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> My mother did not work while me and my siblings were growing. ...my siblings and I... There's a homework assignment for you.
by sureaboutthis 8y ago
> My mother did not work while me and my siblings were growing.
...my siblings and I...
There's a homework assignment for you.
- PakG1 8y agoI'd be interested in why this is such a sticking point and the language doesn't just evolve to accept this phrasing. American English seems to have accepted that you can end sentences with a preposition, or is that just my misconception? I believe Canada and the UK still doesn't like it, or is that my misconception too? But my point is why doesn't the language evolve along with informal societal usage?
- garmaine 8y agoIt does. Ignore the pandits.
- geomark 8y agoI am no stickler for grammar but when you take out the other people you get "... while me was growing" and to the native Enlish ear that sounds pretty terrible compared to "... while I was growing".
- PakG1 8y agoTalk with a pirate accent and it'll sound natural. ;)
- mrob 8y agoIt's a proxy for social class. If you accept informal language as standard usage, how will you filter out the plebs?
- sureaboutthis 8y agoIt is grammatic structure of a sentence. I was taught this in grade school. It was emphasized in high school.
- PakG1 8y agoYou missed the point of my question. :)
- sureaboutthis 8y agoYou asked why it doesn't evolve. I'm saying that you are asking why writing doesn't change its fundamental structure for what reason? To fit into people who are doing it wrong? I can't think of anyone in my circle of friends, family and business who don't say it correctly. I know my rather large circle is not everybody but neither are the people who use it incorrectly and I fail to see the point in changing to incorrect usage.
- pessimizer 8y agoIt's not part of the fundamental structure of English, it's just a class affectation. Language is not mathematical.
- sureaboutthis 8y agoUh, I spent a good amount of time in the eighth grade learning language diagramming and structure. None of that was mathematical so I don't know where you got that from. Nor is it an affectation.
- ams6110 8y agoIt does evolve, one that always catches my eye is the singular "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun. It was drummed into me in school that this was incorrect, and I always notice it. That said, I do sometimes catch myself using it, but I almost always go back and correct it.
- pessimizer 8y agoEnglish has always accepted this construction and correcting it has always been prescriptive, just as ending a sentence with a preposition has always been. There have never been grammatical rules in those cases, just grammatical demands.
- kartan 8y ago> ...my siblings and I... Thank you. English is not my mother tongue and I easily fail that kind of constructs.
- maxdamantus 8y agoActually, the more natural construction in English would be "me and my siblings". The only reason people know about "X and I" is due to prescriptivism. Noam Chomsky for example sometimes uses this example: https://chomsky.info/1991____/ https://chomsky.info/1991____/ (search "him and me"). In general in English, you have a one-to-one correspondence between a finite verb and a subject noun phrase. When the noun phrase is just a single pronoun, you have formal agreement between the verb and that pronoun ("(I) am here", but not "(Everyone who knows I) am here"). Subject pronouns are not used in other cases. Regardless of some technical explanation of why the "and I" construction is unnatural, some pretty good evidence would include the fact that people have to keep teaching it to successive generations, and the fact that "I and he" sounds undesirable even to people who have learnt the rule, whereas "him and me" and "me and him" both sound natural to someone who has learnt English naturally. Perhaps we should also be telling people that prepositions are not things you can end sentences with.