In their defense a lot of people mistake death and deaf even in speech. I don't know what's up with the hyphens though. Maybe these kids have strange accents. If you say a word wrong it will probably be spelled wrong when you sound it out. :shrug: Or maybe they just can't spell.
Using the wrong word
- Thread starter Oli
- Start date
In their defense a lot of people mistake death and deaf even in speech. I don't know what's up with the hyphens though. Maybe these kids have strange accents. If you say a word wrong it will probably be spelled wrong when you sound it out. :shrug: Or maybe they just can't spell.
Pandaemoni
Valued Senior Member
I just heard yet another instance of "worldwind" this evening, rather than whirlwind.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Omg, that is retarded.. lol
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
That's very common in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). TH is not a common phoneme in the world's languages. How many European languages have it? Greek, Spanish, Icelandic and English.
People don't hear phonemes "correctly" that don't occur in their native language; they unconsciously identify them as allophones of more familiar phonemes. This is why anglophones usually pronounce the J in José as H or K instead of KH. It's why the Japanese pronounce L as R. It's why Americans never get Spanish N, D and T right: you're supposed to put your tongue between your teeth, not behind them. Russian (and most Slavic languages) have two kinds of T and you have to learn to distinguish them.
Anyway, linguists say that the native languages of most of the Africans who were kidnapped and sold into slavery do not generally allow words to end in a consonant. So death, debt, dealt, desk, dead, deaf... all those words sounded the same to them. Very few slaves in the USA were formally educated (in the South it was actually illegal to teach them to read and write) and the Euro-Americans seldom corrected the language of the Afro-Americans because it helped reinforce their own sense of superiority. As a result the slave population developed its own dialect of American English with a powerful substratum of pan-African grammar and phonetics. Even after Emancipation, with a brief, feeble respite during Reconstruction, African-Americans were segregated into physically separate communities where they were educated by their own elders. This was of course not universally true outside the South but the majority of the African-American population was in the South. It became the center of their culture and remained so even long after the migrations to the Northern and Western cities in the 20th century, where racial integration never exactly reached the benchmark of Ras Tafari Makonnen. (aka Haile Selassie: "The color of a man's skin is no more important than the color of his eyes.")
So even today many Americans of predominantly African ancestry still have a major substratum of African phonetics in their speech. Until it's pointed out (and most of us don't have the balls to start that conversation
), they don't even realize that "deaf" and "death" are not homonyms.
That's a common phenomenon in many languages. "Whirl" is not a word we encounter very often so people replace it with one they hear several times a day.
The essays involved are from a non-coastal northeastern state with a relatively small black population overall, but a couple of fairly large cities with black neighborhoods. The overall quality seems higher, relative to age, than the gulf coast state of my previous gig, and though there have been no obvious markers of black culture (such as the "we be/I be" construction that was so prevalent in the other essays), that could be merely a consequence of what appears to be more rigorous schooling in general.fraggle said:
And I am seeing a lot of phonetic spelling - wanna, supposta, kinda, should of, etc. It seems to be a pedagogical approach.
Would "drawling" for "drawing" fit that explanation? It's very common.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I've seen British authors identify dialog as American by writing "gonna" and "wanna." One even created a past tense: wannad. Both are the result of the flapped D and T in American dialect. Once we squeeze "wanta" into a single word, the T becomes a flap and then quickly elides. Very few British dialects have that allophone: leader/liter, faddist/fattest, riding/writing, etc. are not homonyms in the U.K.
As for "should of," that's the result of squeezing the "should" and "have" together into "shoodhuv," and the DH combination has no sticking power in English (except of course in Indian dialect where words like "dharma" roll of their tongues without hesitation) so it quickly becomes "shooduv." And then the V elides; I'm surprised they don't write "cooda, shooda, wooda."
For sure, although I've never heard it. That aw-ing combination is pretty awkward. Without the spurious L it's going to eventually become "droing."
I've never heard it either - I'm just seeing it spelled in these essays. It would be interesting to visit that state, and see what this stuff sounds like.fraggle said:
btw: what do you folks think of the apparent pedagogical tactic of having the kids spell phonetically in the earlier (junior high) years? Let's assume they are going to be correcting the aberrant spellings later.
- - -
Occasionally running into this one: "saided". It's the past tense of "said".
Shouldn't kids already know how to spell pretty well by junior high? These almost seem like mistakes an elementary school student would make. But maybe that's just me. If I didn't know how to spell a word I just wouldn't use it.
If you hear sobbing, that's just me.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I have no experience with it so perhaps my comments aren't worth much. Nonetheless, when I started elementary school sixty years ago I remember vividly that two of the things we had to start learning immediately were:
- 1. English spelling is not perfectly phonetic.
- 2. Nonetheless, it's not completely un-phonetic either. Within about three months I was recognizing patterns like Dick-kick and stone-bone, and abstracting out the phonetic and un-phonetic portions of those patterns.
Why teach kids to do something the wrong way, and then later in life make them un-learn it and learn a right way which will now be counterintuitive? It's the Santa Claus/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy myth writ large.
Irregular verbs are the bane of anyone studying English, whether native or second language. I applaud the ascendance of pleaded for pled in legal language and now even in general speech. Strong verbs in particular are so confusing that people make them up where they don't exist, such as dove for dived and snuck for sneaked.
In my day (*limp* *wheeze*) we were expected to be able to spell almost all of the words we used in speech, starting around the fifth grade. We saw them in our textbooks and in stories, magazines, newspapers, novels and other assigned reading; we had intense spelling drills; and we had lots of written assignments. By the end of high school I'd say 90% of the kids could write a letter or a business report that did not look like it came from the pen of a first-year ESL student.
