A tuba player's grammar

[imperialbari]

The only problem coming from bad spelling, aside from the social stigma, is when the semantic content is blurred. Today I was sent off on a wild goose surprised by a travel tuba suddenly entering a thread on a giant tuba. In that case I gave a lecture on a type of spelling errors far too common among Americans trying to operate in German terms. In other situations an innocent question is better used like here:

viewtopic.php?p=287123#p287123

[MikeW]

Probably the Firefox spell checker....

For the benefit of Microsoft users, Firefox is a browser common on Linux, but I've heard there is also a Windows version. It hadn't occurred to me, but I guess that must be where the spell checker lives - it nags me instantly when I mis- spell a word, so it can't be on the Tubenet server. Something new every day...

Now that could really be fun... if everyone has a separate spell checker in his browser, we could all be using different dictionaries with different personal additions. Do I see babel looming ? At least my browser seems to be set for American spelling, which should minimize my English-isms.

[GC]

Firefox is on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Plus Macs have built-in spell-checking functionality.

I prefer Firefox personally because of its wealth of extensions and plug-ins. To each his own.

[MikeW]

The "plugin" feature is a security hole a mile wide, a standing invitation to

Down boy! take one of your pills and remember you're retired now!

[rusty]

a plenty

laquer

air leek

[rusty]

hay jus sayin] bentuba7 needz 2 chek hiz pwn spellin b4 hee tellin evry1 else 2... ur rite tho eye shud b contributin moar; butt theres alot ov hawt hornporn on hear distractin Me! sumday i wil hav 100,00 postz n bee teh tubenet 1337\

[imperialbari]

hay jus sayin] bentuba7 needz 2 chek hiz pwn spellin b4 hee tellin evry1 else 2... ur rite tho eye shud b contributin moar; butt theres alot ov hawt hornporn on hear distractin Me! sumday i wil hav 100,00 postz n bee teh tubenet 1337\

Very intertesting!

[tubajazzo]

very interesting thread to me as a non-anglophone reader...because sometimes it is not easy to get the meaning if the spelling is completely off...
the word that in my impression gets a lot of misspellings here is: embouchure.
Did I read ambrasure, emboshure and other funny variations over that theme?

[peter birch]

I blame the Americans. OK, that's a generalisation, but our kids are influenced by American cartoons, American pop lyrics (including rap and "gangsta") and Hollywood.

pfft!

I was last at Oxford in 2002 and at holiday time I was subjected to "The Cheeky Girls" one morning on BBC t.v.

'nuff said?

However, they are Rumanian

[PMeuph]

Should we accept this cromulent word?

[MikeW]

Wow - two new words today, and they're both in Wikipedia. I guess that's as a good a way as any of measuring the reliability of a Wikipedia reference.

Which reminds me of floccinaucinihilipilification (the act or habit of evaluating something as worthless)

This beautiful and useful word appeared in the Shorter OED for precisely one edition. It appears to have bred all over the Internet, complete with historical references tracing it back to 1471 (or was that 1741). What worries me is, if someone could finagle this word into the OED, what's to stop them faking the history on Wiki-whatever ?

[Ken Herrick]

I think we can thank The Simpsons for "embiggen" and now Muckdonalds has goodification. Our language expands daily.

[MikeW]

There was a time when a misbegotten joke like that died almost immediately, and was decently buried.

Did I just write that ? God, I'm getting old (but also it's true)

[MikeW]

I blame the Americans.
... A problem we have with our education system is that opportunities to learn grammar are lost because the history teacher is teaching history, the geography teacher teaches geography and so on, and although they might comment on grammar, will not penalise or correct it.

Unfortunately we are entering second-generation ignorance; Teachers currently entering the school system were never taught grammar, so they don't teach it or correct it because they don't know how to.

[Michael Bush]

very interesting thread to me as a non-anglophone reader...because sometimes it is not easy to get the meaning if the spelling is completely off...
the word that in my impression gets a lot of misspellings here is: embouchure.
Did I read ambrasure, emboshure and other funny variations over that theme?

I certainly see "embrasure" especially among the English. It's originally the opening in a castle wall you shoot arrows through. I suspect it is substituted for embouchure due to the English aversion to using French words, especially if the pronunciation cannot be conveniently managed using British standards of pronunciation.

