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Perfect example of the complexity of French grammar

  02/15/2023       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Examining 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)

Foreign language teaching & learning, grammar & language change
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Each one gave their best…………

  09/04/2021       Pat Barrett      7 Comments

from 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)

grammar & language change

Rachel Maddow invents new grammatical voice

  07/25/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Recently Rachel Maddow said the following: “… voters who got knocked on their doors.” That is substantially amazing. Standard English would have “… voters whose (Continue Reading)

grammar & language change

Common expressions I don’t use

  01/23/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The 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)

grammar & language change, Word of the Day

A dirty grammar story

  01/23/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

There 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)

grammar & language change

whistleblew

  09/15/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

For 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)

grammar & language change, View from under the Bus

Tracing change in a language over millennia

  09/01/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Reading 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)

grammar & language change, scolds and guardians, What I'm Reading Now

It’s in the Transcript

  07/31/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I 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)

grammar & language change

Privileging language

  07/26/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

In 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)

grammar & language change, scolds and guardians

have to vs have first to

  04/09/2020       Pat Barrett      2 Comments

I’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)

grammar & language change

A body – My grandmother

  03/07/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I 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)

grammar & language change, Word of the Day

The X factor…. Malcolm or Latin?

  02/18/2020       Pat Barrett      2 Comments

So 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)

grammar & language change, Uncategorized, Word of the Day

Another example of growing tendency to use resumptive pronouns

  02/01/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I 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)

grammar & language change

It’s Me, not I? Why?

  10/29/2019       Pat Barrett      2 Comments

Sue 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)

grammar & language change

Hoo Boy!

  09/23/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

No, 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)

grammar & language change

Finding the mot juste to translate a tense

  09/17/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Talking 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)

grammar & language change

The involved entity

  08/24/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

William 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)

grammar & language change

Is this an “infelicity?”

  08/07/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Till 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)

Foreign language teaching & learning, grammar & language change

Urban = Black

  08/03/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Again 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)

grammar & language change, Word of the Day

TPRS with Nyah One Year Update

  07/08/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

At 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)

Foreign language teaching & learning, grammar & language change, TPRS

To go slow or slowly into the night, doing good or well?

  03/05/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

People 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)

grammar & language change, scolds and guardians

Untangle this

  03/05/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

It was Rachel Maddow, I believe, who said this last night (3/4/19): “He was being dangled a pardon.” The sense, of course, was that a (Continue Reading)

grammar & language change

An example of words retaining old meanings

  01/30/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

When a word retains an older meaning along with a newer one, the resulting coincidence can be confusing. When on of the meanings is actually (Continue Reading)

grammar & language change
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