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    Conventions of (American) English
    Conventions of (American) English
    Conventions of (American) English
    Ebook176 pages1 hour

    Conventions of (American) English

    By Douglas Patterson

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    The cover of this book features a picture of Noah Webster, the man most responsible for creating standard American English. He lived during the American Revolution and was an avid supporter of American political and cultural independence. Webster was a successful teacher and writer. His spelling book was once a mainstay of language instruction; but his work as a lexicographer gained him lasting fame. Webster’s Dictionaries made him the de facto Czar American English.
    Webster’s influence was so great that teachers viewed his language standards as a sacred trust. For nearly two hundred years our schools approached language instruction prescriptively. Unlike children today, those who attended school prior to the l960s learned that misspelling a word was sin. Today young people take a more cavalier attitude toward spelling standards.
    During the revolutionary decade of the l960s linguistic scientists noted that English (and French and German and Spanish) speakers in various regions of the world actually speak very differently. Instead of buying into the Platonic notion that the English language exists in a perfect state somewhere in an ideal universe, they redefined language as an arbitrary system of meaningful sounds invented by those who speak and write it. The various languages grew out of the experiences of the people in particular cultures.
    As result of this epiphany Webster was to an extent toppled from his throne. Actually, the most effective revolt was staged from within - by those lexicographers who published a new edition of Webster’s dictionary. Webster’s Third International shifted from telling people how they ought to talk and write to describing how Americans actually do talk and write. English teachers diverted their efforts from a single minded preoccupation with linguistics to a more sensible goal of teaching the four language skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing.
    While I applaud the current emphasis, I wonder whether modern day English teachers did not go too far. Emphasizing the four language skils does not preclude spending time studying the language itself. In fact, Noah’s language standards have over more than two centuries served our American community well.
    The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel tells us that it is easier for people to live in harmony when they can communicate with each other. Wars are fought most often between groups who speak different tongues. Even people who speak varied dialects of the same language come into conflict more often than those who “talk right.” In Deutschland as late as the l950s, for example, Germans from the various regions of the country still spoke such distinct and varied dialects that a person from Bavaria could not always understand what a speaker from Schleswig Holstein was telling him. Germany solved this communication problem in large part by teaching a single dialect (Hoch Deutsch - Luther’s dialect) in the schools.
    This is, of course, what Webster did for the USA during the country’s formative years. His books and dictionaries helped Americans to coalesce around a single language standard long before radio and television began working their magic. Webster’s efforts helped to form our vast country’s population made up of immigrants and language groups around the world into a linguistic unit.
    My purpose in writing this book was to round out a series of language arts e-textbooks which I call Conventions of Language, Thinking and Writing. In this book I review the standards of American English laid down in large part by Noah Webster.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDouglas Patterson
    Release dateJan 27, 2013
    ISBN9781301425969
    Conventions of (American) English
    Author

    Douglas Patterson

    With the exception of a three year stint in the U.S.Army, I have spent my life in and around the public schools. My parents were both teachers, and I have taught language arts courses at the high school level for a total of 37 years. I was born during the great depressions and grew up in Southern Idaho (both literally and figuratively) just north of Poverty Flat. I lived in the very small town of Bellevue, Idaho, that had a population of some 500 people and an equal number of dogs. In this rural environment, I enjoyed a Tom Sawyer like life, not on the Mississippi but rather on the Woodriver where my friends and I fished an swam and roamed the riverbottom and the surrounding hills from morning til night. My parents never locked the doors to our house, and we never worried much about it being burglarized. (For you skiers,Sun Valley is seventeen miles north of this town.) After graduating from Hailey(now Woodriver) High School,I enrolled at the University of Oregon at a time when the school had a student body of 5,000 students and the football team rarely won a game. After graduation, I spent a marvelous tour of duty with the U.S. Army which took me to Europe. I was stationed in Germany for a couple of glorious years and became a dedicated Europhile. After I was discharged, I started my teaching career in the small town of New Plymouth, Idaho, near the Oregon border. After three years, I moved to Yakima, Washington, where I worked as an English and German teacher for the next 34 years. After retiring,I quickly grew bored and began writing books primarily for my own amusement. Four of the books that I am publishing with Smashbooks are language arts textbooks focusing on linguistics, critical thinking, and literal and literary composition. The other two deal with self-improvment and very basic economics. Because breaking into the traditional publishing business has always been such a long shot,I was very pleased to see ebook publishing develop into a platform for people like me who are looking for an inexpensive way to offer their materials to the public. Since they say that confession is good for the sould, I must admit that my picture was taken by a yearbook photographer at least twenty-five years ago. I have no defense except to say, "Vanity thy name is not woman alone!"

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      Book preview

      Conventions of (American) English - Douglas Patterson

      Convention of Standard (American) English

      By Douglas D. Patterson

      Copyright 2011 by Douglas D. Patterson

      Smashwords Edition

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Content

      (automatic)

      Introduction

      Section l – Words

      Lesson 1 - Words, Concepts, and their Referents

      Lesson 2 - Concrete and Abstract Words

      Lesson 3 - Levels of Formality

      Lesson 4 - Words and Logic

      Lesson 5 - Magnitude

      Lesson 6 - The Parts of Speech

      Section 2 - Grammar (Syntax)

      Lesson 7 - Nouns and Their Modifiers

      Lesson 8 - Verbs and Their Modifiers

      Lesson 9 - Prepositional Phrases

      Lesson 10 - Simple Sentences

      Lesson 11 - Verbal Phrases

      Lesson 12 - Dependent Clauses

      Lesson 13 - Compound Structures

      Section 3 – Usage

      Lesson 14 – Nouns

      Lesson 15 – Pronouns

      Lesson 16 – Verbs

      Lesson 17 – Modifiers

      Lesson 18 - Prepositions, Conjunctions & Relatives

      Section 4 - Spelling, Capitalization, and Punctuation

      Lesson 19 – Spelling

      Lesson 20 – Capitalization

      Lesson 21 – Punctuation

      Lesson 22 - Abbreviation

      Introduction

      John 1:1 - In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

      What exactly this quotation means is far from clear, but it does demonstrate the central place that language holds in our lives. The assertion that The Word was God may be more a poet’s flight of fancy than a serious ontological assertion; but those who believe in a personal God cannot help but think of Him in linguistic terms. He is omnipotent and omnipresent – but above all He is omniscient. For the idealist, concepts and the words that express them are God’s creations; and as a consequence, our job is simply to learn the words of God – along with their spellings. We also must learn how they fit together to form phrases and clauses and sentences, how to use the right word forms in the right positions and how to punctuate these structures as well.

      Linguistic absolutism had a strong hold on education systems around the world until the mid-twentieth century. Noah Webster, whose picture appears on the cover of this book, strove with considerable success to standardize American English: word meanings and spellings, syntax, usage, and mechanics. His religious fervor, however, has been equaled and perhaps even surpassed by language purists in France and Germany. Francophiles have fought a an unrelenting battle against the Anglicization of their mother tongue; the Rechtschreibung activists in Germany nearly go into cardiac arrest whenever someone misspells or mispronounces a German word.

      During the 20th century, language relativists - who sometimes call themselves linguistic scientists - began pointing out the obvious reality that, despite all teachers’ efforts, people continue to speak and to write English (and French and German) in a great variety of ways. Even under pressure to conform exerted by electronic media, regional dialects in all three languages continue to flourish.

      Linguists questioned the basic Platonic view that language was handed down from on high. They suggest instead that languages are inventions of the people who use them - they are arbitrary systems of meaningful sounds. Words mean whatever a language groups defines them to mean. Orthography and syntax and usage and mechanics are not absolutes but rather conventions on which the members of a culture have agreed. A word such as picnic, for example, denotes what we understand it to mean only because that is the meaning that we have attached to that group of sounds and symbols.

      No less a literary giant than Marcel Proust took a decidedly relativistic approach when his narrator in Remembrance (Recollections) of Things Past chastises himself for having mocked the French spoken by his faithful servant:

      And this reproach was particularly stupid, for those French words which we are so proud of pronouncing accurately are themselves only blunders made by Gaulish lips which mispronounced Latin or Saxon, our language being merely a defective pronunciation of several others. The genius of language is its living state, the future and past of French - that is what ought to have interested me in Francoise’s mistakes.

      His recognition that language is never fixed and that a language exists by convention and not by decree from on high must have caused many a Francophile considerable linguistic and Chauvinistic stress – if not heartburn.

      Which philosophical orientation is correct? A basic question such as that will never be answered to everyone’s satisfaction; but one point is clear. There is a need for a reasonable level of standardization in order for the members of a society to understand each other and to conduct their business efficiently. English is a Germanic tongue; but the Anglo-Saxons who migrated to England during the 7th century A.D. have drifted so far apart linguistically from their cousins in Germany that they have to study each other’s languages in order to communicate.

      The purpose of this book is not to enforce an absolute and inflexible linguistic standard, but rather to encourage students to be aware that a cultural standard does exist and that this standard is observed and enforced by influential people in our communities. Those who conform to the generally accepted standard(s) tend to prosper. Those who deviate widely from accepted norms may do less well

      Back to the Table of Contents

      (automatic)

      Section 1 - Words

      Words are the basic building blocks of language, and as a result we feel that we are quite familiar with them. The fact is, however, that words can be the source of misunderstanding and controversy; and one should never take them for granted. In the following lessons, you will take a close look at these fundamental tools of communication.

      Lesson 1 - Words, Concepts, and Their Referents

      One of our greatest problems in communication arises from our tendency to treat words as things when they are in reality twice removed from the things to which they refer. Words are only symbols which represent concepts which in turn refer to things, actions, qualities, and relationships.

      The relationship between words and the concepts to which they refer is arbitrary. Words are merely sound combinations to which a language group has assigned meanings. In English, for example, the word house refers to a structure with four walls and a roof in which humans reside; but our language group could just as well have agreed to call this structure a tree. If that were the word that we had attached this concept, people would understand the concept house when asked, "In which tree do you live?"

      A word may stand for more than one concept. The verb drive, for example, means something very different when one drives a golf ball or drives a car or drives a herd of cattle. Germans use three different words to describe these actions: schlagen, fahren, and treiben. When an English speaking person mixes these ideas, a German finds his statements quite amusing.

      The word drive can also refer to an attempt to collect money or food or blood, and a person is said to be driven when he is ambitious.

      Lynn Truss’ engaging little book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, which is focused on the importance of correct - or at least sensible - use of punctuation marks, illustrates the ambiguity of words in her cleverly written title. Leave out the commas, and the words Shoots and Leaves change from verbs to nouns and become direct objects of the verb Eats. Changing the punctuation marks alters the meaning of this string of words in a remarkable way.

      In addition to having more than one denotation, words often suggest overtones of meaning called connotations. When one hears or reads a word, his reactions are not limited to the dictionary definition of the word.

      For example, the words woman and lady and dame all denote human female, but they are not words which may be used interchangeably. Woman is a relatively neutral word; but in American English lady has positive and dame negative connotations. In Britain, of course, lady and

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