At first glance, I thought this was some new TC39 JavaScript syntax proposal.
This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?"
They seem to be missing the incipient disappearance of the -en form of verbs, with people saying things like "I should have went" instead of "I should have gone".
It isn't clear why they feature the constructions they do. They are titled "Yale Grammatical Diversity Project", but the constructions are not necessarily examples of grammatical diversity:
> Have yet to is a construction that appears in most, if not all, varieties of English.
> this construction appears to be distributed across speakers in all regions and demographic groups.
> Repetition clefts are quite widespread in English and can be observed as early as the mid-17th century
> They are robustly attested in contemporary North American English and are also used in the UK. Related constructions have been observed in Australian English (McConvell 2004) and in a corpus of New Zealand English speech as well
> the usage of repetition clefts does not apparently correlate with any sociodemographic features.
‘Go and put your shoes on’ is correct British English. We consider ‘Go put your shoes on’ as incorrect grammar. So ‘try and put your shoes on’ would also be natural. I’m trying to think what other verbs this would work with because ‘find and put your shoes on’ doesn’t sound right in British English but neither does ‘find put your shoes on’ in US English perhaps someone who understands grammar better can explain why some verbs work with this construction and some don’t.
Possibly-interesting comparison: in Japanese, the way to talk about trying to do some verb-phrase X, is "Xて見る" — which is usually literally translated as "we'll try [X]ing", but which breaks down into "[verb-phrase X in present tense] [the verb "to see" in whatever tense you mean.]"
Which means that the construction can be most intuitively framed (at least by an English speaker) as either "we'll see [what happens when] we [X]"... or, more relevantly, "we'll try [X] and see [what happens/how it goes]." Or, for short: "we'll try and [X]."
It's even better. The "X-te" (Xて) is technically not X in present tense, it is specifically X in the te-form (て is read "te").
The te-form has a bunch of different uses, but in the case of "verb-te verb", if the second verb is not one of a list of special verbs (of which miru (見る, to see) is one), X-te Y normally means "X and Y". For example, yorugohan o tsukutte taberu (夜ご飯を作って食べる) means "(to/I/we/you/...) make dinner and eat it": yorugohan is dinner, the "o" is a particle marking the direct object, tsukuru means to make (becomes tsukutte in the te-form) and taberu means to eat. (The first word in English is ambiguous because grammatical subjects are usually optional in Japanese, plus its verbs are not inflected for person or number.)
For a number of verbs, however, if they are in the second position, the phrase gets a special meaning. If it's miru, e.g. tsukutte miru, it means "to try to make" — or perhaps more aptly, "to try and make". If it's iku (行く, to go), it means "to go X-ing": tabete iku (where taberu (to eat) -> tabete in the te-form) is "to go to eat [something]", or perhaps: "to go and eat [something]".
Not all such special verbs correspond to English pseudocoordination though; a common one is shimau (the dictionary says "to finish / to stop", but it's uncommon in bare form), where e.g. tabete shimau means "to finish eating" or "to end up eating" / "to eat accidentally" depending on context.
The analogy between English and Japanese here is likely coincidental, but it's amusing nevertheless.
This is a nice explanation; I wish that duolingo hadn't removed their user comment/explanation section, which used to contain similar (though not always correct, which is probably part of why they removed them.)
Pro tip: Duolingo is a game and basically a dead end for properly learning a language. If you want to really learn, you need to build intuition, and that only comes from huge amounts of level-appropriate input. Find yourself some good native language podcasts that are targeted at language learners and native reading material. Search for "Refold" for a better strategy (no affiliation, it's just awesome), and make sure that whatever you do, you enjoy it. Language learning is a marathon, the fun is in the journey, not just the destination.
I always say, that if you want to learn a language, then surround yourself with it.
I learned all languages I know this way. When it comes to Polish, I mainly saw people writing in that language without knowing much. Translator came to the rescue. I picked up common words and phrases that way, and it helped with grammar, too, but it was not a fast process as it is a difficult language. I do not speak it well, although I speak it understandably enough, because I did not listen nor speak to people in the language much, as opposed to English, and this includes movies, TV series, etc.
Spanish was easy, all it took was a translator and long conversations with 2 people and some music. :D Pronunciation is not an issue, my native language helped.
French would have been a bit more difficult to learn, as I have tried, then lost interest and reasons to do so.
I am trying to learn Arabic, but for me, that is a whole different one.
Plenty of people enjoy Duolingo. And I wouldn’t say it’s a dead end any more than simple picture books or a total beginners class. Will it turn you into a fluent speaker? No, so what.
I guess I just don’t know anyone who doesn’t recognize the limitations, perhaps that’s a function of an environment where we all know multiple languages already.
My impression of duolingo was strongly influenced by a former PM who said basically what OP said without any hint of ill will in their voice. Duolingo discovered that it was easier to reward-hack short term signals of language learning instead of scaffolding those signals into longterm language learning. Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.
That’s not even a diss, it’s just The Way Of The World when you are directly rewarded for growth and retention and very indirectly for language learning.
It's an interesting coincidence, but I think there is a reason that the te-form in Japanese is much more fruitful than "and" in English in producing these constructs. Japanese verbs have too conjunctive forms: te-form and ren'youkei[1] (continuative form). Ren'youkei、 is more formal and has a different but overlapping range of conditions in which it can be used. The "te-form" itself was originally[2] just the ren'youkei conjugation of a special auxiliary verb "tsu", that is used to mark a completed action.
Neither of these forms is nearly as flexible as the conjunction "and" in English. For one, they can only connect verbs and one class of adjectives, but another important point is that the actions described by the verbs need to occur sequentially in time, with the action marked by '-te' occuring earlier. You cannot use either of these forms to say something like "The dog kept jumping and wagging its tail" or "It's important to both eat and drink".
If we compare this to how linguists define "pseudocoordination" in English and other Germanic languages, then every instance of the te-form or ren'youkei in Japanese is pseudocoordination and not real coordination: you cannot reorder the verbs freely, you cannot add "both", and you can use an interrogative pronoun. Since these limitations apply to every use of the te-form and ren'youkei, not just the "special case" ones, it makes these form more amenable for building special construct. Add the fact that Japanese does not have an infinitive form, and you end up with either of these forms as the most natural way to attach auxiliary verbs in Japanese.
Now you end up with a plethora of constructions (demonstrated with the verb 作る tsukuru "to make"):
作ってみる tsukutte miru (make and see) try to make
作ってみせる tsukutte miseru (make and show) prove that [I] can make it
作っていく tsukutte iku (make and go) gradually make (or make more and more)
作ってしまう tsukutte shimau (make and complete) finish making or "oh shit he really ended up making that" (the MORE common meaning in this case)
作ってください tsukutte kudasai (make and give (imperative)) Please make
Funnily enough, this has resulted in people saying things like "見てみましょう" and "見てみてください", which confused me at first. But I suppose this is like non-native English speakers being confused by the extra "do" in phrases like "I already did do my work."
> Hungarian works the same, well I guess the few agglutinative languages do share this element
Not sure what you mean. In Hungarian, the verb meaning "to try" is (meg)próbálni, which does not mean "to see." Its argument is typically given as an infinitive verb, which would never be translated using the pseudocoordination described above, and there is no related form that would be translated as "and".
The point I was waiting for them to get to was saved for last: entails completion.
Try to do something, you might or might not do it. “I’m going to try to persuade them to decide in my favor.”
Try and do something, you expect to get it done one way or another. “I’m goin down there to try and straighten them out.”
I don’t have a long history of research in this going back to the 1500s, but I grew up in southeast Texas, and this is how I’ve always understood it to be used around here, when it is used with any intention at least.
Funny how the grammar write-ups treat it as basically synonymous with "try to," but the lived nuance can be totally different depending on where you grew up.
Interesting, where I’m from in southern california, “try and” doesn’t entail completion. (The article only mentions this for “go and”, which here does indeed entail expected completion.)
Is not a question asking whether the person is capable of washing the dog. It's a command phrased politely.
"Try to wash the dog"
"Try and wash the dog"
If you had no prior information on whether the dog likes water or not, I'd say that the try-and version expresses a greater level of confidence that washing the dog will be successful, in other words it's a command.
Whereas try-to could be read either straight (this task may fail) or as a command phrased politely.
It still implies possibility of failure, but in the example of the commenter above, that possibility is almost low enough to the point of expectation (but not quite) and "try to" would increase that possibility in the direction of failure. Nuance!
You can also interpret the Dr Dre quote an abbreviation of, “I’m gonna try (to change the course of hip hop again) and change the course of hip hop again.”
In this form “try and” means you will try to do something and that you will succeed. Some of the articles tests make more sense in this light; Of course you wouldn’t reorder the trying and the succeeding because that’s the order the events will happen.
This ignores the fact that “try and” developed concurrently with “try to” and possibly before. So it wasn’t originally an abbreviation for a phrase that was yet to be established.
"I have tried and finished my homework" is correct to my ear (possibly because I'm Canadian), but it means successful completion as opposed to "I have tried to finish my homework" implying I didn't get around to it.
For me, if someone says "try and see for yourself", it implies possibility of failure or something new.
If outcome is considered in terms of success or failure then try implies non-zero probability of failure.
If outcome isn't considered in terms of success or failure then "try this flavour of ice-cream" is experience and try this outfit(fits or doesn't) is a test you can't fail.
Philosophically, it is as master Yoda said: Do or do not, there is no try.
This is a good intuition. The construction is actually sometimes jokingly called the "Try And"-C, where "C" stands for Complementizer, a thing that introduces and subordinates a clause.
I don’t think that’s anything like the meaning of “I’ll try and go to the store tomorrow”. There’s no implication that anyone is trying to stop me.
Also, your abbreviation analysis would still leave a syntactic mystery, as that sort of ellipsis doesn’t seem to follow any general attested pattern of ellipsis in English.
That example would be something like 'I'll try to go to the store tomorrow and see if I can' along the lines GP suggests. 'stop me' only came from the specific example they were using.
You can actually construct this using regular VP ellipsis (or possibly Right Node Raising?) in English, but it sounds weird and doesn’t convey the same meaning. So I don’t think so.
“I’ll try to ___ and see if I can go to the store tomorrow”. [where ___ is the VP ‘go to the store’]
Then you have the various syntactic facts mentioned in the article , such as the possibility of wh-extraction. This isn’t possible in an analogous ellipsis construction:
“What did you try and eat?”
* ”What did you try to and see if you can eat?”
There’s also an interesting tense restriction which suggests that there’s no independent elided clause:
Your examples are not ringing bells for me as a native speaker. The linguistics terms may or may not be confounding, but are too unfamiliar for me to discuss.
