marveen silverhand ([info]marveen) wrote,
@ 2005-05-11 19:44:00
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Current mood: amused

With due apologies to kelticviking....
....I ran across what's billed as the ultimate blonde joke on one of my friends' journals.

Come to think on it, that excludes him, because I was taught that "blonde" is the feminine and "blond" the masculine form.


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[info]amokk
2005-05-12 05:10 am UTC (link)
Thank you. People need to understand that, although we rarely use it, English does have some masculine/feminine word forms.

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[info]marveen
2005-05-12 10:56 pm UTC (link)
See the ongoing discussion below for more on that topic.

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[info]slev
2005-05-12 06:16 am UTC (link)
Blond is no longer in common use, as it seems to have been subsumed by blonde.

The problem with blond/e arises when you try to write something like, 'both emma and her brother have blond(e) hair'.

As any laguage is rendered by common usage, blond is dead.

And I think tat's more aong the lines of the old 'how to keep an idiot ammused for hours' joke than a real blonde joke...

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[info]kadath
2005-05-12 12:34 pm UTC (link)
But in the case of Emma and her brother, "blond" modifies "hair," and thus takes the masculine. The blond/blonde distinction is made when the word is used as a noun.

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[info]marveen
2005-05-12 10:51 pm UTC (link)
Playing devil's advocate just to keep the debate going, what if the sentence had been phrased "Emma and her brother are both blond(e)s"?

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[info]kadath
2005-05-13 12:34 am UTC (link)
I would follow the Romance rule of using the masculine for mixed groups. (Do I think the masculine should be the generative? No. Is that the way it is? Yes.)

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[info]maartje
2005-07-17 07:02 pm UTC (link)
Or, as my French teacher explained this injustice: "Suppose you have a house full of big gorgeous women and one tiny little guy, we still use the masculine."

(It sounded better when he said it.)

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[info]n_true
2005-05-12 08:40 pm UTC (link)
It's Berk! Berk!!! I love your user icon! Aaaaaaah!
I miss Boney & Trudy.

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[info]marveen
2005-05-12 10:54 pm UTC (link)
As any laguage is rendered by common usage

Did I mention that I'm a prescriptivist?

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[info]slev
2005-05-13 05:39 pm UTC (link)
Ohhh, new word!
Please explain!

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[info]marveen
2005-05-13 09:52 pm UTC (link)
You can get a good discussion of the phenomenon from [info]conuly, who introduced me to the terms. Basically, you're a descriptivist--one who believes that the proper role of teachers, scholars and authors is to reflect the current usage of language. By descriptivist terms, there are no "wrong" constructions, just rare variants--thus "I ain't got no more money" is a dialectical formation and equally correct with "I'm out of money".

I'm a prescriptivist, which means that I believe that there are right and wrong ways to use English, and just because you can make yourself understood doesn't mean you're doing it right. (Language is the basis of communication, and if everyone uses different rules, then communication breaks down.)

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[info]ubykhlives
2005-05-14 10:41 am UTC (link)
A friend of mine was once informed by an American from the Deep South: "Woman, you ain't got no good English!", and another linguist friend was laughed at by a Lancashire child who confided in him: "Tha talks funny!"

I'm half-and-half. I think that dialectic usage like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, because there are still regular rules at play; and since every English speaker uses some forms that are in some way different from literary English, where does one draw the line, particularly since even the literary dialect changes on occasion? Nevertheless, there are some usages that no English speaker would find grammatical, regardless of dialect: things like "Me talk English real goodly", which a foreigner may produce, but which no sane English speaker would accept.

I suppose the difference is between being prescriptivist about the written or literary form and being prescriptivist about the spoken form. I'm a writing-prescriptivist, but not a speaking-prescriptivist, which I think is a dangerous thing. Like many theoretically binary oppositions, there is really a continuum rather than mutual exclusion.

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[info]prolificdiarist
2005-05-14 09:09 pm UTC (link)
[info]marveen and [info]ubykhlives rock. Conversations about grammar &co make me happy. I'm so glad you exist. :)

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[info]ubykhlives
2005-05-15 03:51 am UTC (link)
Glad to be of service. :D

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[info]marveen
2005-05-16 02:32 am UTC (link)
Thanks. Always nice to be appreciated. *grins*

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[info]slev
2005-06-05 06:55 pm UTC (link)
Actualy, I'm somewhere in between.

I accect planguage evolving to cover new items not already covered, like the diffece between the UK 'pavement' and the US 'sidewalk'. Both are words that had to be created after the europeans went over the pond, and thus the words where created in exclusion.

However, I'm not so much for revising existing language and changing it's meaning when there is existing language. For example, the US lead use of 'issues' to mean problems and/or matters.

Ultimately, spoken language is a tool, and this is why I have those oppinions. The tool allows us to communicate ideas. Re-defining an idea already present in a language is pure folley.

There are excetions where this ties into eveolution of the language, for example, the term 'wireless'. My grandparents would have ment a radio by this term. By the current time though, this language use is dead, a few over 70's still use the term, but otherwise it is outmoded. Wireless is now taken to refer to Wi-Fi LAN systems. As those who use each term are generaly exclusive from each other, there is unlikeley to be a problem here.


With spellings and such, I believe we need to start again. Any given language has ways of pronounciong things, so, like when we where kids, we can spell out the sound of a word.

The problem wioth English spellings, is that when they where codified, they simply took a set of spellings already present, and declaired them correct.

As a result, we have various ways of spelling the same sounds, which is a broken tool to my mind, as writing is the recording of sounds.

Now, admittedly, some words are pronounced differently in different areas. Example, my housemate is from a posh southen polace so says 'Barth', I'm a common nothernber brought up saying 'Baff', and my other housemate is a scotsman who says 'Bath'. The latter is the most technicaly correct, but the long 'a' sound is common in the south.

This aside, spelling should only change for a sound where a meaning is slightly different n the same sound (two, to, too).

We need to decide how to record each phonetic, apply it across the language, and define spellings that way.

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[info]amokk
2005-05-13 12:43 am UTC (link)
It's not dead if you search for porn. Blond gets male results, blonde gets female.

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*sings*
[info]marveen
2005-05-16 02:32 am UTC (link)
~Aupres de ma blond, qu'el c'est bon, c'est bon, c'est bon...
Aupres de ma blond, qu'el c'est bon dormi!~

(Do pardon the spelling, it's been SEVENTEEN YEARS since we had that song in French class....)

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