Science nitpicks at Consonance

[kanef]

It may be unfair to nitpick the science depicted in old "sci-fi" movies (like we did in the con suite, where giant bug movies played throughout the weekend) or Star Trek (like I did in "Mutant Generations"), or in typical filk songs.  All of those, after all, are meant for entertainment.  But I did comment on two works at Consonance that had a

Comments

[patoadam]

Yes, ozarque makes the same argument at the beginning of "The Joy of American English Grammar", which she serialized on her blog.

Teaching that "lay" takes a direct object and "lie" doesn't is probably not important. But for the following reasons I am annoyed that schools, both public and private, teach less grammar than they did when I was growing up:

1. If you know rules of grammar, you know whether what you say or write is considered grammatically correct. I think this gives you a feeling of confidence that imitating what others say or write does not provide. You can still choose to split an infinitive (I do that all the time) or to end a sentence with a preposition.

2. Some people will look down on you if you do not speak the recommended way.

3. Teaching grammar is egalitarian. A student who isn't taught grammar will speak the way people around him/her do. This may not be the optimal choice for the student's future career.

4. If you don't have the vocabulary of grammar, you can't talk about it. For example, you can't say "In English, an adjective precedes the noun it modifies, but in French, an adjective usually follows the noun."

5. Knowing some grammar helps when you want to learn an inflected foreign language. You can't speak German correctly if you don't understand the difference between a direct object and an indirect object. Native speakers understand the difference before they learn the terminology.

6. Students can learn to write well by imitating what they read, just as they learn to speak well by imitating what they hear. But this takes time and practice. Many students don't write enough to learn that way. Being explicitly taught how to figure out where one sentence ends and another begins may be a useful short cut.

[kanef]

Re 1-3: I think it was from the above-mentioned Pinker book that I learned the history of the split infinitive rule: Because the Romans had conquered the Anglo-Saxons and were economically and militarily powerful, the Anglo-Saxons aspired to emulate their betters and to talk more like them. Since it's literally impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, it was considered "bad grammar" to split it in English. And while I agree that everyone can learn to speak the same standardized dialect, there are socioeconomic and class and ethnic influences to that, because the standard tends to approximate the dialect the more powerful groups speak. Pinker points out that AAVE, for example, has just as consistent a grammar as "correct" English. Or take the fictional Western-inspired English of the Browncoats: Vixy carefully wrote "there's many a man has tried his hand" in Mal's Song, which sounds correct for that dialect, although it's arguably incorrect grammar to say "them that run with me" -- I'm pretty sure, admittedly from watching the series only once, that the correct grammar is "them as runs with me"; I recall Kaylee telling Simon that if he hated the life he'd been forced into, "you must not think much of them as chooses it".

Re (4): So if you told a 4 or 5-year-old, "In English we say 'the red truck' but in French they say 'the truck red', except they use a different word for 'red' and 'truck'", it would make no sense at all to him because he doesn't know what nouns and adjectives are? I wrote a lot of songs substituting words that had the same scansion before I read a book that taught me words like trochee, and I think I used caesuras and enjambments perfectly well in complete ignorance of what they were called. The terms might be fun and might be useful for having a technical meta-discussion about songs or speech, but they're not necessary for writing songs or speaking. If we had to learn the rules of our native language in school before we could use them, we'd have to wait until we got to the lesson on direct and indirect objects before we could stop making mistakes like saying "John lifted Mary the box" instead of "John lifted the box to Mary." And by the way, what's the name for the class of verbs like lifted as opposed to handed or slid, the better to teach children to use them correctly? Pinker says in a more recent book that linguists didn't even discover those "microclasses" until recently, but that they seem to be human universals (although different languages draw the boundaries a little differently) and may tell us something about how the human brain works.

[patoadam]

Sure, you don't have to know the grammatical names for things to be able to talk. You don't even have to be conscious of what you're doing. I did not realize that there are two "th" sounds in English, one voiced and one unvoiced, until I read it in a book, yet I flawlessly pronounced words like "thin" and "then".

[kanef]

Hence the word "instinct" in the book's title. Pinker is arguing against the widespread theory that language is a product of general intelligence. He argues that language is a second amazing and almost unique capability of our species. The evidence includes studies of people whose brains were damaged by accident so that they lost the ability to think coherently but could still talk, or vice versa. (Or, technically, not language, but the framework for learning any human language in the first few years of life.)