"An Arguement for Misspelling"

[s1m0n]

...but I am not sure that the readiness to accept loanwords is greater in English than that of most languages - the willingness to accept neologism seems high, though.

We're famous for it. French has the Academie Francaise policing the lexicon and making up 'french' terms for foreign (read: english) newcomers, but english just steals words outright. The accent begins migrating to the front, and we conjugate them with english grammar and declare them english.

[Bloomfield]

...but I am not sure that the readiness to accept loanwords is greater in English than that of most languages - the willingness to accept neologism seems high, though.

We're famous for it. French has the Academie Francaise policing the lexicon and making up 'french' terms for foreign (read: english) newcomers, but english just steals words outright. The accent begins migrating to the front, and we conjugate them with english grammar and declare them english.

I'll give you the French. I doubt that the English steal any more terms than the Dutch or the Germans, for example. Do you have any other source for your assertion, beyond a comparison to the French? I'd be interested.

[s1m0n]

Orthography is the actual letterforms.

Not in my dictionary. Merriam-Webster happens to agree with me, for what it's worth:

Main Entry: or·thog·ra·phy
Pronunciation: \ȯr-ˈthä-grə-fē\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English ortografie, from Anglo-French, from Latin orthographia, from Greek, from orth- [correct*] + graphein to write —
Date: 15th century
1 a: the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage b: the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols
2: a part of language study that deals with letters and spelling

*bracketed entry mine, for sake of clarity

You're basing your claim on the existance of the word 'spelling' tacked on to the end of the second definition?

"Ortho" is from greek, and means "right" or "correct" (c.f. 'orthodox' = 'right-teaching') and 'graph' means 'shape' or "picture". That should be your clue that this is a word about the shape of symbols. There might be a tiny corner of orthography that bleeds into spelling, but that's far from the centre of the term. If you read a textbook on the history of language, spelling and orthography are usually dealt with as two things, not one.

[Nanohedron]

Orthography is the actual letterforms.

Not in my dictionary. Merriam-Webster happens to agree with me, for what it's worth:

Main Entry: or·thog·ra·phy
Pronunciation: \ȯr-ˈthä-grə-fē\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English ortografie, from Anglo-French, from Latin orthographia, from Greek, from orth- [correct*] + graphein to write —
Date: 15th century
1 a: the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage b: the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols
2: a part of language study that deals with letters and spelling

*bracketed entry mine, for sake of clarity

You're basing your claim on the existance of the word 'spelling' tacked on to the end of the second definition?

"Ortho" is from greek, and means "right" or "correct" (c.f. 'orthodox' = 'right-teaching') and 'graph' means 'shape' or "picture". That should be your clue that this is a word about the shape of symbols. There might be a tiny corner of orthography that bleeds into spelling, but that's far from the centre of the term. If you read a textbook on the history of language, spelling and orthography are usually dealt with as two things, not one.

No. I'm basing it on the very first entry. I'm not sure why you passed that over, or why you'd think I would.

In modern English compound words, the Greek root "-graph-" signifies writing, not "shapes". This is, or ought to be, common knowledge. Whatever ancientmost meaning that root had to the Greeks (carving, actually, if I remember correctly, but don't hold me to that) doesn't apply in English nowadays.

If you read a textbook on the history of language, spelling and orthography are usually dealt with as two things, not one.

I guess I'll have to take your word on that, then, won't I. But to be honest I find that claim to be suspect, as every Google search I've done so far - even Wikipedia, God help me - says otherwise, unless you just haven't been clear. Orthography includes all conventions of writing, including spelling and punctuation. Not one word about how to write upper and lower case letters properly.

[s1m0n]

I'll give you the French. I doubt that the English steal any more terms than the Dutch or the Germans, for example. Do you have any other source for your assertion, beyond a comparison to the French? I'd be interested.

Not "the english'. "English", the language. We're widely supposed to have the largest vocabulary in the world, but it's a moving target, and while the center is pretty definable, (the first hundred words of the 'mothertongue', perhaps, all straight-up anglo-saxon ie, germanic) the margins fade into the mists.

