h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Or an American--in American English I'm pretty sure "The Green Party is are crowd of leftist idiots." is incorrect.

Now this is something that I finally sorted out for myself last time we were talking about "people are" vs "people is".

You can say "elephants are purple" without breaking any rules of grammar. Or, as I pointed out in post 8107, there is no grammatical difference between "a packet of biscuits" (a singular entity) and "a crowd of schoolchildren" (a singular entity, but the mind's eye sees lots of people, and therefore one is seduced into letting the meaning of the word affect the person taken to conjugate the verb and saying "a crowd of schoolchildren are storming the tuckshop" instead of "a crowd of schoolchildren is...".)

So I side rather with Plaguesville, who says: "Until someone repeals the concept of a collective noun, it will continue to exist and govern the verb." rather than with Gnomon, who is ready to accept that it is not wrong because everyone says it these days.

(I'm not disagreeing entirely with Gnomon. For example, I can see no problem with "different than" taking over from "different from", but I draw the line in a different place when it comes to accepting changes which arise out of common use. There are cases where people do not grasp how the language works. If we agree to accept everything, we'll be legally using double negatives next. And "ain't" and such.

For all I know, there may be some rule I am ignorant of, which provides us with a very good reason for continuing to say "different from". There should be a body who does know where to draw the line.

Another example which puts me on the other side of the fence: I can live happily with the occasional split infinitive - Manolan can't.)

And where do all the problems arise?

They arise from a confusion between grammar and semantics, where people think they can treat one noun in one way because it means this, and another noun in another way because it means something else.

Now - is this entirely right? For English, I think we can happily say that any rule of grammar applies to all words of the same type. (Once we agree that, grammatically speaking, our crowd of hungry kids is a singular noun).

However, on thinking about the German language reform*, I have noticed that here, even some ways of spelling words, and deciding whether to write them with a capital letter or not, depends upon their meaning. And in Polish, too (I'm up to lesson 10 - *pats self on back*) very often some rules depend on the meaning of the word. For example, I quote from the book

"After 2, 3 or 4, the noun is in the nominative plural and not genitive, as it would be after 5, 6 7 ff"

So the case you use changes, depending on the number of things you are talking about.

So - the original question again, as in the new subject title: To what extent can we let the meaning affect the grammar?


*The German language reform is a topic of many heated debates - especially now in the silly journalistic summer season - and I really ought to write an entry on it - if only to help myself understand it!

TC, split infinitives are different. There was never a time when it was wrong to split an infinitive in the English language. That was a grammar 'rule' which was invented by grammarians without reference to the language itself and based on Latin rather than English. People who say you shouldn't split an infinitive are just wrong.

I'm sure there is a good reason why the blurring of the distinction between singular and plural is happening and why it is not just due to ignorance, but I haven't fully worked it out yet. It is something to do with the way companies, corporations and groups are now referred to by short titles such as Microsoft, Labour and British Airways.

I can happily say both "our team is doing very well this season" and "our team are playing well today". The latter suggests (to me) that they are a collection of overpaid egos, whose set pieces are dreadful (see most Chinese teams - an observation which surprises me, given that they are supposed to be'all for one and one for all')
Other sets of people, like committee and audience depend (for me) on whether they are acting as a team or as individuals. I think that's why other folk also vary the verb (so the answer IS semantic). But, bizarrely, I can't do this with "crowd", which (for me) is always singular, even if it numbers 50,000.
Incidentally, I teach that collective nouns take singular verbs, because grammar teaching necessarily lage behind usage.

Oh, and on split infinitives, I go where Gnomon boldly goes (as usual)

TC -

That's one change I really dislike.
What has become acceptable is "different to" which is something of an oxymoron. Differences highlight the separation between objects - hence "from" signifying being apart compared to "similar to".

Actually, I think you will find it is 'divrant' not 'different' nowadays

Saw the Beebs Grumpy Old Men series on TV the other night, with whoever it was saying they wished that someone out there had the courage to put back the two T's in bottle.

Did anybody in England ever pronounce the t's in bottle as t's? In Ireland, we always used a side tongue click for this tl combination and I find it almost impossible to pronounce a tip-of-tongue-against-hard-palate t followed by an l.

I think the comment was against the glottal stop (is that the correct term?) where you get bo'le with the 'bot' cut off just before the full pronunciation of the 't'.
I seem to recall the person speaking was an ac-tor.

oh, and you cann pronounce it, but only if you do it as bott-el.

OK, which brings me to that subject (sorry for interrupting *again*),
why is -le pronounced almost as if it was -el? Or, I suppose, more as if the 'e' wasn;t there and the letter L is being said? i.e. bott-L
?

Yes, but my point is that there never was a t in bottle. There was a different sound which was written down as t. Now there's yet another sound which is not t but is written down as t.

This comment is based on my own pronunciation, though. I don't know what the RP version of 'bottle' is.

Hmm, not sure myself what the RP is.
But I pronounce bottle as above, the 't' being formed as tip of the tongue on the upper palate just behind the front teeth.

>> "For all I know, there may be some rule I am ignorant of, which provides us with a very good reason for continuing to say "different from". There should be a body who does know where to draw the line."

I'm not sure there's a *rule*, rather than just tradition, but there is a subtle distinction between 'different' and most (all) the other comparative words that happily paired with 'than' without generating complaints. The other words do seem to be asymmetric in that they will point out both a difference and direction (larger than, slower than, hotter than, etc.), whereas 'different' doesn't give any kind of ranking information.

In UK English, 'different to' is also common (about 11% in writing, and 27% in speech), which makes some sense given that the other non-ranking comparatives (similar, equal, equivalent, etc) tend to use 'to' exclusively.
Abandoning linguistics, and rying to think spatially, where 'from' and 'to' do imply movement (or pointing) in different directions, it's hard to see any obvious reason why 'different' seemas to fit with both words, whilst 'equal from' doesn't work.

It's easy to imagine that 'different' started out paired with 'to', like the other nonranking words, but hard to see how it would drift to being largely paired with 'from' unless there's some effect of language mixing going on.
Would anyone know what the situation was in Old English? Do French and/or German have consistent usage in their comparatives?

I can see that 'different than' does work in certain contexts "The weather is different than it was yesterday", but those contexts that spring easiest to a UK mind do seem to be those where a comparison is being made between the present and the past.

In that case, disregard my comments.

Teasswill,

I suppose my ear is sufficiently used to 'different to' that I don't interpret it as being at all odd, but I do see your point about separation/inclusion in 'different from'/'similar to'.

I *can* imagine someone standing over a collection of objects and collecting them into similar/different groups, where from/to would make sense, but I can equally imagine someone standing next to one object and pointing at a succession of distant objects and saying "This nearby object is similar to *that* one, different to *that* one, etc.

I think my pronunciation of bottle is more like "bottul". Introduce the dreaded glottal stop and you get "bo-ul, li-ul, ke-ul".

Funnily, when we're singing, our choir leader berates us for singing "lit-tle", but we don't go quite as far as the glottal stop!

I haven't played keepy-uppy for decades, with the Joneses or anyone else. Never could manage to keep the balls in the air.

"Funnily, when we're singing, our choir leader berates us for singing "lit-tle", but we don't go quite as far as the glottal stop!"

Our choir master, likewise, tries to get us to shade off the last syllable of multi-syllable words. He claims that there is a tendency for over emphasis unless we concentrate on avoiding it.

I have unexpectedly remembered the film "White men can't jump".
Presumably because there is an actor called John Marshall Jones appearing ....

I'm not suggesteing that your prestigious choirs would be singing "Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky-tacky", but were you to do so, how would you pronounce it?