If you check the parent comment, the 'most' applied to the fraction of mysteries, not the the fraction of instances of the construction that the analysis is supposed to apply to. But anyway, this isn't an exception. The overwhelming generalization is that "try and do X" means the same as "try to do X". This holds for imperatives like the OP's example just as much as for my examples. There's very little difference between the to/and variants of any of the following:
Try and/to do it quietly
Try and/to be a little more polite.
Try and/to hand your homework in on time.
I agree that in some specific cases there are slightly different shades of meaning. However, this doesn't seem to be a very systematic phenomenon, or one that obviously justifies the assumption that "try and" is an elliptical expression of a complex multi-clausal construction.
I also like how several linguists attempt to call out this usage as wrong:
> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).
Linguists don’t say varieties are right or wrong (even though they might have private aesthetic opinions like everyone else). That would be like a biologist saying dogs are the correct version of mammals and cats are wrong and/or don’t exist.
Just because someone has a degree and a job in the field doesn't mean they understand how science works. Prescriptive biology is even sillier than prescriptive linguistics.
If a modern linguist call any usage as wrong, I would ask for his diploma and check if I have to close his university, because clearly they shouldn't teach linguistics 101, let alone bring someone towards a PhD. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Then linguistics is worthless. Descriptivism can't actually tell you anything; all someone can say is "yep, you sure are using that word that way". Fortunately prescriptivists still exist despite people's best efforts to give it a bad name.
How can you learn about how people spoke and the patterns that dictate how that changed over time if all you care about is what is considered technically correct at the moment?
Linguistics can explain why and how the language evolve, who caused this evolution. I don't know any modern linguist (as in doctor in linguistics) who ever wrote 'you should say this and not that', because all of them knows that languages change. The only 'prescriptivists' are bad philosophers and English majors.
These are not linguists doing that. No self-respecting linguists will waste time doing prescriptivism. These are two linguistic articles about this constructs that are quoting amateur language usage manuals. The oldest one is a boys magazine[1] published in 1864 discussing "the Queen's English"[2]. The newest one (Crews et al.) seems to be an obscure usage manual for writers[3].
As demonstrated here, "try and" is older and more "original" than "try to", if not contemporary with it. Any other reason why would "try to" be more "correct" cannot even make sense as anything more than a purely uneducated opinion. When you dig deep into most examples of perspectivism you'll usually run into the same story too. "Incorrect" forms often predate the "correct" forms and are often employed by respected writers (such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen). And even if they don't, there isn't really any scientific ground to brand one form as incorrect.
Linguists do not generally engage in linguist prescriptivism. As far as I'm concerned (and I believe most linguists would agree), this is stylistic opinion at best and pseudoscience at worst. Still, it's not linguists can do anything to stop amateurs from publishing prescriptive language usage manuals, so you'll always have people who claim that "try and" or "ain't" or "me and my friend went for a walk" are incorrect.
[2] Yes, this is Edmund Routledge whose father is the namesake of the present scholarly publisher, but they were just publishing popular books back in the 19th century.
The people they’re citing are either authors of usage guides or linguists who are simply noting that the usage has been deemed incorrect by some of the former.
I think this capture’s the essence better than anything else, “try and” simply behaving as “try and see if I can” (or whatever fits instead of “I” here)
It's kind of funny that in Norwegian, people mix up the infinitive "to" and "and", as they are pronounced the same, "o" in IPA. So we have the same thing in Norwegian writing, but if you happen to use "and", you must use the imperative form of the verb for it to be grammatically correct. So, "try to stop me" is "prøv å stoppe meg", and "try and stop me" is "prøv og stopp meg". The latter is much more colloquial.
This isn't a problem in Swedish and Danish, as their infinitive marker is "att/at", which in Norwegian only means "that" in its conjunctive form.
I wonder if there's any relation to the Norwegian here.
Actually, the situation is even weirder in Swedish! Even though we write "att", it is pronounced "o" when used to mark an infinitive but not when used like the word "that" in English. So, in the sentence
Jag tror *att* han gillar *att* äta
I think *that* he likes *to* eat
the first "att" (that) is pronounced similar to its orthography but the second one (to) is pronounced "o".
> In his 2014 paper "English: The Language of the Vikings" (co-authored by Joseph Embley Emonds), Faarlund and Emonds assert that English is a Scandinavian language (or North Germanic language) which was influenced by Anglo-Saxon (a West Germanic language) [1]
He may be referring to what I suspect too, that even though it is unlikely that any one Germanic language has the key to this, let alone the many similar linguistic mysteries, deeply diving into each of the languages to graph connections will likely provide the best chance at solving such things.
I believe that not only do we have a hard time with this matter because our conception of what “try” means today is not original, but also that effectively “try and” and “try to” are effectively different concepts of the mind that we simply do not understand anymore, homographs whose separate original meanings and appropriate uses have been lost over time.
I look forward to what LLMs will be able to unlock with this kind of historical and linguistic analysis. I think we will start unlocking some interesting this this way. I could see us being able to, to some degree, rewind linguistic history and also then apply it to historical context. Imagine an LLM that can not only graph all languages and meanings in those languages, but will also be able to infer meanings and origins going back into history by cross referencing all related languages … at least with some degree of accuracy greater than what we can do today. Now we just need all historical texts in digital form and to not erase all life on the planet.
> regular coordination permits the order of conjuncts to be changed, while in (7) we see that the same is not possible with try and (De Vos 2005:59).
But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.
It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”
The emphasis is a really interesting point and overlooked by the article. Your "went and" examples do seem very analogous to "try and". "He went and got himself arrested again," is less about the going and almost exclusively emphasizing the other half of the conjunction.
"Try and" can operate the same way by de-emphasizing the trying. If Dr. Dre said "I'm gonna try to change the course of hip hop again," the sentence is about attempting to do something. On the other hand, "try and" makes the sentence more assured- Dr Dre is going try it and then do it.
I wonder if this half about ordering, half about emphasizing is the reason for the special rules of usage.
As a nonnative speaker of English who lived more than 30 years in an English speaking country, "try and" sounds to me as bad as "should of". Right or wrong, I perceive it as something an "uneducated" person would say. That said, I firmly believe that correct language is whatever people deem to be appropriate for their communication.
There is nothing more annoying than being told something annoying, and then learning to be annoyed by it.
Try not to internalise that dictum or it will recursively annoy you.
Next time you hear a really annoying vague repetitive/intermittent sound at work, mention it to a coworker if you wish to ruin their worklife.
(Minor edits). I often hear people who have learned English make a particular class of mistake (usually pronunciation) that is a result of being taught English by reading from books. Modern schooling for languages causes certain types of mistakes. There is a natural mimicking art/skill to learning a language by ear. Unfortunately the art isn't taught and is hardly even recognized: perhaps because it works best with intense one-on-one interaction and intent. Book learning was the default that our society used, and some well-educated people prefer books. When learning spoken English it is important to try and ignore spelling. Natural English speakers learn the spelling after learning the language and are in an environment where we have tricks to learn pronunciation of unfamiliar words. There is a strong classist/academic ridiculing of people that make the mistake of pronouncing a word as it is spelled (knowing how words are "properly" pronounced is an important distinction to many people - as is received wordplay).
Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't.
It also depends on the audience and medium, with "should've" being more appropriate for conversational/informal usage. It would be perfectly normal to say something like "he shouldn't've done that," but if I were writing a message, I'd at least expand the last contraction to "have."
I think there's a general perception that many of the common dialects of American English, especially in the South and West, are associated with being less educated. I am not sure where that comes from.
I'm a native English speaker, and my perception is that when someone speaks in a way where they don't use contractions, it seems verbose and stilted; I associate it with being scolded or disciplined, or when someone is speaking sternly to make a point (or out of anger).
E.g.:
"You don't know where you're going, you should've taken a left" - informative/neutral
"You do not know where you are going, you should have taken a left" - critical/scolding
Omitting contractions can result in speech that sounds strange and unnatural in general:
"Shouldn't we go?" -> "Should not we go?"
"Aren't you coming?" -> "Are not you coming?"
"We didn't, but we should've." -> "We did not, but we should have."
> Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't.
I think they specifically meant "should of" which is a colloquial form of "should've" in a number of places in the UK.
I went to school with a large number of people who would write "I should of done X instead of Y". In fact I'm pretty sure I made that "mistake" a number of times growing up.
I meant "should of", especially in writing. I am not sure if "should've" is supposed to sound the same as "should of", but seeing the latter in writing annoys me a lot for some reason.
They sound the same in most American English accents, at least.
(This response contains another funny modern colloquialism: 'a lot' gets used by both native and non-native English speakers where 'many' or 'greatly' is prescribed. Not that we need to be prescriptivists, of course.)
How can “should of” sound bad to you, when it sounds identical to (a not super carefully enunciated pronunciation of) “should have”, at least in every dialect I’m aware of
Except in rapid speech, and particularly at the end of sentences, I can definitely hear “should of” being used by some people in local Australian English.
Guess it depends on the country? As a native speaker of British English “try and” sounds fine to me, and in some cases would flow more naturally than “try to”
They are not even remotely the same. "should of" is a phonetic issue. of is spoken with the schwa vowel uh, so the o sounds like uh, and the f takes the v sound, so "should of" sounds like "should uhv", and "should have/should 've" sounds exactly the same, "should uhv". The issue is that folks that don't read much hear "should uhv" and think it's should of, so when they write "should of" because they expect should 've to sound like "should have" even tho they completely use the contraction when they speak!
It's like saying that people with accents come across as uneducated when it come just be that the person has a deafness to American th and hears t does a substitute so they will say ting instead of thing or tin in place of thin. With that said, I grew up speaking/hearing the form of British english and "Try and" sounds perfectly fine to me.
Prompted by reading an instance of "try and" instead of "try to" in an HN-linked Register article[1] this morning, I thought this might be of interest to both non-native and native English speakers in our community.
Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
I thought from the title that this was going to be about some new exception handling mechanism in a programming language I'm not familiar with. In fact, the article was even more interesting than that, as I've often wondered about this in the past but never quite got to looking it up. Thank you!
That’s exactly what happened with me. I expected some interesting programming content but ended up spending 20 minutes (so far) thinking about English grammar.
In his comments on the use of symbols P and V in semaphores, Dijkstra gave the reason for choosing P as it having come from "probeer te verlagen", which he infamously explained that when translated into English means "try and decrease" [sic].
Basically yes, but I do hear nuance, idk if it's right - "try and" feels more daring, like "I think you can't", while "try to" feels more neutral, just a command.
You are right on the nuance. "try and catch me" for me, means I'm going to give it my all not to be caught and I believe I will not be caught. Good luck, try and catch me.
"Try to catch me" means I think you might have some chance.
> I'm going to try and change the course of Hip-Hop.
can be parsed as
> I'm going to try; I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop.
which has been subject to a well-understood extraposition process to factor out the leading "I'm going to" from all the clauses, so that a single copy of it distributes into all of them.
