Lavengro

Mistakes Spanish-speakers make

In my publicity for Great English Mistakes I list some typical mistakes made by Spanish-speakers. I have been asked for explanations of them.

• People is kind.
Should be: People are kind.
Explanation: In Spanish the word for “people” (gente) is singular.

• Which is your phone?
Should be: What is your phone number? The Spanish would be: ¿Cuál es tu teléfono?
Explanation:
1) “Cuál” conventionally translates as “which” so Spanish-speakers say “which” in questions with unlimited possibilities.
2) The Spanish form does not include the word for number.

• I am interesting to know you.
Should be: I am interested to know you.
Explanation: A common mistake with no obvious cause.

• How many children you have?
Should be: How many children do you have / have you got?
Explanation: Spanish ¿Cuántos hijos tienes? The verb (tienes) is not marked as a question. The meaning is shown by the context, with intonation in speech and punctuation in writing.

• I am sorry, I am constipated.
Should be: I am sorry, I have a cold.
Explanation: Spanish “constipado” refers to a blocked nose.

• I forgot my books at home.
Should be: I left my books at home.
Explanation: Spanish-language interference.

• I came walking.
Should be: I came on foot.
Explanation: Spanish-language interference.

• My car is in the parking.
Should be: My car is in the car park.
Explanation: “Parking” is the Spanish for car park.

• Is very beautiful your sister.
Should be: Your sister is very beautiful.
Explanation: Spanish often starts a sentence with a verb followed by the subject.

• My fathers live in Zaragoza.
Should be: My parents live in Zaragoza.
Explanation: In Spanish “padre” is “father” but “padres” is “parents”. This applies generally, e.g. “rey” is “king” but “los reyes de España” is “the King and Queen of Spain”.

An American-British usage experiment

At Glossophilia Louise asks for comments on these sentences. It’s easy to see which way this is heading but as my comment is there I will say no more here, for now at least.

A) “Looking at the three designs, I was most drawn to the round one that bled outside the page border; however, I liked the square one too.”

B) “Looking at the three designs, I was most drawn to the round one which bled outside the page border; however, I liked the square one too.”

C) “Looking at the three designs, I was most drawn to the round one, that bled outside the page border; however, I liked the square one too.”

D) “Looking at the three designs, I was most drawn to the round one, which bled outside the page border; however, I liked the square one too.”

Grammar poll

Tom Freeman at the Stroppy Editor quotes a YouGov poll that showed 1000 Americans some sentences and asked them to pick which one of each pair or group was grammatically correct.

These were the results:

1. My oak tree loses it’s leaves in autumn. – 31%
   My oak tree loses its leaves in autumn. – 67%
2. The dogs are happily chewing on they’re bones. – 4%
   The dogs are happily chewing on their bones. – 89%
   The dogs are happily chewing on there bones. – 4%
3. I think you’re very smart. – 91%
   I think your very smart. – 6%
4. I consulted an attorney whom I met in New York. – 61%
   I consulted an attorney who I met in New York. – 32%
5. I don’t trust fruits and vegetables which aren’t organic. – 24%
   I don’t trust fruits and vegetables that aren’t organic. – 68%
6. The beneficial affects of exercise are well documented. – 17%
   The beneficial effects of exercise are well documented. – 77%

His comments on these figures are just what I would have written myself but he got there first so please follow the above link to see them.

Preposition problems

The Guardian’s letters column has recently seen a discussion about the standard preposition collocation of going up to and down from London, counter-intuitively to the common idea of up implying northwards on a map. I am not sure if it is still the case but I certainly remember the up train and the down train being the common colloquial names respectively for the trains to and from London. When P G Wodehouse wrote

I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.

no reader would have doubted that the train was travelling away from the capital towards the provinces.

But this letter prompted me to think about different prepositions.

Wherever your destination, go there by East Coast or Cross Country train and, bizarrely, you’ll arrive into it.

Michael Ayton, Durham

Firstly, this use of into is something that has surprised and puzzled me on British trains. It goes counter to what I explain to my students: that arrive implies position, when you arrive you acre there and thus it takes prepositions of position not of movement. This is particularly important with Spanish students who collocate the preposition a with llegar. As I say in A Guide to English Language Usage and with almost identical wording in Pearls of the English Language:

arrive

This is a verb of position not of movement. It can only be used with prepositions which describe position; it cannot be used with to: He arrived in the pub before me but He came to the pub by bus and We arrived at the airport an hour and a half before take-off but We travelled to the airport by taxi. The most commonly used prepositions are in and at, though other prepositions of place, e.g. on, over, next to, are possible: The plane arrived over Paris at 12.30.

