User talk:Jerzy/Grammatical Error

(This approach to Wiki-talk (using two templates) is an experiment; i've so far imposed upon a number of colleagues with it, who have responded thru it (even without this 'graph) well enough that i can describe it as "working" (though an otherwise angry one nevertheless described it as "ridiculous"). My hope is that it will slow the growth of my talk page, make my archiving simpler and more timely, and thus make leaving talk for me less burdensome (especially for slow-pipe colleagues) than it has been for too many months. I cordially invite discussion of it (or one-shot comments, from those who prefer).)

If you add to this discussion, most other participant(s) won't be nearly as quickly aware of that as they would, if you had also edited their respective talk page(s). (A link to the corresponding section of each is at their corresponding "*" below, and your updating the edit count and editing-time-stamp range there also gives that participant further information. But no one other than i has done so yet.) For my own notification, i've started a list that i can check via "Related changes" more often than i am willing to check my Watchlist or "My contributions", tho of course that is still less often than "You have new messages."

• 4 msgs, 11:35, 29 July thru 06:16, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
  1. 11:35, 29 July 2005 O
  2. 16:33, 29 July 2005 J
  3. 19:32, 30 July 2005 O
  4. 06:16, 1 August 2005 J
• 2 participants: Jerzy·t·c·*; Oregon Fangleboonta·t·c·*.
• general topic(s):

There's a grammatical error in a paragraph on your userpage. In the paragraph entitled "note to Non-Native Speakers of English" there is an apostrophe missing in the sentence "Not to mention its being hard for us to grasp how difficult the task is." Also, is there any way you could change the writing to reflect the fact that not all english speakers are Americans and not as typically monolingual? Oregon Fangleboonta 11:35, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
_ _ Hi, OF, & welcome to WP.
_ _ You think it's is ungram'l there; it's not, see
[This unfinished sentence would have been completed with a lk that appears in my next posting, but the posting will not be pursued further, having been overtaken by another posting before i could finish it. --Jerzy·t 06:16, 2005 August 1 (UTC)]]
_ _ If y're concerned that

• someone else is bloody-minded enuf to read the assertion you attribute to me into my opinion that the number of quirks in modern mainstream English is emblematic of the modern American character

or that

• the typical wretched capability most commonly described as "high-school Spanish" is not a reasonable approximation to monolinguality

you should set up yr own xxx soap box at User:Oregon Fangleboonta.
--Jerzy·t 16:33, 2005 July 29 (UTC)

• It's is short for "It is". "Its" is the genitive form of it. I realise it is easy to confuse the two. Please do not presume I am some sort of American delinquent. At "high-school" I studied French and German and I have continued with German ever since. I also speak the language of my father and it appears I can speak English better than you can. There are mistakes on your user page - shame on you if you don't correct them. Perhaps they should teach proper English in American high schools.

Oregon Fangleboonta 19:32, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

_ _ I can't tell whether you read my reply-in-progress before your last posting (you having, not unreasonably, posted on my talk page rather than below my reply-in-progress), and since you seem so dedicatedly rude about this bit of ignorance of yours, i

• will say no more about your confusing and inconsistent notation for indicating whether you are using or making reference to a given word;
• note that while what you meant by your next sentence is as obviously true as your first, the sentence is false (except, perhaps, when made within the field of linguistics rather than ours, English grammar), since the cases of English are nominative, objective, and possessive: no genativ, nor for that matter dativ or accusativ;
• take issue with your lack of nuance: it's not clear that confusion as such is significant in the writing of "its" or "it's" where the other is grammatical, since nearly all ungrammatical uses are in casual contexts where maintaining the distinction is a pedantic misuse of effort, and where intentional inattention to the distinction is thus sensible (a case of benign neglect);
• am unsure your statement about "easy to confuse" would sound any less patronizing than it actually does, if you were instead as well informed as you imagine.
  

_ _ And i think, in the context of this whole discussion, that it's also important ensure crystalline clarity on this for you, with minimum effort by you: a native speaker in a rush might well make the mistake you did, bcz

• the apostrophe is not pronounced,
• the construction in question is not one common enough to merit the instructional effort it would take to get non-grammatophiles to parse it completely, and
• the contraction is rarely used in contexts where, despite a contrived note of informality, precision might be worthwhile (such as a user page, an ad, or a formal verbatim transcription of real or imagined speech).

But a careful native speaker, having made the mistake, would feel a nagging doubt about the apostrophe, and would be likely to try two tests:

1. Actually expand the supposed contraction in its context (rather than just assuming it is one): "Not to mention it is being hard..."
2. Change person in the inflection of the pronoun (and in this case change the adjective to one more suitable to the grammatical person): "Not to mention my being sleepy...".

No native speaker is comfortable with the phrase "it is being" in that context, and no native speaker would have any objection to "my being sleepy" (nor would consider "i'm being sleepy" in its place). No doubt what you fail to grasp is that "being" functions as a noun (i think it's called a "gerund", which you could look up in WP), not as what could logically be called the "present progressive" tense of a verb, nor as an adjective. (At the risk of proceeding beyond my real knowledge, i also speculate there are complications due to the unusual role of "it" in this particular sentence: i am unclear whether the best analysis is that "it" paradoxicallly has the later "to grasp" as its antecedant, or that "it" has an antecedant-free role similar to those of "it" and "there" in "It's raining", "It's time now", "There's no one here", and "There aren't any left.")
_ _ If you need further information on this, check what i originally intended to simply refer you to, User talk:Jerzy/Archive 00#Grammar & Usage Quibbles. Beyond that, we're done and you're on your own, unless there's anything you'd like to offer to remedy the situation between us -- because, coming back to the worst of it, shame on you, you arrogant little putz, for trying to shame anyone for not meeting the standards you as an outsider have for embodying their culture. AFAIK cultural insensitivity ranks high on the list of characteristics noted as common among Americans, and that could easily be the aspect of American culture you've best mastered.
--Jerzy·t 04:27, 2005 August 1 (UTC)