It's essentially the same as what is going on in the following unassailably correct sentence:
> I'm going to turn on the TV, crack open a beer, and watch the game".
Also note that this "and" is not something which exclusively pairs with "try":
There's explanations in the article of why 'try and' can't be parsed as simply as that kind of parallel ellipsis structure.
No reordering: You can't rephrase as I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop and try the way you can I'm going to watch the game and crack open a beer
No use of both: You can't say I'm going to both try and change the course of Hip-Hop the way you could I'm going to both crack open a beer and watch the game
No inflections: You can't say I have tried and changed the course of Hip-Hop the way you can I have cracked open a beer and watched the game
Interestingly this pattern also exists in Danish (though not for the same reasons). Correctly speaking you’d say “try to…” which is “prøv at…”, but since the infinitive “at” and “og” sort of both turned into /ə/ when quickly spoken and you get “prøv og…”.
Pseudo coordination is a fun phenomenon in Scandinavian. Lots of detail in NALS: https://tekstlab.uio.no/nals#/chapter/65 but an important difference with English is that the Scandinavian construction occurs with many more verbs in the first conjunct, not just _try_.
Every time I read something like this, I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something - all that matters is that your intended audience understands it, eventually.
> I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something
Weirdly, that's not what this says. It specifically says you can't say this:
> * John will both try and kill mosquitos.
or
> * I tried and finished the assignment
or
> * Try always and tell the truth
What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct. What you were taught is the "prescribed grammar" or "prestige grammar".
Also, grammar is voted on by speakers of a language. I'm generally against making fun of people for deviating from the prestige grammar; but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
Nobody has ever used “literally” to mean “figuratively”. That’s a common misconception and/or a strawman from people who want to stick to the original meaning of “literally”.
If that were the meaning, you would be able to say things like “I stubbed my toe and it hurts so bad I’m figuratively dying”, mirroring the colloquial meaning of “literally”. But nobody says this.
Oh, and by the way, the “traditional” meaning isn’t even the first one. According to my OED second edition, “literal” meaning “Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact.” is only attested since 1599.
The actual original meaning of “literal”: “of or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical” is attested since 1475.
But your link gives two senses, and it's the second one that applies here: "Used as an intensifier with statements or terms that are in fact meant figuratively and not word for word as stated". And Wiktionary offers the synonyms virtually and so to speak.
"it hurts so bad I’m intensely dying" would be wrong too. It's more than an intensifier, it also means "figuratively".
> It's more than an intensifier, it also means "figuratively".
No, its an intensifier for things which are contextually unambiguously figurative. It doesn't communicate that the use is figurative, it communicates intensity. The figurative nature of the expression is understood from context, not the use of the word "literally".
> Used as an intensifier with statements or terms that are in fact meant figuratively and not word for word as stated
That is not the same as the meaning of “figuratively”!
“‘Literally’ is used with statements that are meant figuratively” does not mean the same thing as “‘Literally’ means ‘figuratively’”.
> "it hurts so bad I’m intensely dying" would be wrong too
Indeed, because “intensely” is not an intensifier. In your example, “intensely” modifies “dying”, whereas “literally” modifies the tone of your utterance.
For an example of another intensifier: “it hurts so bad I’m fucking dying” would work.
Nobody would claim that “fucking” means the same thing as “figuratively” in this sentence, even though the sentence is itself figurative.
> The actual new and non-traditional meaning of “literally” is as a generic intensifier
"Literally" is used as an intensifier in two situations:
1. When speaking neither figuratively nor hyperbolically -- i.e., when the thing you're saying is... er, literally true. (e.g., "The beach is literally a five-minute walk from my house"; "You literally fold the cravat like this")
2. When speaking either figuratively or hyperbolically (e.g., "My head literally exploded"; "The island was literally catapulted into the 21st century")
I have no problem with the first; I do it myself. It's the second I object to.
Why? The hint is in #1 -- right now, literally is the only word we have to say that this actuallyreally happened, that what's being said is neither figurative nor hyperbolic.
That is, the first is not a generic intensifier. It intensifies it because it's actually true.
Loads of other words that used to perform the same function have become meaningless intensifiers: "really" (from "real"), "very" (from "verily" -> "in truth"), "truly".
I think language should be practical. Double negatives are perfectly understandable and feel to me more poetic (if less logically expressive). Using "they" for a single person of unspecified gender is a practical and long-standing solution to a real problem. "Megabyte" is a lot easier to say than "mebibyte".
And, we need a word to mean "I'm not speaking figuratively or hyperbolically"; we don't need Yet Another Meaningless Intensifier. We have "literally", let's keep it.
> The actual original meaning of “literal”: “of or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical” is attested since 1475.
That meaning comes from the Latin "littera"/"litera", meaning letter or character. Words like "transliteration" are based on this root meaning (https://www.etymonline.com/word/transliteration)
I understand the feeling, but language is what language does. It will change and you will notice those changes if you're alive long enough :)
Even prescriptivist languages (as my own native language tends to be) cannot escape. I'm bad at my own native language because I've been living elsewhere for very long... but not as bad as the Kids These Days :)
There is no such thing as a “prescriptive language”. What would that mean?
No living language is only used according to the rules laid down by grammar teachers. The only languages that are are dead languages like Latin with zero native speakers.
Well, no, but I can't understand 99% of Spanish and Chinese using my knowledge of my native English dialect, so I'm not going to lecture Spanish or Chinese speakers on correct grammar.
My point was that differences between dialects drive a lot of arguments about grammar. If I'm annoyed about the phrase "could care less" then that originates in my native dialect not allowing it. Not being part of the prestige grammar is secondary, as is whether the phrase makes any logical sense.
It may be grammatically correct in the dialect they're using.
There's plenty of mutually-intelligible English spoken outside of primarily English-speaking countries which native English speakers would consider ungrammatical, but that's only relative to their own dialect.
> What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct.
By your own logic, "literally" meaning "figuratively" is grammatically correct. Which just goes to show that your logic is wrong. Something can in fact be grammatically incorrect even when said by native speakers.
Although it is a little odd and I'm not certain I've seen it in writing, I have definitely heard constructions like "John will both try and kill mosquitos." to mean, "John will both attempt to and succeed in kill[ing] mosquitos."
"John will both try and like sushi" makes perfect sense, although there's an implied "to eat" verb separate from the "to like" verb in there that isn't present in the constructions the article is talking about.
Likewise, "I tried and finished the assignment," means "I tried (to do) the assignment and I finished it." Again, maybe not in writing, but with a certain inflection on 'tried' (where in writing maybe you'd put a comma or semi-colon to indicate a pause) this is something people actually say; although they may emphasis it with "I finally tried and actually finished the assignment." (Whereas maybe previously they weren't confident they could even do it and maybe didn't try.)
Included for no real reason:
"They tried and failed, all of them?"
"Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."
These are all just different constructions that are related to "try and" only by coincidence. The fact that a different construction looks similar to a grammatically incoherent one by coincidence doesn't make the incoherent one coherent.
I disagree. GP is laying is laying out reasonable scenarios that are a few dropped/implied words away from the otherwise incoherent ones. For my part, this one is very grating to my ears:
"Try and tell the truth"
Since it clearly should be "try to tell the truth"
However this one, while similar in construction, doesn't actually sound nearly as bad:
"Try and finish the assignment"
It can be fixed the same way ("try to finish") but it also accept GP's form too, which would be "try (to work hard) and (see if you can) finish the assignment". As I say, for whatever reason this second example sounds much more reasonable to me— I think at least in part my brain is much more accepting of a word that feels dropped than one that's misused.
There's a more standard, general rule in English grammar that web searches tell me is called "delayed right constituent coordination". It lets you read sentences like "He washed and dried the clothes" as "He washed [the clothes] and dried the clothes." The same object gets applied to both verbs.
I suspect that's what you're applying to these sentences. "Try and finish the assignment" makes some sense under this rule if you read it as "Try [the assignment,] and finish the assignment" -- an "assignment" is a thing that makes sense to "try". ("He tried [sushi,] and liked sushi" works for the same reason.) But "Try [the truth,] and tell the truth" doesn't work -- it doesn't make sense to interpret "trying" the truth as some separate action you're taking before you "tell" it.
So probably you just don't have the article's special try-and "pseudo-coordination" rule in your dialect.
The try and in “try and tell the truth” is a different idiom from “[try] and [x]” as two separate actions. It can almost always be replaced with “try to”.
For example, in “let’s try and finish this” it does not mean trying then finishing, it is try to finish. The construction is more obvious in a phrase like “try and stop me”. This phrasing is very common in movies, it might just not be as popular in your area.
I think the article is incorrect on this though, try always and tell the truth is a perfectly fine albeit slightly anachronistic usage that would mean
Whatever you do you must always try (that is to say not give up), and tell the truth.
One might also assume that you should tell the truth about trying always is the meaning, but at any rate it is not a phrasing that would be out of order a few hundred years ago.
Dr Dre is a professional poet and a very successful one by any standard. His whole stock-in-trade was American urban colloquialisms most of which can be traced back to English rural and working class and predate the colonization of the Americas. The early development of English "prestige grammar" and word usage dates back to the court of William the Conqueror and the reintroduction of romance linguistic influence on Anglo-Saxon English that lead to the development of Middle English by the 13th Century. What you understand as English "prestige grammar" today is a moving target, consistently evolving but still full of contradictions and single-case rules. Many popular European languages today have been modified to exclude these linguistic anomalies, making them more consistent, less error prone and easier to learn. I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
> I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
This has already been happening in English, for centuries. Compare these examples given in the article to modern English:
> 3) ...howe and by what certaine and generall rule I mighte trye and throughly discerne the veritie of the catholike faithe, from the falsehood of wicked heresye... (1554)
> 4) You maie (saide I) trie and bring him in, and shewe him to her. (1569)
I suppose after more than 450 years, one might expect even more simplification, but it is perhaps the fate of a lingua franca to have more "backward compatibility" than less widely-used languages.
My point was that English has been changing and in some instances those changes might have occurred to remove anomalous characteristics but English does have more old warts than most popular languages and I expect many of those will be removed as English recedes from its position of dominance over the next century.
In that context, 'literally' as figuratively makes the same sense as inflammable and flammable.
It's just one more errata in a language that's filled with horrible hacks from centuries of iterative development.
My hill to die on would be exactly one way (NOT the funky dictionary way!) of spelling words exactly as they should be pronounced and writing them back similarly.
The hill to die on part of that is they need to start with children, teach them ONLY the correct way of spelling words as use in school and stick to it. While we're at it, FFS, do metric measures conversion the same way. Cold turkey force it, and bleed in dual measures and spelling with a cutover plan that starts to make the new correct way required to be larger text by the time the grade -2 kids graduate. (So about a 14-15 year plan.) That's to give all us adults time to bash into our heads the new spellings for old words too.