The prepositions in, on and at can cause great difficulty because other languages do not use them in the same way. A Spanish-speaker reads something en un libro or en la página 38 where as an English-speaker reads the same thing with different prepositions as being in the book but on page 34. The difference is easily explained – though in my experience few students have ever met the simple explanation that in means inside and on means on the surface of. Once this is grasped, everything falls into place. The information is inside the book but the print is on the surface of the page; a coin is on my hand if I hold it open and flat but in my hand if I close my fist around it; a table is in the corner of the room because it is surrounded by the walls but you stand on the corner of the street because you are on the ground; you sit in an armchair but on a dining chair. The surface does not have to be horizontal: we say on the floor, on the wall and on the ceiling but German has auf dem Boden, an der Wand and an der Decke because auf is only for on that is on the top of a horizontal surface.

(Click to enlarge image left of in, on & at from Pearls of the English Language.)

Then there is at, a preposition that no other language seems to require. It isn’t in and it isn’t on so what is it? It is for a relation in space that exists between two things but that is not in or on. If you are waiting for a bus, you stand at the bus stop. The stop is a pole so you can’t be in (inside) it and you can’t be on (on top of) it. You stand at (within a few metres of) it but someone waiting for a taxi could be in the same place but standing near the bus stop because there is no relationship between the purpose and the place.

And of course, when you are at the bus stop you could be sitting on a seat in the shelter.

Bus shelter in Zálezlice, Czech Republic, Wikimedia Commons

The Guardian whinges

The Guardian has an article entitled

Good grammar saves lives – and rescues friendships

Despite the uproar it caused, local councils are still banishing apostrophes from street signs. But a single apostrophe can save utter humiliation

It is written by Gary Nunn, a journalist in Australia with no apparent linguistic qualifications. Well,

1) Does it need saying again? Apostrophes have nothing to do with grammar. They are punctuation marks or even, some say, the 27^th letter of the alphabet.

2) The pronoun it in the subhead has no noun referent. The sentence should read: Despite the uproar caused by their decision … That is a grammatical mistake.

After relating an anecdote about how his neighbour knew that a text message wasn’t genuine because it contained your for you’re, the author concludes rather grandiosely:

A single apostrophe can prevent you from being ostracised in your own neighbourhood.

We then have

Good grammar saves lives, too. “Let’s eat, Grandma” and “Let’s eat Grandma” have two very different meanings: one an invitation, the other homicidal.

An old chestnut that has nothing to do with grammar. And nothing to do with apostrophes.

But if we are going to be picky about commas, there is an extraneous comma in this sentence:

Oh how sick is [sic], the three-lettered bitchy Latin put-down that succinctly and snootily says “Don’t for one second think that was my error.”

The comma after [sic] apparently marks a pause in speech but the [sic] is a parenthesis, already marked at beginning and end by square brackets to indicate a pause. The base sentence is

Oh how sick is the three-lettered bitchy Latin put-down …

(NOTE: On rereading this post I see that the comma might be intended to mark an apposition. If so, it is correct. However, the presentation is clumsy. The brackets, which suggest an editorial insertion, should surely be replaced by inverted commas to indicate a quotation.)

There then follows a spectacular whinge about apostrophes with special reference to street name signs.

Birmingham, Mid Devon, Cambridge, East Staffordshire, East Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire – all took the decision to remove apostrophes from street signs. You can imagine them, sat [sic] around like the parish council in the Vicar of Dibley, eating Marmite cheesecake and discussing the things that really matter to locals – such as spending money creating new, apostrophe-less signs.

Our grammar angel contacted all the local authorities that have abolished apostrophes and was told by Huntingdonshire that the decision ‘was made to aid clarity when using address names in search engines and sat navs’. That sounds fair enough to me but ‘Birmingham city council – Europe’s largest local authority – didn’t respond before the deadline.’

How rude of them! Or can one imagine them not sitting around eating Marmite cheesecake but in fact doing the things that really matter to locals and not spending taxpayers’ money on a petty query from a solipsistic journalist?

And shouldn’t our author refer to ‘the parish council in The Vicar of Dibley’ rather than ‘the parish council in the Vicar of Dibley’? Sometimes a capital letter can make the difference between the name of a sitcom and group sex.

(The Vicar of Dibley was a BBC sitcom featuring a woman Church of England vicar, Wikipedia.)

Less and fewer

Can anyone honestly say that this is a reasonable use of English? This is hypercorrection because less is used with quantities (click to enlarge):

As I say in A Guide to English Language Usage:

Few(er) is used with countable nouns and little/less is used with uncountable nouns. However, native speakers often use less with countable nouns: less books, people, years. When this refers to a quantity rather than to a number, it is perfectly acceptable in forms such as (No) less than fifteen minutes, 200 miles, £3000.

Neuter babies

I have mentioned the use of the neuter pronoun it to refer to babies here. In A Guide to English Language Usage I say (emphasis added):

It is perfectly acceptable and normal to use it (but who rather than which) for a baby or a young child, especially when its sex is unknown or is not clearly seen (e.g. under breast: A woman who feeds a baby with her own milk breast‑feeds it).