Today they have to offer "Remedial English" classes to university freshmen, and the last statistic I saw said that the average American university graduate reads at what my generation called the sixth-grade level. You can imagine what that translates to in writing ability.
I don't have to imagine; I edit their writing for a living. It's a good living because there is such a tremendous demand for the skill, but it can be rather depressing.
Well, that's a little extreme. Don't limit your expressiveness because you can't spell an exceptionally difficult word that is exactly the right one for the context. Besides, Dictionary.com is only a click away. Or you can use a Google search. It's programmed to recognize thousands of common misspellings and send you to websites where it's spelled correctly.
It's a great help to learn to recognize the origin of an English word. If you divide them into glossaries of Latin, Greek, French and Anglo-Saxon origin, you'll be startled by the much greater correlation of sound with spelling. Well maybe not quite so startled in the Anglo-Saxon column because we've got spellings that were devised eight hundred years ago, before the massive phonetic shifts from Middle English to Early Modern English in the 14th and 15th centuries made them obsolete.
Most of the other European languages have reformed their spelling systems over the last century and a half, by government decree, academic leadership, or publishers' consensus. English never normalized its spelling, and French did it so long ago that the subsequent phonetic shifts make Modern French look arguably crazier than English.
May bad spelling be the worst thing that you encounter in your life.
i meant during an essay test. When using the computer there is no spelling limitation. Unless I butcher a word so bad the computer doesn't know what it is.
You lay your body down just as you lay anything else down but you lie down.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
- LAY, transitive verb (i.e., requires an object): to set or place (something) down so that it rests on a surface.
This is a weak verb, meaning the past tense and past participle are identical and end in D (or occasionally T). However, its spelling is irregular, meaning it is not formed by adding the suffix -D or -ED to the infinitive
PRESENT: LAY
PAST and PAST PARTICIPLE: LAID (not LAYED, which would be a regular inflection)
EXAMPLES: Watch me carefully LAY this emerald necklace on its display cushion. Yesterday my company LAID five miles of railroad track. Over the past ten years we have LAID thousands of square feet of linoleum.
- LIE, intranstive (i.e. does not take an object): to recline.
This is a strong verb, meaning that its past tense and past participle are not formed by adding -D or -T but instead are formed by modifying the vowel. In addition the past tense and past participle are usually different, and the past participle often ends in -N.
PRESENT: LIE
PAST: LAY
PAST PARTICIPLE: LAIN
EXAMPLES: At night John LIES on this slanted bed to prevent acid reflux. Last night he LAY on it for twelve hours because he had the flu. During the past year my dog has LAIN in front of the fireplace for a total of eight months' elapsed time.
- They sound remarkably similar.
- Because of this, their inflection paradigms overlap. LAY is the infinitive and present tense of LAY, but it is also the past tense of LIE.
- Both verbs are irregular. Strong verbs like LIE are irregular by definition because there is no standard pattern for the vowel changes that form their inflections: lie-lay-lain, sing-sang-sung, see-saw-seen, find-found-found, eat-ate-eaten, etc. LAY is irregular only in its spelling, but that's enough; it would probably be slightly less confusing if its past tense were spelled LAYED so it didn't look so similar to the past participle LAIN of the verb LIE.
- They have similar meanings. In essence, the only difference between them is that one is transitive and the other is intransitive.
But since you asked and are therefore interested in mastering proper English, you LIE down. LAY must take a direct object. Yesterday you LAY down (not LAID or LAYED down).
Try to memorize: LIE-LAY-LAIN (intransitive); LAY-LAID-LAID (transitive).
The same rules apply to SIT (intransitive) and SET (transitive), which have a remarkably similar set of confusing conditions and are often used incorrectly.
I have to ask... does it matter?
I learned these arbitrary rules thanks(?) to a middle-class education and I can apply them correctly without having to think about it, but they really don't seem to add anythinig useful to communication.
Take lie-lay-lain and lay-laid-laid. Would we lose anything meaningful if no one bothered to distinguish the two or stick to the strong forms? If someone use lay and lie as synonyms, or if they use layed or lied for the past tense or past participle, would you have even the slightest difficulty in understanding them?
I learned these arbitrary rules thanks(?) to a middle-class education and I can apply them correctly without having to think about it, but they really don't seem to add anythinig useful to communication.
Take lie-lay-lain and lay-laid-laid. Would we lose anything meaningful if no one bothered to distinguish the two or stick to the strong forms? If someone use lay and lie as synonyms, or if they use layed or lied for the past tense or past participle, would you have even the slightest difficulty in understanding them?
I agree and root for the language to evolve away from the distinctions there. One verb with three tenses. I do not think we would get confused.
I think the consequences of relying on that - or more likely the spellcheck features we see in, for example, this forum's post composition template (which has just flagged "spellcheck" for me, and fuck them it's an adjective) - are a large part of what I'm seeing in these essays.fraggle said:
Drawling for drawing, death for deaf, contempt for content, and so forth, don't look like the kinds of spelling errors I remember from bygone eras.
Try this one: "moccasin" (correctly spelled) for "education". There's just no way to make that mistake without a computer involved somewhere, is there?
The better question would be: if they are meaningfully distinguished by someone, do you catch the distinguished meanings? English has a lot of homonyms created by collapsing pronunciations, so one more won't bring down the roof, but there is always a loss. Would you miss the distinction between bricklaying and bricklying? Lying on bricks, about bricks, {or just} bricks?pete said:
"The lying bricks on college hill - - "
And if you are one of those who lament the prevalence of prepositions in English: laying the table / on the table/ the waitress on the table/ the table on the waitress; lay on vs lie on ("fifteen lashes well laid on"); lay up vs lie up, and so forth.
Lay and lie (and don't forget lye) are a confusion, but all simplifications involve loss.
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