Why can't it be dictionary spelling? Offhand, 1) those phonetics aren't used quite like that anywhere else. 2) those phonetics are more strongly based on the other languages in Europe so the structure isn't as expected. I'd sooner force everyone to learn how to write TUNIC's shapes... though there's some coverage issues for that.
Effectively I want different shapes for the chart ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... ) that DO NOT MATCH EXISTING ENGLISH LETTERS so that when I look at a 'new spelling' my old pronunciation programmed brain doesn't index the wrong lookup table.
The problem with "one spelling the way it is said" is that (1) pronunciation varies among native speakers even within the same country or region. (So, at best, you'd have to pick a winner or just count them all as different languages with their own spellings.) (2) Pronunciation drifts over time (and I'm not sure an official spelling and pronunciation could stop it).
The other reason is that there are many countries that speak English, and the largest and most powerful one is too politically dysfunctional to ever agree on something that would be this controversial.
Not going to happen. No one’s ever going to successfully retrofit a logical system into English. English has even got two words (guarantee and warrantee) which are spelled and pronounced slightly different while meaning the same thing because they were borrowed from French separately at different times.
Irregardless is fine and people who try to be pedantic about it are just mistaken. It is literally in the dictionary as an intensified form of “regardless”.
That's cap. 'Ir' is usually used in the english language to denote the negative of the following property that follows it, e.g. irrespective meaning not respective. Regardless alone signals the negative assertion of the following property, so a prepending of 'ir' before it connotes a not-not, a double negative, and against the context of what is trying to be communicated. Having a problem with this abuse of language/meaning/communication is to be expected.
It’s not an abuse of language or meaning or communication. It’s a rule that you really want to be true for English but which unfortunately has exceptions. Irregardless is one of those exceptions. It’s not a word that I personally use because I don’t like it (probably for the reasons you’re articulating) but English doesn’t actually care what you or I think. Using “irregardless” as a synonym for “regardless” or “irrespective” is not incorrect.
Yep "correctness" only exists contextually. A language teacher can say "no that's wrong" with the implied meaning of "that doesnt follow the patterns of the dialect I'm teaching you". Ditto for newspaper editors and their house style.
But in 99% of situations no such context exists and "that's grammatically incorrect" is a bullshit statement.
In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling. It's widely done and widely accepted but personally I think it's pointless and somewhat toxic.
(Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".)
> Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".
Many of those languages have mutually unintelligible dialects. The reference implementation exists to patch communication when you run into trouble with people who aren’t from your village.
Even American English has this. People from Appalachia register switch to more standard English when they’re not home, for example. Or a high schooler will tamper their slang when talking to grandma.
You could also argue international business English is a contrived dialect used primarily by ESL speakers. It definitely has many differences from any English spoken natively at home.
Yes I experience this regularly with Hochdeutsch and I stand by my point. You still don't speak the language exactly as specified and it's still nonsensical to "correct" someone's grammar/pronunciation if you understood them.
> In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling.
Same is true in the US, though ethnicity is in the mix too. White and black Americans are historically distinct cultural groups which speak different dialects (though obviously, since the end of slavery and segregation the groups are mixing more and more). It is no coincidence that varieties spoken by white people ended up as the “standard”.
I've thought a lot about this one. It really is the message that matters, not the grammar. It's the song, not the notes.
It's also that language is pretty inherently a very fuzzy, ambiguous, and imprecise thing. If I say, "I've left my cup on the table," then you know what I mean even though you've never seen my cup nor my table. Everyone reading that sentence is equally convinced that it's quite concrete, even though everyone is also imagining a completely different cup on a completely different table.
Even more fascinating, it's likely that nobody that ever reads this post will have met me in person. We have not specifically agreed in advance what our words mean, merely relied upon collective agreement based solely on historic usage.
Honestly, the idea that two people who have never met, never seen each other, maybe never even lived in the same hemisphere, might speak the same language and be able to converse freely is an astonishing feat of magic.
But register also matters. A communication is about much more than the surface meaning. It conveys a lot about the relationship between speaker and listener. Some languages formalize that grammatically, but it's present in myriad other ways.
Adhering to the arbitrary rules of correctness is one. Saying "try and" in a resume cover letter probably conveys a message of slackness and over-familiarity. Which might be a deliberate choice, but you're better off if you at least know you're making it.
Yes and constantly obstructing communication is annoying and boring!
Imagine sitting listening to a lecture on quantum effects in biology or something similarly fascinating and someone in the audience obstructs because the lecturer said paetent not patent (or vice versa). Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.
Anything over one dot communicates the idea effectively.. the difference between two or three dots is irrelevant...
Ellipses look like squares.........
Close up they are circles....
That’s not true. With two dots, it can as plausibly be a typo of a single dot. In fact, in your GP post I was assuming that you hit the dot key a second time instead of the space key by mistake, and ignored the resulting lack of auto-capitalization. (Granted, the fact that ellipses are usually separated by a space from what follows also played a role.)
As a EE wannabe, I see everything in terms of impedance matching. It's all a very high dimension matching problem we tend to get good at, in order to survive.
I think of language like a lossy encoder-decoder system.
You compress/encode your thoughts into words. The the listener/reader decompresses/decodes your words into thoughts. As long as we don't think thoughts and words are the same thing, then yeah, you're right.
I think this also helps with communication in general because it forces you to think more about what someone is saying. There's no way you can put all your thoughts into words. Decoding is highly affected by prior knowledge, culture, and all that jazz. It's why you can make a confusing array of unintelligible noises and gestures at a friend and they'll understand but everyone else around is left confused. I think this also explains a lot of fights on the internet, as it is easy to misinterpret and with no perfect encoding it's hard to write to an audience of everyone.
Yes, there is. Linguistic descriptivism is a stale 1960s academic fad wrapped up in a revolutionary energy that's dead and cringe now. Like that era's other insane postmodernisms, it rejects reality and reality has rejected it right back.
"Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.
Well said. Linguistic descriptivism is completely incoherent because it can't actually tell you anything. All a descriptivist can do is say "yep, you sure are using the word that way" which isn't remotely useful or interesting.
>when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions
And who will be the keepers (or should I say gate-keepers) of this glorious collection? And will they prevent Tolkien from spelling plural of dwarf as dwarves? Will they force Cormac McCarthy to use quotation marks?
> "Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster ~when we out speech draws from a a collection of words~, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.
Sorry, but you are completely misunderstanding what “descriptivism” means, why it’s the viewpoint taken in serious linguistics, and how common it is there (i.e. absolutely 100% universal among everyone who studies language scientifically).
When you say "allow"... what exactly do you imagine happening if Yale's linguistic department forbids people from using English in certain ways?
Or is this more of a federal government thing? Grammar Force as the seventh branch of the US Military? What about other countries... are we thinking NATO or UN? Either way, gonna be tough to try and convince the Brits that US English is the correct one, since we didn't exactly get permission from them in the first place.
"try 'n" sounds suspiciously close to "tryin'", so I suspect that people who were saying "tryin' to" began to reanalyse the first two syllables as "try 'n" and then started dropping the newly-superfluous "to".
> In dialects of Northeastern Canada, parallel inflected forms are acceptable:
> 12) They tries and does that.
There is a Ricky Jervais show https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(TV_series) where the main character talks like this alot but not because that is common in the UK but perhaps to show he is a bit simple/slow. I think there is a danger in making that assumption about anyone based on the accent or general way they talk.
I did an introduction into the basics of linguistics in secondary school and something my teacher pointed out that a rule of thumb is that common phrases or words are the most likely to break grammatical rules.
He then told me a story about a language that was invented to be perfectly regular, and then there was a generation of native speakers of this artificial language and the first thing that happened was common phrases became irregular.
I believe the language must be Esperanto but I'm struggling to find a reference to this anecdote
I'm not a native English speaker, but to me "try and" has always conveyed a sense of more deliberate trying, of getting over yourself, in the sense that the "try" means the choice to give it a real proper go. So first you try (or, in fact, decide to try) and then when you're fully committed and mentally prepared, then you do it.
With an interpretation like this, none of the syntactical stuff in this story seems useful anymore. You try, and then you do.
Does this make any sense at all or am I just a foreigner imagining things?
I grew up in the Southeast, and this usage is common. Both in Southern accents and AAVE.
I agree with skrebbel's feeling about the phrase, and I think yours is also a little bit correct.
To add more character, I also think "try and" feels more casual and friendly. Less like a technical suggestion and more like a form of encouragement. More caring, less distance or annoyance.
"You should try and get some sleep. [I care about you, you poor thing.]" vs "You should try to get some sleep. [Why are you still awake?]"
There's more closeness with "try and" and more distance with "try to".
"Try to" feels formal, technical, distant. "Try and" feels comforting, compassionate, friendly, but definitely not something you'd use for a complex task.
I couldn't imagine "You should try and recalibrate your photon detector" ever being said.
I definitely agree with the difference in formality.
> You should try and recalibrate your photon detector
I can totally imagine this, in a lab where all the equipment is old, and out of calibration, and the person saying it knows there are 10 other things that are more important, but this thing is still pretty bad and they feel obligated to point out the issue.
Whereas "try to calibrate" sounds to me like the process of calibration is quite hard and it's likely to end up no better calibrated than you started with.
I think that's exactly right. I say "try to" in more neutral situations, or noncommittal, or pessimistic. It conveys it's not my top priority to succeed. "I'll try and get it done today" is easy to imagine with a neutral tone or a downward tone, conveying that I may not get to it and it isn't my top priority. "I'll try and get it done today" is easier to imagine with a chipper tone, it's a higher priority for me, I intend to get to it.
This makes logical sense too, doesn't it? "Try and" implies success. I'm not actually saying "I'll try to get it done and I will get it done", if that was the case I'd skip the try, but I am evoking an idea in that direction.
It makes sense, as folk etymologies often do. But the phrase acts in a more conditional manner in Southern American English at least.
If I say "I'm going to change that light bulb," I'm probably already getting up to fetch my toolbag.
If I say "I'll try and change that light bulb," I may be wondering whether I have a spare or a ladder or something else whose lack will interrupt the job, or in some other way doubtful of success: the implication is I expect I may come back and say something about the job other than that it's done.
If I say "Well, I might could try and change that light bulb," I probably don't mean in any particular hurry even to get up off the couch, and indeed may already be dozing off.
As a native speaker my feeling is that if we're talking about "I'll try and X" vs "I'll try to X," they're mm@$be asking you neutrally to attempt something for the first time, but "try and get home without taking any detours" sounds as, if we've been through this issue on several occasions, and now I'm annoyed.
I'm also a native speaker from the US. Non-native speakers often have extra insight into the nuances of language, and I think skrebbel's headcanon here is really interesting.
