Interestingly, I am finding that the Romance languages, too, often mixed up Latin cases in deriving their new paradigms. For instance, the dative and ablative (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
A shift in agreement – grammatical variety
08/11/2023 Pat Barrett Add CommentChris Hayes said, “The will of the voters were heard.” This tendency to have the verb agree with the number of the last noun in (Continue Reading)
Perfect example of the complexity of French grammar
02/15/2023 Pat Barrett Add CommentExamining French grammar in light of my teaching my granddaughter French, I learned just how much the expression ‘one Xs’ dominates the verb paradigm. “on (Continue Reading)
Each one gave their best…………
09/04/2021 Pat Barrett 7 Commentsfrom The Language Instinct pp. 377-379 Sometimes an alleged grammatical ‘error’ is logical not only in the sense of ‘rational’ but the sense of respecting (Continue Reading)
Rachel Maddow invents new grammatical voice
07/25/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentRecently Rachel Maddow said the following: “… voters who got knocked on their doors.” That is substantially amazing. Standard English would have “… voters whose (Continue Reading)
Common expressions I don’t use
01/23/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe first one is ‘come with,’ as in ‘are you going to come with?’ or ‘decide whether you want to come with or not’. I (Continue Reading)
A dirty grammar story
01/23/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentThere is a simple dirty joke that work in Spanish but not in English based on differences in grammar. The story goes like this: a (Continue Reading)
whistleblew
09/15/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentFor the first time I heard the verb ‘whistleblow’. I don’t know if this goes under ‘language change’ or ‘from under the bus’. A very (Continue Reading)
Tracing change in a language over millennia
09/01/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentReading Medieval and Modern Greek, we see the changes from Classical to Koine Greek, phonological and morphological. Most of such tracing I’ve learned has been (Continue Reading)
It’s in the Transcript
07/31/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI am reading the transcript of a conversation among Micelle Goldberg, Frank Bruni and Anne Applebaum. When I heard Mika say on Morning Joe just (Continue Reading)
Privileging language
07/26/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn other entries I have mentioned the privileging of Ancient Greek by the excluding of Modern Greek in the term Greek whereby we mean Ancient (Continue Reading)
have to vs have first to
04/09/2020 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsI’ve always wondered where the devoicing of the v in ‘have to’ came from. I assumed it was assimilation to the unvoiced following t. Just (Continue Reading)
A body – My grandmother
03/07/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI am revising this post somewhat, not taking out or changing anything, just adding to it. I have a list of words my grandmother used (Continue Reading)
The X factor…. Malcolm or Latin?
02/18/2020 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsSo easy to ridicule liberals …. or Liberals. They are now taking to saying “Latinx” instead of Latin, Latino, or Latina. Seems silly, right? Just (Continue Reading)
Another example of growing tendency to use resumptive pronouns
02/01/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI just heard a reporter say, “…. going back to a time we can’t even fathom it.” The ‘it’ in my English is not only (Continue Reading)
It’s Me, not I? Why?
10/29/2019 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsSue asks you to look over her letter, one she wants to be a bit formal. The only correction you make is from “Paul saw (Continue Reading)
Hoo Boy!
09/23/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentNo, that’s not my Word of the Day. It is my reaction to reading a discussion on some sort of Bible study site, UE Using (Continue Reading)
Finding the mot juste to translate a tense
09/17/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentTalking with my Urdu-speaking friend, I showed him a sentence that used what we would call a preterit form. The sentence read in my first (Continue Reading)
The involved entity
08/24/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentWilliam Bull and LaMadrid in their books on Spanish use the term ‘the involved entity’ for what winds up being the old Latin dative case. (Continue Reading)
Is this an “infelicity?”
08/07/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentTill now, at least 50 scholarly and authentic books on Urdu grammar have been written in Urdu……. My question about this sentence is about “Till (Continue Reading)
Urban = Black
08/03/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentAgain I heard a speaker use the term “urban” as a synonym for Black in the ethnic sense. Earlier, the mayor of Memphis had responded (Continue Reading)
TPRS with Nyah One Year Update
07/08/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentAt the end of last month we reached one year that we started lessons. That is equivalent to a little over a third on a (Continue Reading)
To go slow or slowly into the night, doing good or well?
03/05/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentPeople of an authoritarian mindset require rigid rules to follow and to enforce. Others believe that rules for language are written on golden tablets in (Continue Reading)