The Off Topic Topic

[garbon]

Is came the standard British past participle of to come, or a regional thing?

I'd say "has come to have". I saw a thread by an award-winning American novelist that reminded me of you noting grammar from Brits:

Brandon
@blgtylr
The way you never know what is going to come out of a British person's mouth when they use the past tense of a verb? Exquisite.
Subject-verb agreement over there? Lawless. Absolutely lawless. Agreeing in number? WHO CAN SAY.
I just watched Adele conjugate "to be" like four different ways in like three different sentences, all of which were past tense. Exquisite. Lawless land.
Yes, class, but, like, even y'all's Oxford-educated YouTubers be over there freestyling conjugations. So, like, I think it might just be y'all's English.
Y'all love a "have done"
Also a "won't have"
Also a "they'll not have" to change it up.
That's why they are so good at telling anecdotes. Absolutely lawless land.
I feel like the hardest part of impersonating a Brit would not be the accent. It would be the grammar because how.

From the replies it turns out Americans learn grammar in school and diagram sentences (? ) which we do not. I can't work out what's wrong with any of his examples

What a fancy way of describing Brandon "lives his life on twitter" Taylor.

[Josquius]

Is came the standard British past participle of to come, or a regional thing?

Remember when Squeeze was Teh Chav?

The fact that a stuffed dairy cow has a baby is not macabre.  Dairy cows do in fact have offspring and dairy cows are not slaughtered for meat.

Teh chav?
I've never been a chav.

Dairy cows usually have their kids taken from them at a fairly young age as we want that milk instead. It's true and I still love cheese despite knowing this. But it is grim.

[grumbler]

From the replies it turns out Americans learn grammar in school and diagram sentences (? ) which we do not. I can't work out what's wrong with any of his examples

I didn't see the problems with his examples (within the proper context) and don't understand whatever it is that the writer is trying to say.  As Syt's FFFF thread shows, lots of Americans don't understand concepts like subject-verb agreement, either.  Lots of American schools are not attempting to teach much n the way of proper English at all. 

And he doesn't even mention the British greengrocers apostrophe, and that heinous crime is, thanks to the internet, spreading to the US as well.

[garbon]

Is came the standard British past participle of to come, or a regional thing?

Remember when Squeeze was Teh Chav?

The fact that a stuffed dairy cow has a baby is not macabre.  Dairy cows do in fact have offspring and dairy cows are not slaughtered for meat.

Teh chav?
I've never been a chav.

Dairy cows usually have their kids taken from them at a fairly young age as we want that milk instead. It's true and I still love cheese despite knowing this. But it is grim.

It is grim when we anthropomorphize in children's toys or when we do so in relation to real animals?

[Admiral Yi]

Teh chav?
I've never been a chav.

When you first showed up here you told a story about your sister telling you not to talk that way, it sounds chavish.  After that I, and I thought others, teased you about being a chav.

[Josquius]

Teh chav?
I've never been a chav.

When you first showed up here you told a story about your sister telling you not to talk that way, it sounds chavish.  After that I, and I thought others, teased you about being a chav.

That doesn't sound like me. My sister has never said ought like that.
 When I first started posting here I don't think the word chav even existed perhaps except for certain bits of the south.
What did I say that was chavvish there anyway?

[Josquius]

Is came the standard British past participle of to come, or a regional thing?

Remember when Squeeze was Teh Chav?

The fact that a stuffed dairy cow has a baby is not macabre.  Dairy cows do in fact have offspring and dairy cows are not slaughtered for meat.

Teh chav?
I've never been a chav.

Dairy cows usually have their kids taken from them at a fairly young age as we want that milk instead. It's true and I still love cheese despite knowing this. But it is grim.

It is grim when we anthropomorphize in children's toys or when we do so in relation to real animals?

Both

[Admiral Yi]

That doesn't sound like me. My sister has never said ought like that.
 When I first started posting here I don't think the word chav even existed perhaps except for certain bits of the south.
What did I say that was chavvish there anyway?

I don't think you said when you told the story.

[Syt]

Ah, the 70s. When you could advertise cocaine paraphernalia made from African ivory.

[Tamas]

From the replies it turns out Americans learn grammar in school and diagram sentences (? ) which we do not. I can't work out what's wrong with any of his examples

WTF. Anarchy.