I almost see "try and" as a form of "manifesting", of optimism, of believing that you will succeed. This would sort of comport with what he's saying.
But any difference is subtle, and most native speakers won't notice it, beyond maybe the more formal register of "try to".
Usually these extra insights are interesting but incorrect. Like here I think. I don't think there's any different expectations between someone saying "try and" and "try to" except it's maybe a very loosely correlated signal of social class
Another example is I've seen people several times online trying to argue y'all can be singular and all y'all is a way to make it clearly plural. Ok it's interesting that y'all is used as singular and all y'all isn't just about inclusion, but its not true.
When you say “I’ll try to do something…” you are giving a heads up to the other person that you may give up on that thing at any time. There is no commitment.
Although the default rule for conjunctions joining predicates is that the comma is optional (by contrast, in most other contexts it is either mandatory or forbidden), there are a lot of circumstances where the comma becomes mandatory to avoid ambiguity or just because.
The two are not interchangeable though, as shown in the article. If someone asks you "Are you going to win?", you could say "I'll try to", but not "I'll try and".
This article illustrates the main reason why prescriptive grammar is so boring.
If instead of just writing things off as “wrong”, we accept that they happen and try to understand why and under what circumstances, we unlock a whole incredibly interesting new field of science.
The point specifically is that the "and" in "try and" conceptually should be "adding a second thing" (what they mean by "coordination"), but isn't doing so in a fully regular way. Specifically, it seems like it should coordinate "try to kill mosquitos" and "[actually] kill mosquitos", but that interpretation isn't fully compatible with how the word "and" normally works.
On the other hand, there does seem to be a nuance in the meaning of "try and kill mosquitos" that makes it not just a dialectical form of "try to kill mosquitos"; there's an implication of expecting success. One might also point out that "try" can be replaced with synonyms in "try to" ("attempt to kill mosquitos"), but not "try and" (*"attempt and kill mosquitos"). So this is a very particular idiom.
Prescriptively, maybe. But it is certainly grammatical in the sense that linguists normally use. "Try and" sounds perfectly natural to my own ears and it is regularly used by native English speakers.
Good grief. Quote Dre up top, then totally ignore AAVE and Southern American English which both heavily feature the construction of interest, despite being interested to find out what the Boer pidgin, of all things, has to say. (Why not Basque next? That would be about as relevant!) This they call a linguistic diversity project? Surely they could not have found themselves short of sources!
AAVE is definitely underappreciated as the source of a lot of common modern slang. But in this case, the article makes it pretty clear that "try and" is not nearly modern enough to have come from AAVE - they show several attestations from the 1500s and even mention one from 1390.
If they had headed the first section differently, I would credit this argument. Under the name "Who says this?" as at present it bears, and with nothing there or elsewhere to justify the substantial and obvious exclusion, that section is substantially incomplete.
edit: But so is your own criticism, in that it ignores AAVE is not the only dialect I mentioned. It isn't even one I would say I really speak, except inasmuch as AAVE and my own SAE heavily overlap as the close siblings they are. Both deserve to be treated, not least for that interrelationship, as well as the one you mention with their forcible deracination into mesolect and acrolect slang, where the class origin makes such terms feel "edgy."
"However, De Vos (2005:59) points out that try and may not be preceded by both: "
[example] "John will both try and kill mosquitos."
Then the next sentence has "try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected". (only when "both try and")
I know the italicization of "try" and "and" makes it a different thing grammatically, just thought it was amusing.
This pales when compared to my favorite grammatical annoyance, a common perverse construction, for example "... similar effect to ..." when "... effect similar to ..." is actually intended. This misordering is so common that, in a Web search, it appears to outnumber the canonical ordering.
I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
One might say, "benzodiazepines have a similar effect to alcohol", or "benzodiazepines have an effect similar to alcohol." The second construction is clearer in its meaning.
I don’t really get why one is in the wrong order? Maybe we’re parsing them differently somehow. The meaning reads identically to me although the parse tree is different.
Benzodiazepines have a similar effect to [the effect of] alcohol
Vs.
Benzodiazepines have an effect [which is] similar to [the effect of] alcohol.
Hadn't heard about this project before; it's a really good idea.
English is not a language that either lends itself well to, or is historically regulated by, prescriptivism (with a few specific attempts that didn't claim universal adoption). Treating it as a language where "If you've heard this novel construct, here's where it came from and what it's related to" is a good way to approach it.
(I liken it often to C++. C++ is so broad that the ways you can glue features together are often novel and sometimes damn near emergent. It's entirely possible to be "a fluent C++ user" and never use curiously recurring template pattern, or consider case-statement fallthrough a bug not a feature, and so on).
What you’re saying is probably true of all human languages. I don’t know of any where usage is actually governed by a governing body. Some try, e.g. the French Academy, but they are widely ignored in actual usage.
This article is not “blessing” anything, it’s trying to understand it. And I promise you that linguists have indeed given thought to why and under what circumstances people write “would of” instead of “would have”.
Yes, and a huge chunk of language evolution is driven by things getting confused with other things due to phonological changes making them sound the same, so studying this is squarely within the realm of linguistics.
That said, the one-off simple example of “would of” is probably not interesting enough to write a big article about.
Of course, but linguists consider themselves to be scientists, so they are only allowed to describe and explain. They can't say that anything is wrong or bad. Even "would of." Prescriptive judgements are restricted to philosophers of language.
The majority of the article is describing how it is different from “try to” in its usage. In short it acts more like a single phrase than as a literal future infinitive.
There's no usage of try and where try to wouldn't fit perfectly well and mean exactly the same thing. It's a weird construct with weird restrictions on how it can be applied grammatically, but it's not different in usage.
That's absolutely not what the article is about. Did you even read it?
People don't really have that debate anymore outside of twitter casuals, and it's dismissed with a wave almost immediately in this article, which then goes on to examine the complex grammar of "try and".
Yep. This is like someone seeing an article about geology and saying “ah, sphere earth vs. flat earth”. Like, no, the article already presupposes that the earth is spherical because that’s the viewpoint taken by all people with a serious academic interest in the topic.
Nah, prescriptivists love writing books saying that a thing almost everybody does - sometimes including themselves - is wrong. Prescriptivist amateurs with strong opinions sell reasonably well, publishers are quite fond.
But this is part of a project by academics and the academics abandoned prescriptivism because it's not science. We don't have prescriptivist chemists or physicists either.
At first glance, I thought this was some new TC39 JavaScript syntax proposal.
This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?"
https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/what-all
Why, "try and" could be like "try / finally", and "what all" could be filter().
I won't mind "await y'all" to await multiple promises.
What if...
And the catch can't catch a division by zero error because it occurred inside an "and" block.What is this JavaScript thing ?
I guess I come from a different era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM
Feels like one of those constructions you don't notice until someone points it out, and then you start hearing it everywhere
They seem to be missing the incipient disappearance of the -en form of verbs, with people saying things like "I should have went" instead of "I should have gone".
It isn't clear why they feature the constructions they do. They are titled "Yale Grammatical Diversity Project", but the constructions are not necessarily examples of grammatical diversity:
> Have yet to is a construction that appears in most, if not all, varieties of English.
> this construction appears to be distributed across speakers in all regions and demographic groups.
> Repetition clefts are quite widespread in English and can be observed as early as the mid-17th century
> They are robustly attested in contemporary North American English and are also used in the UK. Related constructions have been observed in Australian English (McConvell 2004) and in a corpus of New Zealand English speech as well
> the usage of repetition clefts does not apparently correlate with any sociodemographic features.
‘Go and put your shoes on’ is correct British English. We consider ‘Go put your shoes on’ as incorrect grammar. So ‘try and put your shoes on’ would also be natural. I’m trying to think what other verbs this would work with because ‘find and put your shoes on’ doesn’t sound right in British English but neither does ‘find put your shoes on’ in US English perhaps someone who understands grammar better can explain why some verbs work with this construction and some don’t.
'Go put your shoes on' is sensical in British English. If I heard someone saying this, I wouldn't bat an eye.
Possibly-interesting comparison: in Japanese, the way to talk about trying to do some verb-phrase X, is "Xて見る" — which is usually literally translated as "we'll try [X]ing", but which breaks down into "[verb-phrase X in present tense] [the verb "to see" in whatever tense you mean.]"
Which means that the construction can be most intuitively framed (at least by an English speaker) as either "we'll see [what happens when] we [X]"... or, more relevantly, "we'll try [X] and see [what happens/how it goes]." Or, for short: "we'll try and [X]."
It's even better. The "X-te" (Xて) is technically not X in present tense, it is specifically X in the te-form (て is read "te").
The te-form has a bunch of different uses, but in the case of "verb-te verb", if the second verb is not one of a list of special verbs (of which miru (見る, to see) is one), X-te Y normally means "X and Y". For example, yorugohan o tsukutte taberu (夜ご飯を作って食べる) means "(to/I/we/you/...) make dinner and eat it": yorugohan is dinner, the "o" is a particle marking the direct object, tsukuru means to make (becomes tsukutte in the te-form) and taberu means to eat. (The first word in English is ambiguous because grammatical subjects are usually optional in Japanese, plus its verbs are not inflected for person or number.)
For a number of verbs, however, if they are in the second position, the phrase gets a special meaning. If it's miru, e.g. tsukutte miru, it means "to try to make" — or perhaps more aptly, "to try and make". If it's iku (行く, to go), it means "to go X-ing": tabete iku (where taberu (to eat) -> tabete in the te-form) is "to go to eat [something]", or perhaps: "to go and eat [something]".
Not all such special verbs correspond to English pseudocoordination though; a common one is shimau (the dictionary says "to finish / to stop", but it's uncommon in bare form), where e.g. tabete shimau means "to finish eating" or "to end up eating" / "to eat accidentally" depending on context.
The analogy between English and Japanese here is likely coincidental, but it's amusing nevertheless.
This is a nice explanation; I wish that duolingo hadn't removed their user comment/explanation section, which used to contain similar (though not always correct, which is probably part of why they removed them.)
Pro tip: Duolingo is a game and basically a dead end for properly learning a language. If you want to really learn, you need to build intuition, and that only comes from huge amounts of level-appropriate input. Find yourself some good native language podcasts that are targeted at language learners and native reading material. Search for "Refold" for a better strategy (no affiliation, it's just awesome), and make sure that whatever you do, you enjoy it. Language learning is a marathon, the fun is in the journey, not just the destination.
I always say, that if you want to learn a language, then surround yourself with it.
I learned all languages I know this way. When it comes to Polish, I mainly saw people writing in that language without knowing much. Translator came to the rescue. I picked up common words and phrases that way, and it helped with grammar, too, but it was not a fast process as it is a difficult language. I do not speak it well, although I speak it understandably enough, because I did not listen nor speak to people in the language much, as opposed to English, and this includes movies, TV series, etc.