I emphasise those words because I was surprised to read this on the BBC (emphasis added):

One baby has died and 14 are ill with blood poisoning after being given what appears to be a contaminated batch of specialised feed. The babies, many of which were premature, were all being cared for in neonatal intensive care units at six hospitals across England.

I can see no reason why whom should not have been used in this case.

Pearls of the English language: past simple

As the name suggests, Lavengro Books Pearls are concentrated units of concise information. At about 80 – 100  words, each Pearl contains a point about the English language in a short form that is easy to assimilate and remember. The Pearls contrast with and complement the detailed descriptions contained in A Guide to English Language Usage. A collection of Pearls can be seen on the Lavengro Books website.

Pearls are posted here at 06.00 CET on Fridays. A different series is posted at 06.00 on Tuesdays on the Lavengro Books Facebook page.

Pearls of the English Language is published in book form by Lavengro Books.

As the name suggests, Lavengro Books Pearls are concentrated units of concise information. At about 80 – 100  words, each Pearl contains a point about the English language in a short form that is easy to assimilate and remember. The Pearls contrast with and complement the detailed descriptions contained in A Guide to English Language Usage. A collection of Pearls can be seen on the Lavengro Books website.

Pearls are posted here at 06.00 CET on Fridays. A different series is posted at 06.00 on Tuesdays on the Lavengro Books Facebook page.

Pearls of the English Language will be published in book form by Lavengro Books

- See more at: http://lavengro.typepad.com/peter_harvey_linguist/#sthash.QSPkngwD.dpuf

 

As the name suggests, Lavengro Books Pearls are concentrated units of concise information. At about 80 – 100  words, each Pearl contains a point about the English language in a short form that is easy to assimilate and remember. The Pearls contrast with and complement the detailed descriptions contained in A Guide to English Language Usage. A collection of Pearls can be seen on the Lavengro Books website.

Pearls are posted here at 06.00 CET on Fridays. A different series is posted at 06.00 on Tuesdays on the Lavengro Books Facebook page.

Pearls of the English Language will be published in book form by Lavengro Books

- See more at: http://lavengro.typepad.com/peter_harvey_linguist/#sthash.QSPkngwD.dpuf

What’s wrong with English language teaching

I am too preoccupied with publishing affairs right now to give this article by Johnson in the Economist the detailed attention that it richly deserves here, but it describes excellently what is wrong with English teaching nowadays. Simply, the teachers know too little, if they know anything at all, about how the language works.

Many school-leavers in English-speaking countries cannot even say what a clause is … But the problem goes deeper, to teacher training. Many English teachers struggle as much as students with phrases and clauses. They can correct common mistakes (“don’t confuse ‘effect’ and ‘affect’”) and teach punctuation (“it’s” versus “its”). But many could not confidently and correctly break the words of a complex sentence down by function. This seems to be due to a divorce long ago between the study of language itself and what college departments teach future teachers in the “English” departments.

…

As a result of the divorce of language and literature, linguistics has developed an entire hoard of basic terms to describe sentences that are utterly unknown to English teachers. Take “determiner”. This is a basic class of words that includes the, a, an, three, this, that, my, his, many and many others. The reason linguists talk about determiners is that they all play the same kind of syntactical role, and are quite different from adjectives, the category they’ve traditionally been crammed into. Many other basic terms of syntax, like “complement” and “adjunct”, are virtually unknown outside the field, though they’re crucial for understanding how English grammar works.

I did a solid course in grammar for English language O-level in 1966 and was probably among the last people in Britain to do so. When I came to do my PGCE specialising in EFL in 1977, things had changed. Communicative competence was what we were seeking, and it was true that the English grammar I had learnt, with its eight parts of speech based on Latin grammar, had been superseded. True too that the grammar-translation method by which I had learnt languages (German, French, Spanish and Russian) was hopeless for enabling communication, but the baby went out with the bathwater and grammar had become a dirty word – as had many things that required formal learning in the 1970s. Situations, notions and all sorts of things were to be taught with the assumption that grammar would be absorbed incidentally.

Now I find myself unusual among English teachers, even EFL teachers, in having a sound understanding of grammar.

Gwynne, suicide and language

We know that Nevile Gwynne lives in a world of his own where grammar is as he thinks he was taught at school. The problem is that he tries to make that world ours. Tom Freeman, the Stroppy Editor, reports hearing Gwynne say ‘When I was young there was no such thing as suicide,’ and that the modern explosion of suicide was due to people ‘not thinking coherently’ – a tragic result of their using ‘hopefully’ as a sentence adverb and saying ‘different to’ and such other brain-destroying, life-ruining horrors.

In a detailed post that is well worth reading Tom has the figures to show that Gwynne is utterly mistaken on suicide rates. I can only second his conclusion:

My objection to Gwynne is not that he is conservative or uncompromising or authoritarian. My objection is that he is ignorant, incompetent and lazy. He literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I have dealt with Gwynne myself here, here and here.