Tamara wrote: > But grammar is something else. The only firm change I can think of > within the past 50 yrs is the usage of "shall" and "will" not only as > being a difference in degree of intention but also something to do with > person (singular, plural, first second, etc). Can't remember any of > that circus because I never encountered it again.
We were taught (in SCOTLAND, in the 50s) as follows: For normal use: I shall, you will, he/she/it will; we shall, you (pl) will, they will. For emphasis: I will, you shall, he/she/it shall; we will, you (pl) shall, they shall. But (we were taught) this is the exact opposite of ENGLISH rules. "Circus" is about right - let's just abbreviate to "I'll go and do that now". > There's that "iffy" "mode" - can't even remember its proper name now - > where you say "if I were you"; that's not used a whole lot though it's > still taught. That'd be the conditional case. I still use it if I need to sound well-educated <G> but mostly people don't seem to mind one way or the other. > > Texting is a separate system of spelling on its own I ignore all the teenage text abbreviations, and also the helpful (not) "predictive texting" which guesses (wrongly) what I want to say. I just enter in full the words I want to use. Slow, maybe, but clear and readable. And Weronika said: > Latin, by inventing their own alphabet; English, by just giving each word > a randomly chosen Latin alphabet spelling in no way related to > pronounciation... <G> I often wonder: languages must have begun as spoken sounds and words, long before alphabets and spelling came along. So, once alphabets turned up, who applied the letters (and combinations) to the sounds? And did each scribe choose their own rules? Was that why it took centuries for spelling to settle down? And why did the spelling rules turn out so different in different countries? For instance, when I learned conversational German, our lovely teacher first taught us the German spelling/sounds correspondence so we could read signs out loud, before trying to learn the words; once we could hear the sounds, the words might sound like English words and that helped us to pick up some meaning. It was really useful. End of ramble <G>, Margery. ============================================ [EMAIL PROTECTED] in North Herts, UK ============================================ To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
