English....No Loss for Words

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by PsychoticEpisode, Jan 14, 2009.

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  1. Cellar_Door

    Cellar_Door Whose Worth's unknown Registered Senior Member

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    Ah, but a new word often develops to replace an obsolete and disused word - language rejuvenates itself. We were talking about the net loss or gain of individual terms. I apologise if the imprecise nature of my post proved to be misleading.

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    Cellar_Door, Jan 18, 2009
    #21

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  3. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Of the three I mentioned, only one has a modern equivalent (evenhood), because the concept it represents is timeless. The concept of abatude is obsolete, not just the word. As for burdalane, I know the concept of the last surviving male child came up during WWII (at least in the USA): if all of your brothers had been killed in action, then you would never be sent into combat.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jan 18, 2009
    #22

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  5. Ophiolite

    Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    Articulate that concatenation of epistemological linguistic observations as a self-referential eponymous expression if you please.
    Speak for yourself mate.
     
    Ophiolite, Jan 18, 2009
    #23

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  7. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Exactly.
    You mean:
    "Put that in your own words"
    A person who uses language well will use simple words to convey his meaning when speaking to non specialized people.
    Anyone who doesn't, risks being misunderstood by people who don't understand the words he is using, or looking a pompous prat to those who do.

    On the other hand, when I am being operated on by a heart surgeon, I don't want him saying that : "This bloke's old ticker is looking well out of order. Lets dig in with the old daggers and remove that bit"
     
    Last edited: Jan 19, 2009
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 19, 2009
    #24
  8. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Hey dude, you did say:
    Ophi was writing, and the hallmark of a good writer is the ability to use more nuanced expressions in writing and make them understandable--or in this case interesting, or just plain fun.

    BTW, "less" is only used with analog measurements. With digital measurements (counting), "fewer" must be used. It should be "fewer than 10,000 words," but "less than two quarts of water."
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jan 19, 2009
    #25
  9. Cellar_Door

    Cellar_Door Whose Worth's unknown Registered Senior Member

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    You have a point; I suppose it can then be argued that the development of Science (pseudo and real) has compensated for the loss of these more outdated words. Although it's interesting to think that a concept can become obsolete when, historically, it can still be conceived of.
     
    Cellar_Door, Jan 19, 2009
    #26
  10. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    You are right, but two quarts is also a digital measurement. (counting)
    so according to the rules it should be fewer than two quarts.
    You've made the same mistake as I did.


    As for Ophiolite.
    I knew what he meant.
    He was being deliberately verbose to make a point.
    I was agreeing with him.
     
    Last edited: Jan 19, 2009
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 19, 2009
    #27
  11. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No. Water does not come in discrete units. When we say "less than two quarts" we mean that 1.9999999 is okay. When we say "fewer than ten words" we all agree that there's no such thing as 9.6 words. (Except in typing, where "one word" is defined as five keystrokes for measuring speed.)

    It's not the wording of the measurement that counts, it's the characteristic of the thing being measured.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jan 19, 2009
    #28
  12. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    That does make sense.

    Which would you say?
    "There are fewer clouds in the sky today"
    Or "There are less clouds in the sky today"

    I think I would go for fewer- Probably wrong.
     
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 20, 2009
    #29
  13. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Clouds come in discrete units. You can count them. Well theoretically anyway. I guess they're like continents with their little isthmuses.

    But anyway, if the noun is in the plural, I'd say it implies that we can count the things it represents. As you attempt to choose between "less" and "fewer," form a sentence experimentally without either, but with numbers instead.
    • "There must be fifteen clouds over there." -- "I think there are fewer."
    • "There must be two gallons of water in this bucket." -- "I think there is less."
    Of course we're never consistent in English.
    • "I need thirty bricks to build this garden wall." -- "You'll have to do it with fewer because we only have twenty-eight."
    • "It looks like a ton and a half of bricks fell on that guy when the truck skidded off the road." -- "He's still alive so it must have been less."
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jan 20, 2009
    #30
  14. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Without consciously referring to the rule, I would naturally choose less in this case. I can't tell you why. Fewer seems to jar. Either it's a blind spot in my grammar, or word usage is changing.

    With the usage of "less" in regard to vocabulary, I do agree that "fewer" is better, but only marginally.
    When we speak of vocabulary, we would usually number it in thousands.
    If you accepted that as a rule rather than a convention then "less" would be correct.


    Later note.
    I've thought about the bricks example, and I think I know why my mind jumps to "less".
    It is because the "less" in this case is short for "less than that".
    I've just googled the phrases "less than that" and "fewer than that", and the former outnumbers the latter massively. 4,780,000 to 35,000.
    When it is a comparison with a previously stated amount, people choose "less" over "fewer".
    If people were obeying the rule, it should be nearer equal.

    A good discussion, Fraggle.
     
    Last edited: Jan 20, 2009
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 20, 2009
    #31
  15. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Obviously word usage changes over the decades; that's how languages evolve. But written language always lags behind spoken language; just look at our medieval spelling.

