
Old grammar forms live on in American English - newest
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/10/17/how-america-saved-old-fashioned-english-grammar
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neonate
[http://archive.is/W7XAE](http://archive.is/W7XAE)

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kova12
Thank you so much kind person

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yosito
I'm a native English speaker, so I'm sometimes unaware of English grammar. I
had no idea that English has subjunctive. That would have been helpful to know
when I was trying to wrap my mind around the Spanish subjunctive. I'm
currently learning Hungarian, which uses the accusative case. It took me
awhile to wrap my head around, until I realized that "him/her" is the
accusative case of "he/she" (used when it's a direct object) and now I know
the difference between "who" and "whom" (accusative). I never knew that
before. It's interesting how different languages, and evolving forms of
languages, tend to have the same grammatical structures. Makes me wonder if
there's some sort of grammar that's innate to the human brain.

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schoen
> Makes me wonder if there's some sort of grammar that's innate to the human
> brain.

Yes, but what it consists of is a perennial source of controversy. :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal)

On the one hand, there are lots of concepts that are found in lots of
different languages (so understanding a concept in one language is a big help
for another language). Noun case is a great example of that, but it's use to
different extents in different languages, and languages that have noun case
don't always use it as extensively as one another (for example, in Latin it's
arguably marked directly on _every noun and adjective_ , even on names, while
in English we nowadays only have it in pronouns!).

Also, languages have different numbers of cases (some people say that English
just has subject and oblique, though perhaps also a genitive, while German
still distinguishes a dative, Latin also has an ablative, and Finnish and
Estonian famously have dozens of cases).

You definitely can't use noun cases as a linguistic universal, though: for
example, Chinese doesn't have them at all. There Barney's "I love you, you
love me" should just be "我爱你，你爱我" (I love you, you love I). Whereas in Latin
it would most idiomatically¹ be "ego te amo, tu me amas"— _every single word_
is different between the "I love you" and "you love me" cases, and the
grammatical relationship is _still_ also reflected (although not explicitly
expressed²) by the word order.

So it's one thing to benefit from learning grammatical concepts that you can
apply to new languages as you learn them (as well as to your native language),
and another thing to expect to encounter each concept in each new language you
look at, which is most likely _not_ going to happen.

There are also two different phenomena which are likely to make some
grammatical features _feel_ recognizable:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family)

(the fact that many languages are historically related to one another) and

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areal_feature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areal_feature)

(the way that languages that are unrelated to one another by descent
nonetheless influence each other through language contact within a geographic
area, or sometimes trade or religious influences)

Many of the languages that you encounter in Europe, in former European
colonies, and in Central and South Asia (although not Hungarian!) are part of
the Indo-European family.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-
European_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages)

These languages share a common descent (and include all of the Romance and
Germanic languages, and many, many others). They often have features like
prepositions, participles, noun inflections (like case markers), verb
inflections (perhaps tense, number, mood, voice, and person, although not all
languages include all of these distinctions), and agreement (certain forms of
words have to match certain forms of other words in the same sentence in order
to confirm a grammatical relationship).

The Indo-European influences as well as areal effects have also resulted in a
phenomenon sometimes called "Standard Average European"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European)

where European languages are, by worldwide standards, grammatically rather
similar to one another. But these similarities shouldn't all be taken to be
linguistic universals that reflect how the human mind works, because many
other languages _don 't_ have them, and may also have other features that are
rare in European languages. (Some examples that are somewhat common in
languages overall but rare in European languages and in the Indo-European
family include ergativity and evidential markers, while marking number on
nouns or tense on verbs is less common in languages from some other parts of
the world.)

¹ This example uses subject pronouns, even though they are optional in Latin
(unlike English). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-
drop_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language)

² This example uses SOV order, which is the most common order in Latin but
isn't grammatically required at all due to the noun case markings. For
example, "te amo ego" is less idiomatic but is still grammatically acceptable
and still has the same meaning.

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FabHK
Wouldn't idiomatic Latin also drop the subject (marked in the verb ending):
"te amo; me amas"? Or am I confusing it with Spanish now?

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schoen
I included a footnote about that in my post. Latin is similar to Spanish here
in that the subject pronoun is optional and commonly omitted.

One thing I don't have a clear sense of is how much including it in Latin
draws attention to it. In Spanish it certainly does and so it's used, for
example, to suggest contrasts between people ( _I_ do this [unlike other
people?]). I don't remember whether I've seen or heard it used in Latin with a
similar emphatic sense.

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jjtheblunt
nominative case is all over the place in the Aeneid, for example. I'd
conjecture that the elision of an explicit noun, given a conjugated verb, is a
convenience whose viability is contextual.

~~~
schoen
It's sometimes hard to gauge idiomaticity from poetry, though, because poets
do so many unusual things for the sake of the meter.

~~~
jjtheblunt
Your comment rings true; I really agree. Dactylic and iambic don't come for
free.

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0db532a0
I would say that the modern British equivalent of ‘can I get’ is ‘could I
have’. ‘may I have’ might be seen as pretentious.

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tyingq
I also find our _" she's in the hospital"_ vs _" she's in hospital"_ curious.

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chrisseaton
This article talks about 'can I get a...', but I also hear 'I'll have a...',
which sounds extremely presumptuous and demanding to my British ears. Then
there is 'I'll grab a...' which sounds almost violent! Why can't you pick
things up gently - why do you need to grab at them?

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turndown
"May I..." sounds like I am asking my elementary school teacher if I'm allowed
to go to the bathroom to my American ears; or pointlessly formal.