Spanish was easy, all it took was a translator and long conversations with 2 people and some music. :D Pronunciation is not an issue, my native language helped.
French would have been a bit more difficult to learn, as I have tried, then lost interest and reasons to do so.
I am trying to learn Arabic, but for me, that is a whole different one.
Plenty of people enjoy Duolingo. And I wouldn’t say it’s a dead end any more than simple picture books or a total beginners class. Will it turn you into a fluent speaker? No, so what.
> No, so what.
Because it promotes itself as a platform to learn fluency. That’s why it’s important to recognize its limitations.
I guess I just don’t know anyone who doesn’t recognize the limitations, perhaps that’s a function of an environment where we all know multiple languages already.
My impression of duolingo was strongly influenced by a former PM who said basically what OP said without any hint of ill will in their voice. Duolingo discovered that it was easier to reward-hack short term signals of language learning instead of scaffolding those signals into longterm language learning. Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.
That’s not even a diss, it’s just The Way Of The World when you are directly rewarded for growth and retention and very indirectly for language learning.
It's an interesting coincidence, but I think there is a reason that the te-form in Japanese is much more fruitful than "and" in English in producing these constructs. Japanese verbs have too conjunctive forms: te-form and ren'youkei[1] (continuative form). Ren'youkei、 is more formal and has a different but overlapping range of conditions in which it can be used. The "te-form" itself was originally[2] just the ren'youkei conjugation of a special auxiliary verb "tsu", that is used to mark a completed action.
Neither of these forms is nearly as flexible as the conjunction "and" in English. For one, they can only connect verbs and one class of adjectives, but another important point is that the actions described by the verbs need to occur sequentially in time, with the action marked by '-te' occuring earlier. You cannot use either of these forms to say something like "The dog kept jumping and wagging its tail" or "It's important to both eat and drink".
If we compare this to how linguists define "pseudocoordination" in English and other Germanic languages, then every instance of the te-form or ren'youkei in Japanese is pseudocoordination and not real coordination: you cannot reorder the verbs freely, you cannot add "both", and you can use an interrogative pronoun. Since these limitations apply to every use of the te-form and ren'youkei, not just the "special case" ones, it makes these form more amenable for building special construct. Add the fact that Japanese does not have an infinitive form, and you end up with either of these forms as the most natural way to attach auxiliary verbs in Japanese.
Now you end up with a plethora of constructions (demonstrated with the verb 作る tsukuru "to make"):
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_conjugation#Conjuncti...[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/v08pbp/brief...
Funnily enough, this has resulted in people saying things like "見てみましょう" and "見てみてください", which confused me at first. But I suppose this is like non-native English speakers being confused by the extra "do" in phrases like "I already did do my work."
Hungarian works the same, well I guess the few agglutinative languages do share this element
> Hungarian works the same, well I guess the few agglutinative languages do share this element
Not sure what you mean. In Hungarian, the verb meaning "to try" is (meg)próbálni, which does not mean "to see." Its argument is typically given as an infinitive verb, which would never be translated using the pseudocoordination described above, and there is no related form that would be translated as "and".
The point I was waiting for them to get to was saved for last: entails completion.
Try to do something, you might or might not do it. “I’m going to try to persuade them to decide in my favor.”
Try and do something, you expect to get it done one way or another. “I’m goin down there to try and straighten them out.”
I don’t have a long history of research in this going back to the 1500s, but I grew up in southeast Texas, and this is how I’ve always understood it to be used around here, when it is used with any intention at least.
Funny how the grammar write-ups treat it as basically synonymous with "try to," but the lived nuance can be totally different depending on where you grew up.
Interesting, where I’m from in southern california, “try and” doesn’t entail completion. (The article only mentions this for “go and”, which here does indeed entail expected completion.)
So when I ask people to do me a favor, use "try and". And when I need to answer somebody, use "try to".
Doesn’t “try” imply possibility of failure to complete?
"Could you wash the dog?"
Is not a question asking whether the person is capable of washing the dog. It's a command phrased politely.
"Try to wash the dog"
"Try and wash the dog"
If you had no prior information on whether the dog likes water or not, I'd say that the try-and version expresses a greater level of confidence that washing the dog will be successful, in other words it's a command.
Whereas try-to could be read either straight (this task may fail) or as a command phrased politely.
It still implies possibility of failure, but in the example of the commenter above, that possibility is almost low enough to the point of expectation (but not quite) and "try to" would increase that possibility in the direction of failure. Nuance!
I think most of the mysteries in this piece can be explained if “try and stop me” just an abbreviation for “try to stop me and see if you can”.
You can also interpret the Dr Dre quote an abbreviation of, “I’m gonna try (to change the course of hip hop again) and change the course of hip hop again.”
In this form “try and” means you will try to do something and that you will succeed. Some of the articles tests make more sense in this light; Of course you wouldn’t reorder the trying and the succeeding because that’s the order the events will happen.
This ignores the fact that “try and” developed concurrently with “try to” and possibly before. So it wasn’t originally an abbreviation for a phrase that was yet to be established.
"I have tried and finished my homework" is correct to my ear (possibly because I'm Canadian), but it means successful completion as opposed to "I have tried to finish my homework" implying I didn't get around to it.
That's not what "try and" means though. It's perfectly fine to say "I'm gonna try and fix this" when you don't know if you can fix it.
(Source: I say that shit all the time).
I would only say "try and" if I thought it was likely that I'd at least make some progress towards the goal.
If I expected failure, I'd instead say "try to" fix it.
For me, if someone says "try and see for yourself", it implies possibility of failure or something new.
If outcome is considered in terms of success or failure then try implies non-zero probability of failure. If outcome isn't considered in terms of success or failure then "try this flavour of ice-cream" is experience and try this outfit(fits or doesn't) is a test you can't fail. Philosophically, it is as master Yoda said: Do or do not, there is no try.
Maybe, but even if true, it's still very clearly different from what the parent said.
To me, "I"m gonna try and fix it before I buy a new one, but that's probably what I'm gonna have to do" is a fine sentence.
I think "Try and X" means "Try to X and do X" which means to my mind means to attempt and, upon success of the trial, to complete X.
"I’ll try and eat the salad." could be expressed as "I'll try eating some of the salad and, if possible, finish eating it."
This is a good intuition. The construction is actually sometimes jokingly called the "Try And"-C, where "C" stands for Complementizer, a thing that introduces and subordinates a clause.
Over time, people probably stopped needing to say the "and see if you can" part because the meaning was already baked in
This is also in line with skrebbel's observation in this thread that the phrase indicates a focused attempt.
I don’t think that’s anything like the meaning of “I’ll try and go to the store tomorrow”. There’s no implication that anyone is trying to stop me.
Also, your abbreviation analysis would still leave a syntactic mystery, as that sort of ellipsis doesn’t seem to follow any general attested pattern of ellipsis in English.
That example would be something like 'I'll try to go to the store tomorrow and see if I can' along the lines GP suggests. 'stop me' only came from the specific example they were using.
You can actually construct this using regular VP ellipsis (or possibly Right Node Raising?) in English, but it sounds weird and doesn’t convey the same meaning. So I don’t think so.
“I’ll try to ___ and see if I can go to the store tomorrow”. [where ___ is the VP ‘go to the store’]
Then you have the various syntactic facts mentioned in the article , such as the possibility of wh-extraction. This isn’t possible in an analogous ellipsis construction:
“What did you try and eat?”
* ”What did you try to and see if you can eat?”
There’s also an interesting tense restriction which suggests that there’s no independent elided clause:
*”I tried and go/went to the store yesterday.”
"What did you try but spit out?"
That’s a regular case of across-the-board extraction from a coordination (where ‘try’ has a nominal direct object rather than a clausal complement):
What did you try ___ but spit ___ out?
The examples in the linked article involve extraction from just one coordinand, which is impossible in “real” coordinate structures.
Your examples are not ringing bells for me as a native speaker. The linguistics terms may or may not be confounding, but are too unfamiliar for me to discuss.
“Try, and [if successful] [do the thing].”
Sorry, I don't understand what you are getting at. What is the significance of the quoted sentence?
> I don’t think that’s anything like the meaning of
Parent post said "most"; you've identified an exception.
If you check the parent comment, the 'most' applied to the fraction of mysteries, not the the fraction of instances of the construction that the analysis is supposed to apply to. But anyway, this isn't an exception. The overwhelming generalization is that "try and do X" means the same as "try to do X". This holds for imperatives like the OP's example just as much as for my examples. There's very little difference between the to/and variants of any of the following:
Try and/to do it quietly
Try and/to be a little more polite.
Try and/to hand your homework in on time.
I agree that in some specific cases there are slightly different shades of meaning. However, this doesn't seem to be a very systematic phenomenon, or one that obviously justifies the assumption that "try and" is an elliptical expression of a complex multi-clausal construction.
I also like how several linguists attempt to call out this usage as wrong:
> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
You can't really reign in language.
Linguists don’t say varieties are right or wrong (even though they might have private aesthetic opinions like everyone else). That would be like a biologist saying dogs are the correct version of mammals and cats are wrong and/or don’t exist.
Biologists actually say the opposite of that!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-are-perfect-...
Just because someone has a degree and a job in the field doesn't mean they understand how science works. Prescriptive biology is even sillier than prescriptive linguistics.
I think her tongue is planted firmly in cheek.
*rein in
Some things like this are nevertheless generally known to be wrong despite usage
Though you also can't reign, in language.
If a modern linguist call any usage as wrong, I would ask for his diploma and check if I have to close his university, because clearly they shouldn't teach linguistics 101, let alone bring someone towards a PhD. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Then linguistics is worthless. Descriptivism can't actually tell you anything; all someone can say is "yep, you sure are using that word that way". Fortunately prescriptivists still exist despite people's best efforts to give it a bad name.
How can you learn about how people spoke and the patterns that dictate how that changed over time if all you care about is what is considered technically correct at the moment?
Linguistics can explain why and how the language evolve, who caused this evolution. I don't know any modern linguist (as in doctor in linguistics) who ever wrote 'you should say this and not that', because all of them knows that languages change. The only 'prescriptivists' are bad philosophers and English majors.
These are not linguists doing that. No self-respecting linguists will waste time doing prescriptivism. These are two linguistic articles about this constructs that are quoting amateur language usage manuals. The oldest one is a boys magazine[1] published in 1864 discussing "the Queen's English"[2]. The newest one (Crews et al.) seems to be an obscure usage manual for writers[3].
As demonstrated here, "try and" is older and more "original" than "try to", if not contemporary with it. Any other reason why would "try to" be more "correct" cannot even make sense as anything more than a purely uneducated opinion. When you dig deep into most examples of perspectivism you'll usually run into the same story too. "Incorrect" forms often predate the "correct" forms and are often employed by respected writers (such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen). And even if they don't, there isn't really any scientific ground to brand one form as incorrect.
