Random Thread - Anything Goes

The way this is phrased means the daughter was drunk. Although the intent of the author likely meant that the mother was drunk and decided to beat up her daughter.

If the latter is the intent, the sentence needs to be rewritten.

tonyshowoff

@valentina That's what I thought it was at first too and was confused.

DustinB3403

@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Another reason English lacks behind other languages.

This is still a very clear sentence, it's the author who has failed.

If the intent is to state that the 'mother beat up her drunk daughter' it could be explained in different ways. But this is still a correct way of stating so.

If the intent was to state that the mother was drunk and decided to beat up her daughter, well then the author fails at being an author.

tonyshowoff

@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Another reason English lacks behind other languages.

I don't think that's a good demonstration of how English "lacks behind" other languages, considering even most other Germanic languages alone the reflexive pronoun(s) tend to be the same word no matter what making certain sentences very ambiguous. I think one of English's neatest things is the possessive pseudo-case of 's, which works a bit easier than genitive case in many languages because you can chain them, but is a hell of a lot more clear than a reverse list of "de", which at least in the case of Indo-European languages is the opposite direction of how speech tends to run.

Plus also the -ing ending is one of the best aspects that almost every other Indo-European language lacks or has to achieve in a complex manner which itself is also potentially vague. One of the problems is that -ing is also the ending for gerunds and some other things.

English's biggest problems are:

The spelling system is one of the worst in the entire world, certainly worst in the western world, even beyond French. Funnily a lot of people who speak only English will say "but things are spelled the way they sound." No. At least French has a consistent way to "decode" (read) sounds and know what they are even if they can be hard to "encode" (write). /u/ may be written u, ou, et al but it still is essentially always pronounced /u/. English is broken both with encoding and decoding, though it's rough to write out all the reasons why.
The dropping of singular familiar "thou" leaving only "you" and there's several historical reasons for this, but it's a pain in the ass anyway. Which ironic is that new plurals like "y'all" have been created but they make you sound like a hick or like you're pretending to be endearing and you assume everyone else doesn't see through it. The exception of course is if you speak AAVE (ebonics) and it's apparent, or you speak some version of English from the South East.

Languages don't tend to lack or gain a whole lot of features, they make up with them with syntax, grammatical forms, stress, all sorts of things. Sort of like how people tend to view AAVE as a simplified or dumbed down version of General American where in fact it may not have some of the same grammatical properties GA has but it gains its own which in turn are sometimes ambiguous to whitey.

scottalanmiller

@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

The dropping of singular familiar "thou" leaving only "you" and there's several historical reasons for this, but it's a pain in the ass anyway. Which ironic is that new plurals like "y'all" have been created but they make you sound like a hick or like you're pretending to be endearing and you assume everyone else doesn't see through it. The exception of course is if you speak AAVE (ebonics) and it's apparent, or you speak some version of English from the South East.

thou v you is tu v usted; not usted v ustedes.

y'all is because ye was dropped as the plural of you.

scottalanmiller

One of the problems with English is that informal slang usage is commonly accepted as proper over time. All languages do this some, but English has really embraced it like no other language. So what is wrong today is right tomorrow. And the language just expands and gets murky. So while to some, thou and ye are dropped, they aren't completely. And while y'all is weird and improper, it's considered proper to many.

valentina

tonyshowoff

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

thou v you is tu v usted; not usted v ustedes.
y'all is because ye was dropped as the plural of you.

I didn't disagree with that though.

thou / þu = second person familiar, singular.
you / ye = second person formal, plural

What you said is a common misconception, a similar one is how some people think "thou" is formal now or at least that it has some sort of reverence when spoken because of its use in the Bible.

Ye is a bit more weird, because it's an issue of two things.

In Old English, ye was the nominative form of you-plural and you-formal. However the accusative of þu (thou) was þec. When the printing press came, by that point it became þe, and they began using the letter "y" in place of "þ". Which is also how you get Ye Olde Shoppe, it's actually "The". In the former though this was cleared up in print when they began writing "thee".

You-plural as "ye" in nominative stayed, but in other cases, dative, accusative, and instrumental they became "eow", which by Middle English has changed into "you." So by Early Modern English you ended up with thou and you (Norman French spellings) as singular/familiar and plural/formal, and "ye" as a variation of "you" only in nominative case.

What happened next was that in the South, primarily London, the usage of "thou" was seen as impolite, though it was still used elsewhere. When widespread public education came in early forms in the 17th century, it began to really hammer down. Shakespeare is interesting because he actually used thou a lot in his plays but even at that time it began to fall out of use. He likely did not say it in every day speech, but it wasn't as strange to hear as it is now. There are even isolated dialects of English that still use it.

Certainly though "ye" over "you" for plural specifically was already isolated by 1611 when the King James Bible was written and was one of the many things that made it archaic even at the time it came out. I like "ye" though.

tonyshowoff

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

One of the problems with English is that informal slang usage is commonly accepted as proper over time. All languages do this some, but English has really embraced it like no other language. So what is wrong today is right tomorrow. And the language just expands and gets murky. So while to some, thou and ye are dropped, they aren't completely. And while y'all is weird and improper, it's considered proper to many.

That's what happens when there is no regulatory academy.