Here's someone from wikipedia to say the same thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

Number of words in English

The General Explanations at the beginning of the Oxford English Dictionary states:“ The Vocabulary of a widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits... there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference. ”


The vocabulary of English is undoubtedly vast, but assigning a specific number to its size is more a matter of definition than of calculation. Unlike other languages, such as French, German, Spanish and Italian there is no Academy to define officially accepted words and spellings. Neologisms are coined regularly in medicine, science and technology and other fields, and new slang is constantly developed. Some of these new words enter wide usage; others remain restricted to small circles. Foreign words used in immigrant communities often make their way into wider English usage. Archaic, dialectal, and regional words might or might not be widely considered as "English".

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (OED2) includes over 600,000 definitions, following a rather inclusive policy:“ It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang (Supplement to the OED, 1933).[37] ”


The editors of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (475,000 main headwords) in their preface, estimate the number to be much higher. It is estimated that about 25,000 words are added to the language each year.[38]

And here's someone from the "Oxford Dictionary" site (not sure who they are; the publisher of the Dictionaries is or used to be "ther Oxford University Press" at the "Clarendon press".

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/ ... ds?view=uk

Is it true that English has the most words of any language?

This question is practically impossible to answer, for the reasons set out in the answer to How many words are there in the English language? However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.

The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs.

English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore 'agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of 'words'.

They seem to be fairly firm about English having more words that either the germanic and romance tongues, which between cover most of the major European languages. I do know that the Full OED is substantially larger than the similar Larousse (french) or whatever the german dictionary of record is.

[Bloomfield]

Yes, yes, I see the huge vocabulary point; that has been accepted for decades. I also agree with the Wikipedia thing about the neologism, which makes sense to me from my (anecdotal) experience. But you made an additional claim I hadn't heard before: that English has more loan words, or accepts loan words more readily than other languages. Sure, French is known to resist loanwords. But where else does this additional claim come from? Your most recent post only speaks to the hugeness of the vocabulary, not the loanwords. I ask because the point is interesting to me: it seems to me that in the past thirty years far more English words have been accepted into other languages as loanwords than non-English words have been accepted into English. Like vastly more; but that's just an impression and I am curious.

(I don't think that it contributes to the debate to anthropomorphize languages, but if you want to distinguish between the English and those who speak English or the Germans and those who speak German, fine and I'll go along with it.)

[susnfx]

Never. The. Less. (she said pointedly)

Question directed to Simon: Do you believe that a child's spelling should be corrected in school and, if so, up to what age? And if not, why not?

Susan

[Bloomfield]

Never. The. Less. (she said pointedly)

Question directed to Simon: Do you believe that a child's spelling should be corrected in school and, if so, up to what age? And if not, why not?

Susan

Answer directed to Susan: Most people would probably answer your question a certain way most of the time. But it changes. Ergo your question is stupid; it's really very simple.

[SteveShaw]

The whole point of language is clear communication. Ironically, the weakness of the English language, its utter complexity married to its irregularity, is its strength in terms of its potential for breadth of expression and nuance of meaning. It has always been my contention that we must maintain the integrity of our language in order to preserve these strengths, and that means maintaining our strict rules of spelling and grammar. Any degradation permitted in these areas would inevitably result in our being less able to express ourselves with the grace and beauty that is so possible now. I can't help the fact that so many people fall way behind in achieving the articulacy of expression that our language demands, but my observation is that most of them get by somehow. Thank God some of our best writers and poets have managed to carry the flag for the rest of us. As for myself, I've always tried to express myself in clear English, avoiding long words wherever possible (though, like everyone else, I can't resist the temptation to try to impress by employing such words as "tendentious," meretricious" and "inchoate," and I frequently manage to tie myself in knots with sentences of over-elaborate construction that would leave anyone with the stamina to read them with an awful lot of mental processing to do). I do love the English language as it stands, with all its arcane rules and absurdities. There is an ungainly yet somehow graceful elegance about it that is fairly robust yet which would be all too easily shattered by any attempt to dumb it down by force as opposed to allowing it to find its own sweet way, as inevitably it will if left alone. I maintain my own standards to the best of my ability by keeping a good dictionary next to my computer at all times, and I assure you that it is the most-thumbed book in my house. I also resort at very frequent intervals to any one of three use-of-English books that I happen to possess. I don't mind being picked up on my politics, but equally I don't mind being picked up on my poor spelling or awkward grammar. I hope you won't find too many such examples.