Linguists do not generally engage in linguist prescriptivism. As far as I'm concerned (and I believe most linguists would agree), this is stylistic opinion at best and pseudoscience at worst. Still, it's not linguists can do anything to stop amateurs from publishing prescriptive language usage manuals, so you'll always have people who claim that "try and" or "ain't" or "me and my friend went for a walk" are incorrect.
[1] https://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_periodical.php?j...
[2] Yes, this is Edmund Routledge whose father is the namesake of the present scholarly publisher, but they were just publishing popular books back in the 19th century.
[3] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Frederick-Crews/dp/0070136386
And this is why I cringe whenever somebody tries to defend Perl's syntax by perlsplaining "But Larry Wall is a linguist!"
The people they’re citing are either authors of usage guides or linguists who are simply noting that the usage has been deemed incorrect by some of the former.
I think this capture’s the essence better than anything else, “try and” simply behaving as “try and see if I can” (or whatever fits instead of “I” here)
It's kind of funny that in Norwegian, people mix up the infinitive "to" and "and", as they are pronounced the same, "o" in IPA. So we have the same thing in Norwegian writing, but if you happen to use "and", you must use the imperative form of the verb for it to be grammatically correct. So, "try to stop me" is "prøv å stoppe meg", and "try and stop me" is "prøv og stopp meg". The latter is much more colloquial.
This isn't a problem in Swedish and Danish, as their infinitive marker is "att/at", which in Norwegian only means "that" in its conjunctive form.
I wonder if there's any relation to the Norwegian here.
Actually, the situation is even weirder in Swedish! Even though we write "att", it is pronounced "o" when used to mark an infinitive but not when used like the word "that" in English. So, in the sentence
the first "att" (that) is pronounced similar to its orthography but the second one (to) is pronounced "o".https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/att#Swedish
Professor Faarlund might agree
> In his 2014 paper "English: The Language of the Vikings" (co-authored by Joseph Embley Emonds), Faarlund and Emonds assert that English is a Scandinavian language (or North Germanic language) which was influenced by Anglo-Saxon (a West Germanic language) [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Terje_Faarlund
And in that case, "try and" is potentially very old and very "correct" English.
I don't disagree but I don't follow what you mean in response to Faarlund's theory?
"Try and" has a very Norse/Scandinavian/Swedish feel to it.
He may be referring to what I suspect too, that even though it is unlikely that any one Germanic language has the key to this, let alone the many similar linguistic mysteries, deeply diving into each of the languages to graph connections will likely provide the best chance at solving such things.
I believe that not only do we have a hard time with this matter because our conception of what “try” means today is not original, but also that effectively “try and” and “try to” are effectively different concepts of the mind that we simply do not understand anymore, homographs whose separate original meanings and appropriate uses have been lost over time.
I look forward to what LLMs will be able to unlock with this kind of historical and linguistic analysis. I think we will start unlocking some interesting this this way. I could see us being able to, to some degree, rewind linguistic history and also then apply it to historical context. Imagine an LLM that can not only graph all languages and meanings in those languages, but will also be able to infer meanings and origins going back into history by cross referencing all related languages … at least with some degree of accuracy greater than what we can do today. Now we just need all historical texts in digital form and to not erase all life on the planet.
First thing I thought of when reading the linked post! You explained it for a non-Norwegian audience better than I could have too!
> regular coordination permits the order of conjuncts to be changed, while in (7) we see that the same is not possible with try and (De Vos 2005:59).
But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.
It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”
The emphasis is a really interesting point and overlooked by the article. Your "went and" examples do seem very analogous to "try and". "He went and got himself arrested again," is less about the going and almost exclusively emphasizing the other half of the conjunction.
"Try and" can operate the same way by de-emphasizing the trying. If Dr. Dre said "I'm gonna try to change the course of hip hop again," the sentence is about attempting to do something. On the other hand, "try and" makes the sentence more assured- Dr Dre is going try it and then do it.
I wonder if this half about ordering, half about emphasizing is the reason for the special rules of usage.
> You can’t change the order.
You are confusing semantics with grammatical correctness. In both your examples, they would still be grammatically correct with reversed order.
(I would actually suggest they are still semantically reasonable too, but that's besides the point).
Funny how the same surface structure can be either neutral or judgment-loaded depending on the verb
>I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.
A group works together. One offers to get flour, another offers to bake the cake.
A third could offer, "I'm going to both get some flour and bake a cake."
It would make sense to use "both."
As a nonnative speaker of English who lived more than 30 years in an English speaking country, "try and" sounds to me as bad as "should of". Right or wrong, I perceive it as something an "uneducated" person would say. That said, I firmly believe that correct language is whatever people deem to be appropriate for their communication.
> sounds to me as bad as "should of"
Interesting that you've used the spelling mistake which is perhaps why you hate it?
If you heard "should've" or "should have" then perhaps it wouldn't annoy you so much??? Also listen for would've / could've
But listening to https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/should_of_would_of_c... made me wonder if people do clearly pronounce the "of" in "should of"... Now I'm worried that I'm going to hear the mistake and be annoyed.
There is nothing more annoying than being told something annoying, and then learning to be annoyed by it.
Try not to internalise that dictum or it will recursively annoy you.
Next time you hear a really annoying vague repetitive/intermittent sound at work, mention it to a coworker if you wish to ruin their worklife.
(Minor edits). I often hear people who have learned English make a particular class of mistake (usually pronunciation) that is a result of being taught English by reading from books. Modern schooling for languages causes certain types of mistakes. There is a natural mimicking art/skill to learning a language by ear. Unfortunately the art isn't taught and is hardly even recognized: perhaps because it works best with intense one-on-one interaction and intent. Book learning was the default that our society used, and some well-educated people prefer books. When learning spoken English it is important to try and ignore spelling. Natural English speakers learn the spelling after learning the language and are in an environment where we have tricks to learn pronunciation of unfamiliar words. There is a strong classist/academic ridiculing of people that make the mistake of pronouncing a word as it is spelled (knowing how words are "properly" pronounced is an important distinction to many people - as is received wordplay).
Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't.
It also depends on the audience and medium, with "should've" being more appropriate for conversational/informal usage. It would be perfectly normal to say something like "he shouldn't've done that," but if I were writing a message, I'd at least expand the last contraction to "have."
I think there's a general perception that many of the common dialects of American English, especially in the South and West, are associated with being less educated. I am not sure where that comes from.
I'm a native English speaker, and my perception is that when someone speaks in a way where they don't use contractions, it seems verbose and stilted; I associate it with being scolded or disciplined, or when someone is speaking sternly to make a point (or out of anger). E.g.: "You don't know where you're going, you should've taken a left" - informative/neutral "You do not know where you are going, you should have taken a left" - critical/scolding
Omitting contractions can result in speech that sounds strange and unnatural in general: "Shouldn't we go?" -> "Should not we go?" "Aren't you coming?" -> "Are not you coming?" "We didn't, but we should've." -> "We did not, but we should have."
> Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't.
I think they specifically meant "should of" which is a colloquial form of "should've" in a number of places in the UK.
I went to school with a large number of people who would write "I should of done X instead of Y". In fact I'm pretty sure I made that "mistake" a number of times growing up.
We are not talking about writing; we’re talking about language.
Is there really a difference in how “should have” and “should’ve” are pronounced? There isn’t in any accent I’m familiar with.
> Is there really a difference in how “should have” and “should’ve” are pronounced?
I sure hope so, one's a contraction and the other is not...
Likely gp meant "should of" and "should've."
I meant "should of", especially in writing. I am not sure if "should've" is supposed to sound the same as "should of", but seeing the latter in writing annoys me a lot for some reason.
They sound the same in most American English accents, at least.
(This response contains another funny modern colloquialism: 'a lot' gets used by both native and non-native English speakers where 'many' or 'greatly' is prescribed. Not that we need to be prescriptivists, of course.)
How can “should of” sound bad to you, when it sounds identical to (a not super carefully enunciated pronunciation of) “should have”, at least in every dialect I’m aware of
Except in rapid speech, and particularly at the end of sentences, I can definitely hear “should of” being used by some people in local Australian English.
Guess it depends on the country? As a native speaker of British English “try and” sounds fine to me, and in some cases would flow more naturally than “try to”
They are not even remotely the same. "should of" is a phonetic issue. of is spoken with the schwa vowel uh, so the o sounds like uh, and the f takes the v sound, so "should of" sounds like "should uhv", and "should have/should 've" sounds exactly the same, "should uhv". The issue is that folks that don't read much hear "should uhv" and think it's should of, so when they write "should of" because they expect should 've to sound like "should have" even tho they completely use the contraction when they speak!
It's like saying that people with accents come across as uneducated when it come just be that the person has a deafness to American th and hears t does a substitute so they will say ting instead of thing or tin in place of thin. With that said, I grew up speaking/hearing the form of British english and "Try and" sounds perfectly fine to me.
Prompted by reading an instance of "try and" instead of "try to" in an HN-linked Register article[1] this morning, I thought this might be of interest to both non-native and native English speakers in our community.
Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
[1]: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639)
I thought from the title that this was going to be about some new exception handling mechanism in a programming language I'm not familiar with. In fact, the article was even more interesting than that, as I've often wondered about this in the past but never quite got to looking it up. Thank you!
That’s exactly what happened with me. I expected some interesting programming content but ended up spending 20 minutes (so far) thinking about English grammar.
In his comments on the use of symbols P and V in semaphores, Dijkstra gave the reason for choosing P as it having come from "probeer te verlagen", which he infamously explained that when translated into English means "try and decrease" [sic].
To me, “try to catch me!” feels more formal than “try and catch me!” Which feels kinda playful, but are both saying basically the same thing.
I think “try and” is used more by children than by adults, which is why it works well in this sort of playful, childlike phrase.
Different sociolinguistic register, innit.
Basically yes, but I do hear nuance, idk if it's right - "try and" feels more daring, like "I think you can't", while "try to" feels more neutral, just a command.
You are right on the nuance. "try and catch me" for me, means I'm going to give it my all not to be caught and I believe I will not be caught. Good luck, try and catch me.
"Try to catch me" means I think you might have some chance.
Yeah like if a kid runs off and says “try to catch me!” It’s a “c’mon and play!” But “try and catch me” is a challenge, a dare, a taunt even.
"try and <clause>" is syntactically correct.
That is to say,
> I'm going to try and change the course of Hip-Hop.
can be parsed as
> I'm going to try; I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop.
which has been subject to a well-understood extraposition process to factor out the leading "I'm going to" from all the clauses, so that a single copy of it distributes into all of them.
It's essentially the same as what is going on in the following unassailably correct sentence:
> I'm going to turn on the TV, crack open a beer, and watch the game".
