Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4344 mails)

[Fergus Wilde <fwilde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 23 August 2005 21:44, Dylan wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 Aug 2005 21:17, Anders Johansson wrote:
> > On Tuesday 23 August 2005 22:10, James Knott wrote:
> > > Quite so.  It's amazing the number of people, who don't know the
> > > difference between you're and your.  Another prime example of
> > > ignorance is "irregardless".  The word is "regardless".
> >
> > Or irrespective, depending on what you want to say
> >
> > My pet peeve is "would of" or "should of". It looks so ugly it just
> > gets on my nerves
>
> You're gonna have to learn to live with that one I'm afraid. Because the
> de-stressed form of /HAVE/ is phonetcally identical to the de-stressed
> form of /OF/ children acquiring English as a first language will learn
> them as the same lexical item in certain syntactic environments. One of
> these is "aspectual auxilliary following modal" so it's going to become
> a feature of Standard English and there's absolutely nothing anyone can
> do about it. Innit, eh?
>

Phonetically identical, maybe (if we've decided not to bother aspirating 'h' 
anymore, despite the obvious value of doing so in distinguishing words from 
one another), but not gramatically. 

So to obviate the confusion, we could try teaching children what it is they 
are actually saying and writing, couldn't we? The pronunciation hasn't 
changed much, so why is this happening now? Because we've dropped the ball by 
ceasing to teach basic English grammar to children. That's doing them no 
favours because they'll end up with a blunter, more limited tool with which 
to express their ideas and feelings. Ya narta meeen, innit? In de areah.

> Dylan
>
> --
> "The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out."
>                                                 (Chinese Proverb)