Who's right?

guest   Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:48 pm GMT
>>He said "then" instead of "than". Would a native speaker make such a stupid mistake?<<

Dyslectic is still a possibility.

>>I think that he must be mentally challenged if he is a native speaker<<

And you dare to take the "moral" high ground on that one...please.

>>a poorly educated one<<

You obviously have something in common then, read the post made by Travis, he enlightened us both!
Travis   Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:56 pm GMT
>>Q: "what would be older then English (British)?"

He said "then" instead of "than". Would a native speaker make such a stupid mistake? I think that he must be mentally challenged if he is a native speaker.<<

Just so you know, there are English dialects in which "than" and "then" are homophones. With that in mind, and considering that individuals very commonly confuse words/word-clitic pairs like "there", "their", and "they're" in writing, it is very easily conceivable that individuals would accidentally write "than" as "then" and vice versa.
Pash   Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:57 pm GMT
<"Hast þu that newe Clooney filme yseen?

So, I suppose that's what the Brits still say, because they stick to the *original* English?>

Yes that, like modern British use, is in the present perfect.
Pash   Tue Dec 05, 2006 12:02 am GMT
<(or if you are which is highly unlikely, a poorly educated one)>

User, maybe you should check out your bad punctuation before you go attacking NNES usage.
Pash   Tue Dec 05, 2006 12:03 am GMT
<It requires that the two forms follow established grammar. >

There's no such thing in English usage.
Guest   Tue Dec 05, 2006 12:04 am GMT
Whatever, Travis. It is still a mistake no matter what excuses you offer.

Here is yet another.

Q: "The entire version of the language has diverged from English (British), or have that changed?"

"HAVE that changed?" It should not be "have", because "have" is a plural verb form, and "that" is singular! This mistake is even stupider than his previous ones. Surely a native speaker would not make such a stupid mistake.
Pash   Tue Dec 05, 2006 12:07 am GMT
Does this person sound illiterate, stupid, mentally challenged, or any other nasty name some of you guys love dispensing?

"On the local level, community leaders need to pull together their resourceful science teachers, local pharmacists and doctors to fully explore the resources already at hand and available for any future nuclear emergency that might befall their locale. You might could be responsible for saving many in your community from future thyroid cancer by simply bringing this to the attention of these local authorities and experts!"

http://www.ki4u.com/plan_b.htm
Pash   Tue Dec 05, 2006 12:10 am GMT
<This mistake is even stupider than his previous ones>

It's a common mistake among NNES. Is that a problem? Tell me, which other languages do you speak well?
Guest   Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:03 pm GMT
>>With all due respect; indeed he can, and righfully so. Do you live in that silly notion that grammar can be changed on the basis of once own personal likes and dislikes? Does not work like that in any langauge! <<

But the point is language changes all the time. If you're going to talk about the original rules of English, surely you will have to go back to when English first became recognised as a language in its own right. That language would be almost totally incomprehensible to English speakers today. If you're talking about the rules of English at the time the Mayflower set sail to the New World, then both BE and AE have changed since then. You surely can't be implying that the struture of BE has remained exactly the same for the past few hundred years, while AE has gone off on its own wild developmental tangent. In a few cases AE has developed different grammatical rules i.e. greater use of the simple past as mentioned, but in other ways, it retains grammar that BE has dropped. As I said the Americans are much more likely to use the subjunctive, so where a British person might well say 'He suggested he ASKED for some help', an American would be much more likely to say 'He suggested he ASK for some help'. As far as I am aware this isn't something they invented themselves, it is a rule of English that they still observe (because it was there before), while the Brits more and more overlook it. But by and large there are not many differences between BE and AE grammar, and also for the most part the same 'grammatical errors' are to be found on both sides of the Atlantic. It is in the vocabulary that the most differences are to be found, but even then this rarely results in communication difficulties. It's certainly not true that the entire language has diverged. Most of the time BE and AE speakers would form a sentence in exactly the same way, albeit with different accents.

Oh yes, and to the original poster, I am a BE speaker and have never heard anyone use 'might could'.
User   Tue Dec 05, 2006 3:19 pm GMT
>> For instance, my dialect is one such dialect, and in it the important factor in differentiating pairs such as "once" and "ones" is not the realization of /s/ and /z/ but rather the length of the vowels in question, giving [wVnts] and [wV:nts] respectively in isolation. <<

But, you *do* in fact make a distinction. They are not mere homophones. So, I imagine it would be rather unlikely for you to write "ones" as "once". Anyway, the point was, that Q does not sound like a native speaker.

>> Yes that, like modern British use, is in the present perfect. <<

But the original claim was that the British kept the "original" English, whereas the Americans were the innovators.

>> User, maybe you should check out your bad punctuation before you go attacking NNES usage. <<

First of all, I was not attacking Q's usage, but merely pointing out that by the same reasoning, Q was in fact "changing" the rules of grammar. Secondly, you are using what is known as a logical fallacy--the logical fallacy of pointing to another wrong. "This fallacy involves the attempt to justify a wrong action by pointing to another wrong action. Often, the other wrong action is of the same type or committed by the accuser, in which case it is the subfallacy Tu Quoque. Attempting to justify committing a wrong on the grounds that someone else is guilty of another wrong is clearly a Red Herring, because if this form of argument were cogent, one could justify anything―always assuming that there is another wrong to point to, which is a very safe assumption.(http://www.fallacyfiles.org/twowrong.html)"

>> Oh yes, and to the original poster, I am a BE speaker and have never heard anyone use 'might could'. <<

Judging by the original post (which was worded rather badly, making it fairly difficult to understand), I think that he was saying that some *Americans* use the "might could" construction in their dialect. See this website: http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/mightcould.html
"In some American dialects it is common to say things like “I might could pick up some pizza on the way to the party.” In standard English, “might” or “could” are used by themselves, not together." Please note that it says "in [*]some[*] American dialects..."