    I'm a writer and an editor so I try to give people writing tips. When they're writing a thesis, the slides for a presentation, an article, training material, a story, a manual, an online help subsystem, a web page, or just about anything, it's going to be reviewed by a manager or an editor. That person won't be thrilled with their writing ability if it has more than a smattering of style, grammatical, spelling or punctuation errors. And if he's not thrilled, they might have to wait a long time for their next chance to try again.

    Obviously the rules are not enforced as carefully in spoken language. You don't have a chance to examine your words and fix them before they come out.

    I've attended (and presented) my share of classes in business communication, where we all critique each other's presentations. I go after the uhhhs, the you-knows, the annoying little blunders like "lay" for "lie," and the train of thought that gets derailed. But I don't nail people for saying "less than fifty end users," which I would do if it were in writing.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jan 20, 2009
    #32
  16. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    No, I appreciate it.
    Many people, even those who write professionally, produce work which is full of cliches and grammatical errors. They would be better communicators if someone was pulling them up over it.
     
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 20, 2009
    #33
  17. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Every writer, even the world's finest, needs to be edited.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jan 20, 2009
    #34
  18. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Although..............
    Churchill's speeches would be mundane if they were made grammatical,
    and I think we can excuse Shakespeare from the editor's pen as well.
     
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 20, 2009
    #35
  19. AnWulf

    AnWulf Registered Member

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    less and fewer

    I think that the reason less works here is that you're referring more to the amount of water rather than the number of gallons ... huru since you can't see the each gallon.

    I don't get too bent out of shape over it unless it is something like a recent writ I saw in Forbes about fertility rates. The writer wrote something about each woman having "less children" instead of "fewer children".
     
    AnWulf, Oct 31, 2011
    #36
  20. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    That was my point. Bricks is (are?) a discrete, countable variable, while water is a continuous, measurable variable. "Fewer" applies to things that can be counted, whereas "less" applies to... um... "stuff" that can only be measured.
    Perhaps you haven't seen the statistics, or perhaps you're not a statistician. His mistake was not in the choice of "less" instead of "fewer," but in the choice of "each" instead of "the average."

    For starters, it's simply not true that each woman is having a smaller number of children than her predecessors. Of course the majority of women are, which is the reason for the statistical trend, but some women are having just as many children as their ancestors.

    What he needed to say was that "on the average," women are having fewer children. The fertility rate in the developed nations has dropped below the replacement level of 2.1. (The point one accounts for children dying before they reproduce, so replacement level two hundred years ago with an infant mortality rate of 80% was more like eight or nine to make sure two survived to replace you.) In the U.S. it's something like 1.9 for native-born citizens, which is why we desperately need more immigrants to prop up our social security scheme. In Japan it has fallen to 1.5, which means that soon every working citizen will be supporting exactly one retired citizen.

    My point is that in the West, the average woman is having about 1.8 children. This is not "fewer children" because it's a fraction. The only number fewer than two is one, and the birth rate has not dropped that far. So it has to be "less children."

    But it would be best to rewrite the sentence and avoid the construction entirely. "The people are having fewer children."
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Oct 31, 2011
    #37
  21. AnWulf

    AnWulf Registered Member

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    9
    Many words have been lost

    If you go back to Old English (Anglo-Saxon), then yes, we have lost many, many words. As someone who dabbles in OE / AS and ME ... I could give a long list of them. And there are many more on the "endangered" list.

    As said earlier, evenhood (along with evenhede) for equality was still in the old Century wordbook but isn't found in the 1913 Webster's only a few short years later. ME also had evenship for equality.

    I have a very long list of words that I can swap in and out ... and it grows almost daily! I think if I were to print it out, it would be nearly 30 pages. Many of the words are in a woodbook … bewried with dust!

    For byspel, for the Latinate verb "to use" (from French from Latin) ... there is brook from ME from OE brūcan - use, enjoy, possess, partake of, spend ... or (a little more befuddling), the word note ... from Middle English noten, notien ... from OE notian (“to make use of, use, employ, enjoy).

    And don't bind yourself to just OE ... There were many Germanic words that drifted in (and out) during ME.

    Another OE word brooked in ME that drifted out was skift. It is a good one for effort. Skift was also a verb whch meant to divide/portion out from OE sciftan (“To divide, distribute, allot, place, order, arrange”).

    Huru was a good one that meant many things to include "especially" or "certainly".

    There are many that are still in the wordbook, if a little dusty:

    advice/advise = rede
    dern = secret
    eath = easy
    eathly = easily
    umbe = around
    wanhope (wan + hope) = despair, lacking hoping
    wanbelief or unbelief instead of disbelief
    wantrust or untrust for distrust

    The list goes on!

    As for scientific words (kennkraftic or kenncraftic?) ... many words, like electricity, were made by Englishmen! They're not truly loanwords but words upsprung (upsprung is still in the wordbook) often from Latinized Greek words! :wallbang:
    OK, I know Latin was the lingua franca (tongue of the Franks) of the day ... But at least he could have chosen the OE / AS word for amber to Latinize!
     
    AnWulf, Oct 31, 2011
    #38
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