the stupidest thing

[Dauphin]

Kuci, depends on your definition, prescriptive rules or 'it is what it is'.

I'm inclined to say that bad grammar does exist, even if its not incomprehensible, just as bad spelling exists even if lots of people make the same mispelling mistake consistently.

Prescriptive rules have to exist to aid and improve understanding between people. That FOX news article for example was incomprehensible even though it was supposed to be easier by being more phonetic.

[Kuciwalker]

I interpreted his statement to mean "the spoken English language isn't necessarily grammatical," not "some speakers don't speak grammatically."

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Aabraxan
No question that English has a relatively high percentage of latin-based vocab, and that said percentage may cause some confusion. But it's technically classified as a Germanic language. IIUC, its classification is based on its "ancestry," for lack of a better term. English, Dutch and German all stem from the same root language - a language that is not Latin. By contrast, French, Spanish and Italian are all based in Latin.

Of course, I was just pointing out a possible source of confusion

That seems odd to me. If it were true, then wouldn't English be classified as a Romance language, rather than Germanic?

The grammar and commonly used words, like 'the' are Germanic in origin. English is most similar to Friesian, and English is more similar to German grammar than say, Spanish.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
I interpreted his statement to mean "the spoken English language isn't necessarily grammatical," not "some speakers don't speak grammatically."

I read it as "we don't all speak [correct] grammar [all the time]".

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Lord Avalon

That seems odd to me. If it were true, then wouldn't English be classified as a Romance language, rather than Germanic?

Just because the vocabulary may be similar doesn't necessarily mean that the languages are related--indeed, one must consider such sprachbunds such as the one in East Asia.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are unrelated languages, and yet the vocabulary shared (tempered by local differences) is staggeringly high.

Heck, Romanian (as I understand it) has an enormous amount of loanwords from the Slavic languages surrounding it, and yet at its base, it's a Romance language.

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
I interpreted his statement to mean "the spoken English language isn't necessarily grammatical," not "some speakers don't speak grammatically."

Irony

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Q Cubed


Just because the vocabulary may be similar doesn't necessarily mean that the languages are related--indeed, one must consider such sprachbunds such as the one in East Asia.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are unrelated languages, and yet the vocabulary shared (tempered by local differences) is staggeringly high.

Heck, Romanian (as I understand it) has an enormous amount of loanwords from the Slavic languages surrounding it, and yet at its base, it's a Romance language.

In the English case French invasion had a big hand in the matter.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
I'm all for informal conversational style and use it all the time. Not at the same time as being a grammar nazi, though.

The problem is, there is nothing inherently "illegal" about my sentences grammatically. The things you pointed out are stylistic issues, not grammar ones.

[Dauphin]

The first sentence was a sentence fragment, which is often frowned upon as being bad grammar.

[Asher]

Which is actually a stylistic choice, not bad grammar.

Bad grammar is when you dont rules apply correct.

Bad grammar is not structuring coherent sentences in ways that are stylistically frowned upon in formal documents.

[MRT144]

stop trying to houdini your way out of this asher

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Asher
Which is actually a stylistic choice, not bad grammar.

Only if it's employed correctly. If you misapply it, which I think can be said of your particular sentence as it was not correctly phrased in response to the OP, then it's simply bad grammar.

Unless deliberately using bad grammar was your stylistic choice.

[Asher]

Perhaps I'm spoiled by the rigid way we view grammar in computer science...

Like English, there is bad grammar (syntactical errors) in computer programming, but these are not the same as bad style. In English it gets confused because a lot of people adopt formal style rules and try to pass them off as grammatical rules in English. The fact that people use them all the time in casual usage with no detriment shows how it's not an actual grammar issue with the English language.

Sentence fragments are akin to mixing up issues of past, present, and future tenses within a document.

[Dauphin]

Grammar bad no matter provided understood yes.

[Asher]

No. There are grammatical rules that must be applied, but sentence fragments are not one of them. You could even model most of English with a formal grammar and sentence fragments would be just fine.

Are there any linguists here that can provide more detail? I've only taken the one linguistics course and a bunch of high-level computer science courses regarding grammar so my explanations will keep leaning towards computer examples, which confuses a lot of people...