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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4048 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 19, 2023

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Question for Motteizeans who natively speak a language with cases(I know we have at least a few Russians and East Indians and one German, Finn, and Hungarian apiece)- in English, there's a pattern of young speakers mistaking cases which is shared with more-poorly educated ones, eg "Me and John got a burger" where the correct would be "John and I got a burger".

Is difficulty with cases English specific? I am a fluent Spanish speaker and it seems like most people speaking Spanish have no difficulty distinguishing "yo" from "me", but I also don't interact with children in it very much compared to in English and most of my Spanish communication is relatively unambiguous and/or omits or implies pronouns, either because of the verb or because it's obvious from context. I have some experience communicating in Latin but we can assume people who know Latin to be IQ selected and also using careful phrasing- does the average Russian or Tamil or Finn have some trouble figuring out how to use cases growing up, and is making errors with it a hallmark of a stupid or poorly educated speaker(which statistically must exist) as opposed to simply a second language speaker(which there are probably also plenty of)?

What's happening is linguistic evolution, in real time.

Old English used to have an extensive case system, which changed to the limited form that we currently have. The use of 'me' is the example you gave is just a continuation of that evolution. There's nothing wrong with 'me and John got a burger' because it sounds perfectly fine to native speakers. And if it sounds right, it is right. Language is formed by consensus. 'Me got a burger' sounds wrong, so it is wrong. But if enough people said it, it would become correct.

In English, a bunch of historic linguists tried to make the language work in the same way Latin does, leading to absurd rules like 'you can't end a sentence with a proposition'. Real languages laugh at prescriptivists' petty rules.

Devil's advocate time. I think there's an is/ought conflation here. Is it the case that languages change, meaning that "Me got a burger" could one day be accepted as "normal?" Yes. But whether that's a good thing, or whether something is lost by those changes, are different questions.

I'm very sensitive to correct grammar usage and accurate diction (by writing this, I have now guaranteed that there will be at least one egregious mistake in this comment). I use both as indicators of conscientiousness, and as a conscientious person myself, I give greater weight and credence to the words of people who can follow grammatical rules and use words correctly. I think it's good to have grammatical rules and "correct" definitions for words for this reason, even if they're just conventions and there's no platonic world of word meanings we can appeal to. to which we can appeal.

Another, narrower argument is that the trend in English evolution seems to be towards simplification. As pointed out elsewhere, English used to have cases. We express the same meanings without cases today, though probably less precisely. And although we have added many words to our language, I'd wager they're mostly describing new things, and at the same time we have lost many colorful synonyms and their subtle shades of meaning.

There's also what appears to me to be an egalitarian pressure (that may not be unique to English, I'm not sure) where rhetoric has gotten simpler and coarser over time. Compare American political speeches written around the 1860s, with those written in the first half of the 20th century, with those written in the second half, with those written today. The only reliable source of eloquence in American government today seems to be our higher courts. Some of our Supreme court justices are still a pleasure to read.

Edit: Found and corrected four mistakes.

I mean, you're always going to have the prestige dialect of a language, spoken by the powerful and well connected...and then other separate dialects.

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