I guess, though, worry about losing your language to a conqueror's influence was never a thing for England.

[Sheilbh]

I think kids do now - one of Gove's reforms - but my generation didn't learn grammar beyond nouns are naming words, verbs are doing words etc. The focus was on ability to communicate which you learn by doing not "rote memorisation" of theory and rules. I think from about the 70s or 80s it was seen as old-fashioned and redundant.

It's one of the challenges with learning another language is you need to learn the concept first like discovering there are multiple past tenses

[mongers]

I think kids do now - one of Gove's reforms - but my generation didn't learn grammar beyond nouns are naming words, verbs are doing words etc. The focus was on ability to communicate which you learn by doing not "rote memorisation" of theory and rules. I think from about the 70s or 80s it was seen as old-fashioned and redundant.

It's one of the challenges with learning another language is you need to learn the concept first like discovering there are multiple past tenses

Yes, unfortunately.

[Tamas]

For somebody like me, coming from a country which very purposefully spent a 100 years to eliminate local dialects and uniform grammar (originally an effort to stop it from turning into a mongrel German language due to Austrian influence), the seemingly total chaos of accents within one country is just bewildering.

Like, I am quite unhappy with my own accent and I expect it is more unpleasant to listen to than most if not all the British dialects (I'd definitely listen to any of the natives ones than having to listen to the average Hungarian speaking English), but it does feel sometime hearing some  native on TV like the English they speak is further away from what it's "supposed to" sound like than mine.

[garbon]

I think kids do now - one of Gove's reforms - but my generation didn't learn grammar beyond nouns are naming words, verbs are doing words etc. The focus was on ability to communicate which you learn by doing not "rote memorisation" of theory and rules. I think from about the 70s or 80s it was seen as old-fashioned and redundant.

It's one of the challenges with learning another language is you need to learn the concept first like discovering there are multiple past tenses

My experience was similar. We learned very little grammar except when we went to study foreign language.

[Sheilbh]

Yes, unfortunately.

It genuinely annoys me - and I know there's lots of resistance to teaching grammar now because it's still seen as old-fashioned and Tory etc.

But it makes learning another language so much more difficult having no concept of grammar beyond verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs - but also I'm just useless when a friend who isn't a native English speaker asks if something is correct or what the rule is. I can basically say what is or isn't correct but I've no idea why.

Like, I am quite unhappy with my own accent and I expect it is more unpleasant to listen to than most if not all the British dialects (I'd definitely listen to any of the natives ones than having to listen to the average Hungarian speaking English), but it does feel sometime hearing some  native on TV like the English they speak is further away from what it's "supposed to" sound like than mine.

This is something other non-native English speakers have complained about to me is that British people don't correct them. Generally I think if what they said was understood, British people won't point out mistakes or correct them or feign not understanding. These are people who speak English really well but I think they found it quite difficult to perfect in the UK.

I wonder if part of that is because of the range of accents and dialects - so there's a higher level of tolerance because it's often more difficult to understand, say, a thick Glaswegian or Bristolian accent than a non-native speaker?

For somebody like me, coming from a country which very purposefully spent a 100 years to eliminate local dialects and uniform grammar (originally an effort to stop it from turning into a mongrel German language due to Austrian influence), the seemingly total chaos of accents within one country is just bewildering.

Also I think part of it is the lack of an "English Academy" to set out rules and instead the approach is a bit more of the OED that you observe and update your rules based on how people speak.

My understanding is that standardisation of language and accent and dialect here has primarily been driven by mass media - print, radio, TV - rather than as a political project. RP is basically invented in parallel with the creation of the BBC - and it reflects the accent and pronunciation of a specific class. But it is interesting to read about Victorian figures who had regional-ish accents - so Alfred Lord Tennyson famously had a Lincolnshire burr, Gladstone in recordings has a bit of Lancashire in his accent. We hae this vision of all posh people pre-1900 speaking RP, but it was actually a bit more regional I think.

I wonder if the dominance of RP will be a strange 20th century, top-down mass media blip - but what'll happen instead is standardisation from below - I imagine with lots of American influence, growth of Estuary English and maybe bits of Multicultural London English spreading too?