Thursday, December 13, 2007

Garble and Gibberish

On an extremely random whim, I decided to check out some of the movies playing in theatres now. And one of them was It's a Boy Girl Thing. Which, first of all, wasn't hyphenated. Shouldn't it be Boy-Girl Thing? But that's besides the point.

On their official website, there's a quiz you can take to see how well you know each gender (which I assume is extremely biased to the stereotypical teenage norm of central/northern American families. Despite the lack of choices that even marginally described what I would have done, I still continued, until about four questions in, when I'm asked: "It's the school dance. All the lads are sat around scoring the girls. Where are you?" And then I'm given three choices, none of which include the option that I simply wouldn't have been at the school dance in the first place.

But. "All the lads are SAT around..."!? What the frell sort of English is this!? Is this yet another example of Hollywood over-simplifying and stereotyping socio-economical age groups, or is this a reflection of the actual vernacular of today's youth? Having relatively little contact with teenagers (which, for my aspiring profession and current age, is considered a healthy and normal thing by society at large), it's difficult for me to say whether such a grievous error in verb conjugation could be possible. Then again, some years ago, I received an email from an alleged student at Harvard who couldn't even tell the difference between there and their, and even went so far as to argue his point, obviously more confident in his personal lexicon than the years of research that went into any dictionary. (Incidentally, his native Texan English also disallowed him to concede that the standard transliteration of the Japanese かんじ was kanji and not konji (the latter of which he consistently used, thoroughly confusing me, especially since our school club name was konja).

Back to the point. You can either be seated or sitting. Well, I suppose you could be being sat upon. But since there was an odious lack of particle indicating the idiom, we have to assume the first two.

"All the lads are seated around scoring the girls." Sounds pretty legitimate. The phrase "are seated around" sounds a bit antiquated (especially juxtaposed beside "scoring the girls"), but valid nonetheless.

"All the lads are sitting around scoring the girls." Very natural for the late 20th/early 21st century vernacular English, and consistent throughout for style.

The thing I can't understand is how one could replace a present progressive with a past tense. The errors I normally observe in speech are the replacement of past participles with past tenses, but that's a logical once, since they're both in the same category of "past event; no longer happening". But confusing "did some time ago" with "happening now" is a bit of a stretch.

Admittedly, you could assume that the original was "are seated around", and then some eejit decided that "seated" was essentially the same as "sat", and that's where the source of the error was. But what kind of high school flunkie thinks that the active and passive mean the same thing!? "I ate an apple" is most emphatically NOT the same thing as "I was eaten by the apple".

"I sat at the table" = I did the sitting.
"I was seated at the table" = someone else led me to a table, and quite possibly even physically placed me on the chair.

And, on a more entertaining note, check out this video:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lm2OzAX86JU

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Tutoring Turmoils

I've been teaching at a tutoring centre for a few weeks now, and in that time I've had a variety of students, ranging from age 7 to 17, from naturalised citizens to newly landed immigrants.

Aside from the pains of being reminded of the evils of asian parenting, I've found that a lot of the things I end up teaching about English pertain more to style than grammar. Rather, on the student front, I find that more of the errors come from lack of exposure to good style, which I believe is a product of the times we live in as well, where adjectives seem to replace adverbs, and past tense replaces past participles. Nevermind trying to explain to an 8 year-old child that "I and he went to the store" is grammatically correct. One of my maturer students was preparing for MELAB, a sort of American TOEFL. A lot of the multiple choice questions were clearly more to do with idiomatic English and style than proper grammar. Like the difference between "I've been knowing her for twelve years" and "I've known her for twelve years".

And prepositions are fun to teach any age group. Nothing defines a language quite as well as the way in which it uses its prepositions. We say things in English, but in German, it's on. "Auf Deutsch, bitte" literally means "On German, please". Or the difference between waiting on and waiting for someone.

Since the centre itself is extremely new, there is no precedence or policy on a lot of things. Classroom resources, for example, have been written in American spelling, which I assume is due to the negligent user NOT changing the computer/grammar settings of MS Word to English-Canada over the default English-USA. A lot of the sample writings also contain grievous errors that make me wonder who was in charge of English before I came around. Although I haven't taken on the task of editing all their stuff; I've only been correcting 'em as I get them.

Still, like my old job, it's exciting to see a new establishment boldly make its way forward. I just wish travel weren't so expensive. Ah, money. The oil that lubricates the gears of society.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Military Misnomer

Met yet another person from the Canadian Militia. That makes three now. Three more than would be expected from my sort of social circle. On the topic of Canadian Navy conventions and such, we got to talking about the army alphabet. (Or, what he called "the phonetic alphabet".)

S: "Oh? ... ... In linguistics, 'phonetic alphabet' is something pretty different..."
X: "Well, it's 'cause it's an alphabet that says how the letters sound."
S: "..."

Having just met the man, I wasn't inclined to launch into a 3~7 minute discussion on the ways in which he was wrong. But I can here in my blog. Mwahaha.

Firstly, it's not an alphabet. An alphabet is an ordered, complete set of letters that are used in a given language. In English, that would make 26 letters. A list of words, however, is NOT and alphabet; it's a list of words that correspond to the alphabet. But I am willing to make a concession on this point, if only because I've been calling it the "army alphabet". (As a side-note, writing systems that have the vowels embedded with the consonants are called syllabaries, and complex writing systems are logograms. Thus, to use an Asian example, Modern Viet and Korean have alphabets; Japanese has two syllabaries and Chinese uses logograms. The two most famous logographic orthographies would be Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs.)

Secondly, it's not phonetic because as any literate English-speaking person knows, most letters have at least two corresponding sounds. Vowels especially are quite versatile in the sounds that they can represent (12 "pure" vowel sounds in English, but only 5 vowel letters -- hardly something that can be described as phonetic).

Thirdly, the [International] Phonetic Alphabet is already a registered term to denote an actual alphabet, in which each letter is designed to correspond to a single sound. Thus, each of the twelve English vowel sounds are represented by a unique letter in the IPA.

I sometimes wonder about how much thought people put behind naming things. The military "phonetic alphabet", or corporate "human resources". Unless, of course, we're supposed to view employees as cattle... ... or slaves. Oh wait, what's that about the Human Charter of Rights?