See other World News Articles
Title: How Non-English Speakers Learn This Crazy Grammar Rule You Know But Never Heard Of
Source:
[None]
URL Source: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/ ... rd-of?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Published: Mar 31, 2020
Author: staff
Post Date: 2020-03-31 02:43:19 by Horse
Keywords: None
Views: 416
Comments: 2
In 2016, for example, the BBC’s Matthew Anderson pointed out a “rule” about the order in which adjectives have to be put in front of a noun. Judging by the number of retweets—over 47,000—this came as a complete surprise to many people who thought they knew all about English: That quote comes from a book called The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. Adjectives, writes the author, professional stickler Mark Forsyth, “absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.” Mixing up the above phrase does, as Forsyth writes, feel inexplicably wrong (a rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife…), though nobody can say why. It’s almost like secret knowledge we all share. Learn the language in a non-English-speaking country, however, and such “secrets” are taught in meticulous detail. Here’s a page from a book, published by Cambridge University Press, used regularly to teach English to non-native speakers. An English teacher in Hungary sent it to us. The book lays out the adjective order in the same way as Forsyth’s surprising illumination. Hungarian students, and no doubt those in many other countries, slave over the rule, committing it to memory and thinking through the order when called upon to describe something using more than one adjective. The fact is, a lot of English grammar rules only come as a surprise to those who know them most intimately. Learning rules doesn’t always work, however. Forsyth also takes issue with the rules we think we know, but which don’t actually hold true. In a lecture about grammar, he dismantles the commonly held English spelling mantra ”I before E except after C.” It’s used to help people remember how to spell words like “piece,” but, Forsyth says, there are only 44 words that follow the rule, and 923 that don’t. His prime examples? “Their,” “being,” and “eight.” 
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Horse (#0)
Ebonics will never make it past the ghetto. ;)
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
To put it another way, qualifiers line up in ascending order of importance and shall we say 'standardness'. The full mnemonic is 'I before e except after c, or when sounded like a as in neighbor and weigh' -- with, I think, the roundly understood implication that it refers to single syllables. And to be perfectly ornery, contrary and insufferable, I think the same rules more or less apply in other languages (mostly more) ;) _____________________________________________________________ USA! USA! USA! Bringing you democracy, or else! there were strains of VD that were incurable, and they were first found in the Philippines and then transmitted to the Korean working girls via US military. The 'incurables' we were told were first taken back to a military hospital in the Philippines to quietly die. – 4um
#2. To: Horse (#0)
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest