Another proper England rant...

[MSTRS:Me]

Well, yarss, quate rate old chup. Pip pip, toodle-oo

Excellent visual use of a verbal accent, O Lupine One.
My earlier post of AWAENBILEYERHEID is in the same vein. Are there no takers for it's transalation?? Literal and intent??

[Wolf]

Excellent visual use of a verbal accent, O Lupine One.
My earlier post of AWAENBILEYERHEID is in the same vein. Are there no takers for it's transalation?? Literal and intent??

I was going to respond and tell ye tae piss off an' boil yer own head at the time but I got sidetracked in my waffling...

[MSTRS:Me]

...well done....reward in the mail. How are th'weeuns??

[Wolf]

...well done....reward in the mail. How are th'weeuns??

The 2-year-old's activity is a bit curtailed due to having his leg in a cast (spiral fracture of the tibia after attempting to balance on a ball) but the 3-year-old is overcompensating for it and takes five times the effort to keep track of - want to put his leg in a cast just for the peace and quiet. The expected arrival is down low and we're suspecting the midwife might be right in thinking this one might arrive early.

[MSTRS:Me]

Ahem.... A moment's silence for the wolf pack....
Sounds like fun in your house-glad I'm here!

[Wolf]

If English can co-opt a word and adapt it to it's own rules, then why also can't it bring some of the word's original rules with it to play with?

From what I understand, some of the weird rules of the language are because foreign rules were adopted and applied to the existing language.

I was told the "Thou shalt not split the infinitive" rule is a hanger-on from languages in which you cannot split the infinitive because it is one word ("finir", "aller", "gehen", "essen" etc) rather than two ("to finish", "to go", "to eat").

Not sure how accurate that is, though.

As with most rules, though, the breaking of them can be used to create dramatic effects. The opening of Star Trek would be nowhere near as stirring if they were "to go boldly where no [man|one] has gone before".

It is odd that our words are genderless when the primary languages that make up English all have gender - Celtic languages must have as modern versions still do, German does so it's pretty safe to assume Saxon did, the Norman French did as does modern French now.

Question for those who have studied the language of the Bastard Imperialist Oppressors: did/does Latin have gender for nouns?

[Hitcher]

Split infinitives are not, I believe, grammatical errors. Those with a contrary view are, I believe, truly deserving of the title "Pedant".

To unsplit some infinitives (famously "to boldly go where no one has gone before") significantly changes their meaning.

Most people who get twitchy about this are suck-up teachers pets who should have been caned harder in third form English.

Up with this I shall not put!

[MSTRS:Me]

Most people who get twitchy about this are suck-up teachers pets who should have been caned harder in third form English.

Alas, 90%+ (?) on this forum were not subject to that most feared punishment. I blame the PC Brigade for this, and all the trouble it has wrought. That, and the odd system that the 80's were lumbered with....the one where the message was the important bit, not the spelling etc. Might be behind us now, but, oh the pleasure we are deriving from it's aftereffects.

[MisterD]

Question for those who have studied the language of the Bastard Imperialist Oppressors: did/does Latin have gender for nouns?

Didn't study it, but my Dad was forced to. "Latin is a language, as dead as dead can be..etc".

I believe the answer to your question is in the affirmative.

[Hitcher]

I don't know whether caning was "feared" at my school. That largely depended on the striking power of the teacher concerned. The whole business was a bit of a game really, involving male teachers and students, some of whom had elevated the whole palaver beyond an art form with generally understood rules, rituals and an associated code of conduct that had been honed finely over past decades.

Knowing the striking power of male teachers was important, and elaborate and sophisticated measures were needed to determine this. If it turned out that a new teacher was "weak as piss", then they would probably have to cane one or two classes of boys (at about 16 to a class, as my school was co-ed) for their troubles on a reasonably regular basis -- usually until they decided to go and teach somewhere else. A high strike power teacher, on the other hand, probably only needed to cane one lad once every four years and rely on an enduring legend.

Our class had an iron-arsed lad who was our bell-wether for caning sorties. We knew, from finely calibrated relativism, that if young Brent was impressed by a teacher's technique, than that teacher was one to be respected.

I find it interesting that it was largely women who sought the banning of capital punishment -- they who never dispensed or received it. And I believe they did this because they were jealous of this most noble of male rituals.

[yungatart]

As a girl who went to a single sex school, my only association with caning was to listen to my brothers' descriptions around the tea table-(whereupon Dad would promptly mete out punishment of his own on the already tender-bottomed offender!), however I have worked with a teacher who had a reputation second to none in the caning stakes. He would line his terrified new third formers up and demonstrate the power of the mighty cane on a soft upholstered chair that he had previously liberally dosed with chalk dust! He could, on a bad year, get to the last term before having to use the cane on an errant young man!
Oh yes, young folks, in our day, school was tough! (But we did learn spelling and grammar and suchlike!)

[Ixion]

Question for those who have studied the language of the Bastard Imperialist Oppressors: did/does Latin have gender for nouns?

It did. it does. Thankfully, though, it includes a neutral gender.

[Wolf]

Didn't study it, but my Dad was forced to. "Latin is a language, as dead as dead can be..etc".

I believe the answer to your question is in the affirmative.

Thought it might have (knowing an assortment of unrelated quotes in the language is no help in determining the rules of the language, I fear) as at least French and Italian have gender and 'twould be odd indeed if the parent language had not.

So where the far kinell did the genderless nature of English come from? Brythonic ("P-Celtic") languages, Latin, Saxon, French - all with gender (which survives to this day in other related languages). Did all the English speakers at some stage decide "Fuck it, lets drop this fucking about with gender and just have one set of pronouns"? Or was it that they got so confused as to whether they had two genders or three, and whether they were "le" and "la" or "der", "die" and "das", that they just gave up in disgust, modified "un" to "a" (pronounced similarly)and "der" to "the" and let that be the end of it?

[jazbug5]

Is it at all possible that there were varying gender attributions between the different languages, and it was just easier to neuter them? Tell you what, I'll ask my Ma: she knows everything, and besides, she has this wierd fetish for Old English.

[Ixion]

Old English had genders. We lost them sometime around when Middle English became early modern English - maybe C14