[PhilGreen]

I certainly see "embrasure" especially among the English. It's originally the opening in a castle wall you shoot arrows through. I suspect it is substituted for embouchure due to the English aversion to using French words, especially if the pronunciation cannot be conveniently managed using British standards of pronunciation.

No, I don't think this is the case. Most if the words we (English speakers) use come from either French, Germanic or Latin origins so we'd be pretty stuck if we had aversion (another french word) to any particular language. The Races that these languages come from - absolutely!! However we'll use all their words, pronounce them correctly and call them our own.

What you're probably seeing is ignorance.

Same as you guys not being able to pronounce Aluminium and Oregano I guess

[imperialbari]

To be more specific: English is old Danish with a very strong influx from languages based on Latin.

Language purists fear the influence of English on Danish. Scholars don’t share that fear, as the true influence was the other way round.

Klaus

[Michael Bush]

I certainly see "embrasure" especially among the English. It's originally the opening in a castle wall you shoot arrows through. I suspect it is substituted for embouchure due to the English aversion to using French words, especially if the pronunciation cannot be conveniently managed using British standards of pronunciation.

No, I don't think this is the case. Most if the words we (English speakers) use come from either French, Germanic or Latin origins so we'd be pretty stuck if we had aversion (another french word) to any particular language. The Races that these languages come from - absolutely!! However we'll use all their words, pronounce them correctly and call them our own.

What you're probably seeing is ignorance.

Same as you guys not being able to pronounce Aluminium and Oregano I guess

Oh, I know how full English is of words from other languages. It just looks to me like those languages' pronunciation standards are usually ignored in favor of the recessive accent and a pronunciation especially of vowels as they would be if the word had a longer history in English usage. And I'm not criticizing, just pointing out a phenomenon I've noticed. No big deal.

This first came to my attention in the 80s, hearing BBC reporters talking about the fighting in "Nickeraggewer" (Nicaragua). Then I noticed it happens with lots of words, especially (it seems to me) when those words are of French derivation. But maybe I'm wrong.

[Donn]

Unfortunately we are entering second-generation ignorance; Teachers currently entering the school system were never taught grammar, so they don't teach it or correct it because they don't know how to.

Which is a good thing. The `English grammar' in the educational system of old was full of queer obsessions with grammatical forms that were more relevant to Latin, and was a giant waste of time for nearly everyone. We all have a phenomenal native ability to learn language, but it doesn't work like that, like an engineer consulting a book of formulae.

To be more specific: English is old Danish with a very strong influx from languages based on Latin.

Language purists fear the influence of English on Danish. Scholars don’t share that fear, as the true influence was the other way round.

It crosses my mind that you may be joking, in view of the notorious peculiarity of the Danish language, but Norse influence in English is a surprisingly strong, when for example compared with that of the Celtic languages that predated English on its home turf. I see the wikipedia article on Germanic languages proposes that Norse influence helped break up the grammatical structure of Old English, which is grammatically rather different from Middle English, and we have quite a number of Norse "loan" words. But the English language itself is much closer to Dutch than Danish, and closer yet to the relatively obscure Frisian language of western Germany and the Netherlands.

This first came to my attention in the 80s, hearing BBC reporters talking about the fighting in "Nickeraggewer" (Nicaragua).

Oh yeah, those were dark times. I remember it as "nicker-rag-yew-a", following their pronunciation of "jaguar" (which in the case of the car, makes it correct, since it is a British motor car - it's a "jag-yew-er".) Meanwhile, reporters in the US and Canada striving to be more cosmopolitan would say "nicka-dog-wah" - evidently feeling that it would be crass to use the same R sound they normally use with English, but not particularly adept at the alternatives, and unaware of the other phonological differences between English and Spanish.

It's hard to be `right' on pronunciation of a foreign word, in the context of English speech. But while embouchure is of obvious foreign origin, it's no more a foreign word than envelope. If we saw it regularly in print, we'd spell it correctly.

[imperialbari]

No joking. What you call Norse is Danish of the viking era.

If one can German and English plus has a bit of knowledge about spelling transformation it is possible to read quite a bit of Dutch, whereas it is very hard to understand spoken Dutch due to the odd sounds.

Klaus