EDITED TO REMOVE AN ABSURDITY IN SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION. I SHOULD NEVER TYPE AFTER MALT WHISKY.

[susnfx]

Ergo your question is stupid.

I was afraid of that. *sigh*

Steve, you're English shows your educated.

Susan

[jim stone]

Sorry if this has been covered.

I want to say something about the context of this discussion,
at least in the USA. Large numbers of our college grads
are graduating functionally illiterate. Can't write
a grammatical sentence. Lots of em can't read
much, either.

They often become teachers, by the way.

No, this isn't the time to relax any standards about
language--to the contrary. Tighten the screws.

Meanwhile universities are reducing freshman comp
requirements and also eliminating foreign language
requirements. Too much for the students, ya know.
Need the tuition.

Students are already being cheated of the education
they are paying for, many of them working to pay
for it. Let's not make it easier for the economic
predators.

[Martin Milner]

Meanwhile universities are reducing freshman comp
requirements and also eliminating foreign language
requirements. Too much for the students, ya know.
Need the tuition.

Students are already being cheated of the education
they are paying for, many of them working to pay
for it. Let's not make it easier for the economic
predators.

Sadly this is also true in the UK. University funding is not related to the excellence of the final output, but bums on seats.

It's financially better for a University to have 500 students enter the 1st year, 100 complete it and go onto the 2nd year, and 20 of those to finally pass the course, than for 100 to start the first year and all of them to complete the degree.

I doubt it's better for the students who don't pass; they have a non-qualification and a big Student Loan to pay off.

We also had the announcement last week that A-Level pass rates (a similar level to a high-school diploma) increased for the 26th year running.

Either students keep getting smarter, or the exams keep getting easier.

Having a greater number of people with the same A-Level grades has not made life easier for Universities and potential employers, so consideration is now being given to the idea of an A+ or similar qualification, to once again sort out the sheep from the goats.

As a nation, we don't actually need everyone to train as a doctor, lawyer or accountant, so why does the Government think it's a good idea to aim for this?

[SteveShaw]

It's very difficult to prove that exams have got easier but I'm convinced they have. For twelve years I was a marker/assistant chief examiner for "A" Level Biology with the biggest examinations board in England for that subject at the time, and during that time I saw what I thought was a deliberate policy of making the essay papers far more "can-do" than they were when I first started. Certainly, the questions were increasingly framed in a much "friendlier" manner, guiding the student to the areas needing to be addressed in the answer a bit too openly at times. Also, the rigour demanded of candidates for each marking point obtained was reduced, and the number of marking points allowed in each essay was increased. Just before I gave up marking, the essay paper was scrapped in favour of a much more structured short-question paper which, in my view, did away with any requirement for one of the crucial skills of advanced candidates, that of being able to marshall and present a large body of relevant factual information in a clear way. Oh, well. Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy clinging on to a non-existent golden age. Just don't try to convince me that standards are rising, that's all.

[Flyingcursor]

Ergo your question is stupid; it's really very simple.

You said, "Ergo"!
How come you can say "Ergo" but Jack can't?


Steve

meretricious, inchoate, tendentious. Those are mighty fine words. I had not heard of 'meretricious' before.

[Bloomfield]

Ergo your question is stupid; it's really very simple.

You said, "Ergo"!
How come you can say "Ergo" but Jack can't?

I was spoofing Jack's posts in order to show that they were absurd. I don't normally write "ergo." The question wasn't stupid at all.

Seriously, I think susnfx's question is very very good and shows, depending on your preference, that (1) Jack is talking about something else in this thread, or (2) that it doesn't make sense at all to say "language changes" in response to a question about specific rules and to what extent people should follow rules.

My take on susnfx's question is that of course kids should be taught to write and spell correctly. Correctly means according to the rules. The fact that the rules today aren't the same as they were in 18th century does not mean that they are not rules or that they should not be taught. The same goes for the fact that some rules are subject to controversy---writing/language is no different from any other subject that is taught in school. I would go so far as to consider it a (mild) form of child abuse to refuse to instruct a child in spelling because "language changes." That piece of information will get the kid a tired smile but neither a job nor the sense of accomplishment or empowerment that comes with the ability to express oneself without distracting the reader from what one tries to express.