Also note that this "and" is not something which exclusively pairs with "try":
> Linguists, go ahead and fight me!
There's explanations in the article of why 'try and' can't be parsed as simply as that kind of parallel ellipsis structure.
No reordering: You can't rephrase as I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop and try the way you can I'm going to watch the game and crack open a beer
No use of both: You can't say I'm going to both try and change the course of Hip-Hop the way you could I'm going to both crack open a beer and watch the game
No inflections: You can't say I have tried and changed the course of Hip-Hop the way you can I have cracked open a beer and watched the game
It makes sense from a boolean perspective. E.g "I'll try and go to the store." If the try fails, you did not go to the store.
Only if your language has short-circuiting booleans.
That’s just the meaning of “try” tho; “I’ll try to go to the store” is identical in meaning
For that matter, "trying" is implied by "going", and you could just say "I'll go to the store".
Interestingly this pattern also exists in Danish (though not for the same reasons). Correctly speaking you’d say “try to…” which is “prøv at…”, but since the infinitive “at” and “og” sort of both turned into /ə/ when quickly spoken and you get “prøv og…”.
Pseudo coordination is a fun phenomenon in Scandinavian. Lots of detail in NALS: https://tekstlab.uio.no/nals#/chapter/65 but an important difference with English is that the Scandinavian construction occurs with many more verbs in the first conjunct, not just _try_.
Interesting. I’ve never encountered this before in Danish. Their examples seem very dialect-ish.
This sounds a little closer to “should’v” which should be “should have” but then people also say “should of”
Every time I read something like this, I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something - all that matters is that your intended audience understands it, eventually.
> I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something
Weirdly, that's not what this says. It specifically says you can't say this:
> * John will both try and kill mosquitos.
or
> * I tried and finished the assignment
or
> * Try always and tell the truth
What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct. What you were taught is the "prescribed grammar" or "prestige grammar".
Also, grammar is voted on by speakers of a language. I'm generally against making fun of people for deviating from the prestige grammar; but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
Nobody has ever used “literally” to mean “figuratively”. That’s a common misconception and/or a strawman from people who want to stick to the original meaning of “literally”.
If that were the meaning, you would be able to say things like “I stubbed my toe and it hurts so bad I’m figuratively dying”, mirroring the colloquial meaning of “literally”. But nobody says this.
The actual new and non-traditional meaning of “literally” is as a generic intensifier, see e.g. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/literally
Oh, and by the way, the “traditional” meaning isn’t even the first one. According to my OED second edition, “literal” meaning “Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact.” is only attested since 1599.
The actual original meaning of “literal”: “of or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical” is attested since 1475.
But your link gives two senses, and it's the second one that applies here: "Used as an intensifier with statements or terms that are in fact meant figuratively and not word for word as stated". And Wiktionary offers the synonyms virtually and so to speak.
"it hurts so bad I’m intensely dying" would be wrong too. It's more than an intensifier, it also means "figuratively".
> It's more than an intensifier, it also means "figuratively".
No, its an intensifier for things which are contextually unambiguously figurative. It doesn't communicate that the use is figurative, it communicates intensity. The figurative nature of the expression is understood from context, not the use of the word "literally".
> Used as an intensifier with statements or terms that are in fact meant figuratively and not word for word as stated
That is not the same as the meaning of “figuratively”!
“‘Literally’ is used with statements that are meant figuratively” does not mean the same thing as “‘Literally’ means ‘figuratively’”.
> "it hurts so bad I’m intensely dying" would be wrong too
Indeed, because “intensely” is not an intensifier. In your example, “intensely” modifies “dying”, whereas “literally” modifies the tone of your utterance.
For an example of another intensifier: “it hurts so bad I’m fucking dying” would work.
Nobody would claim that “fucking” means the same thing as “figuratively” in this sentence, even though the sentence is itself figurative.
> The actual new and non-traditional meaning of “literally” is as a generic intensifier
"Literally" is used as an intensifier in two situations:
1. When speaking neither figuratively nor hyperbolically -- i.e., when the thing you're saying is... er, literally true. (e.g., "The beach is literally a five-minute walk from my house"; "You literally fold the cravat like this")
2. When speaking either figuratively or hyperbolically (e.g., "My head literally exploded"; "The island was literally catapulted into the 21st century")
I have no problem with the first; I do it myself. It's the second I object to.
Why? The hint is in #1 -- right now, literally is the only word we have to say that this actually really happened, that what's being said is neither figurative nor hyperbolic.
That is, the first is not a generic intensifier. It intensifies it because it's actually true.
Loads of other words that used to perform the same function have become meaningless intensifiers: "really" (from "real"), "very" (from "verily" -> "in truth"), "truly".
I think language should be practical. Double negatives are perfectly understandable and feel to me more poetic (if less logically expressive). Using "they" for a single person of unspecified gender is a practical and long-standing solution to a real problem. "Megabyte" is a lot easier to say than "mebibyte".
And, we need a word to mean "I'm not speaking figuratively or hyperbolically"; we don't need Yet Another Meaningless Intensifier. We have "literally", let's keep it.
> Nobody has ever used “literally” to mean “figuratively”.
People do that all the damn time!!! It's one of the single most abominable practices in modern English.
Did you read the rest of the comment?
> The actual original meaning of “literal”: “of or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical” is attested since 1475.
That meaning comes from the Latin "littera"/"litera", meaning letter or character. Words like "transliteration" are based on this root meaning (https://www.etymonline.com/word/transliteration)
Here's the page for "literal": https://www.etymonline.com/word/literal
>> but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
Can we have also declare war on using "exponentially" in place of "significantly"?
Or “decimated”’to mean “practically destroyed” when it means the opposite…
Interesting use of "declare war" there... :)
I understand the feeling, but language is what language does. It will change and you will notice those changes if you're alive long enough :)
Even prescriptivist languages (as my own native language tends to be) cannot escape. I'm bad at my own native language because I've been living elsewhere for very long... but not as bad as the Kids These Days :)
There is no such thing as a “prescriptive language”. What would that mean?
No living language is only used according to the rules laid down by grammar teachers. The only languages that are are dead languages like Latin with zero native speakers.
You can participate in these changes. You can participate by resisting if you want. That's not futile, it's part of the process.
> If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct.
In their dialect, sure. In any given dialect, who knows?
Any speaker of a dialect that isn't West Coast American has likely watched actors who live in Los Angeles try, and fail, to speak their dialect.
Of course. Just like what I’m writing now isn’t grammatically correct Spanish or Chinese.
Well, no, but I can't understand 99% of Spanish and Chinese using my knowledge of my native English dialect, so I'm not going to lecture Spanish or Chinese speakers on correct grammar.
My point was that differences between dialects drive a lot of arguments about grammar. If I'm annoyed about the phrase "could care less" then that originates in my native dialect not allowing it. Not being part of the prestige grammar is secondary, as is whether the phrase makes any logical sense.
> If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct.
What if two non-native speakers say something and understand each other?
That’s a pidgin.
Then they’re having a useful, but not grammatically correct, conversation.
It may be grammatically correct in the dialect they're using.
There's plenty of mutually-intelligible English spoken outside of primarily English-speaking countries which native English speakers would consider ungrammatical, but that's only relative to their own dialect.
> What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct.
By your own logic, "literally" meaning "figuratively" is grammatically correct. Which just goes to show that your logic is wrong. Something can in fact be grammatically incorrect even when said by native speakers.
Although it is a little odd and I'm not certain I've seen it in writing, I have definitely heard constructions like "John will both try and kill mosquitos." to mean, "John will both attempt to and succeed in kill[ing] mosquitos."
"John will both try and like sushi" makes perfect sense, although there's an implied "to eat" verb separate from the "to like" verb in there that isn't present in the constructions the article is talking about.
Likewise, "I tried and finished the assignment," means "I tried (to do) the assignment and I finished it." Again, maybe not in writing, but with a certain inflection on 'tried' (where in writing maybe you'd put a comma or semi-colon to indicate a pause) this is something people actually say; although they may emphasis it with "I finally tried and actually finished the assignment." (Whereas maybe previously they weren't confident they could even do it and maybe didn't try.)
Included for no real reason: "They tried and failed, all of them?" "Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."
These are all just different constructions that are related to "try and" only by coincidence. The fact that a different construction looks similar to a grammatically incoherent one by coincidence doesn't make the incoherent one coherent.
I disagree. GP is laying is laying out reasonable scenarios that are a few dropped/implied words away from the otherwise incoherent ones. For my part, this one is very grating to my ears:
"Try and tell the truth"
Since it clearly should be "try to tell the truth"
However this one, while similar in construction, doesn't actually sound nearly as bad:
"Try and finish the assignment"
It can be fixed the same way ("try to finish") but it also accept GP's form too, which would be "try (to work hard) and (see if you can) finish the assignment". As I say, for whatever reason this second example sounds much more reasonable to me— I think at least in part my brain is much more accepting of a word that feels dropped than one that's misused.
There's a more standard, general rule in English grammar that web searches tell me is called "delayed right constituent coordination". It lets you read sentences like "He washed and dried the clothes" as "He washed [the clothes] and dried the clothes." The same object gets applied to both verbs.
I suspect that's what you're applying to these sentences. "Try and finish the assignment" makes some sense under this rule if you read it as "Try [the assignment,] and finish the assignment" -- an "assignment" is a thing that makes sense to "try". ("He tried [sushi,] and liked sushi" works for the same reason.) But "Try [the truth,] and tell the truth" doesn't work -- it doesn't make sense to interpret "trying" the truth as some separate action you're taking before you "tell" it.
So probably you just don't have the article's special try-and "pseudo-coordination" rule in your dialect.
This makes a lot of sense, and it definitely explains where other "try and" sentences work while "try and finish" doesn't at all.
The try and in “try and tell the truth” is a different idiom from “[try] and [x]” as two separate actions. It can almost always be replaced with “try to”.
For example, in “let’s try and finish this” it does not mean trying then finishing, it is try to finish. The construction is more obvious in a phrase like “try and stop me”. This phrasing is very common in movies, it might just not be as popular in your area.
Those examples seem to differ significantly because they're using "try" as an imperative.
> but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
https://imgur.com/QBTlxf7
A real flammable/inflammable moment
>Try always and tell the truth
I think the article is incorrect on this though, try always and tell the truth is a perfectly fine albeit slightly anachronistic usage that would mean
Whatever you do you must always try (that is to say not give up), and tell the truth.
One might also assume that you should tell the truth about trying always is the meaning, but at any rate it is not a phrasing that would be out of order a few hundred years ago.
That's not the point. While it's a valid sentence, as you point out, it means something different from "try and always tell the truth".
In contrast "try to always tell the truth" and "try always to tell the truth" are both valid and mean the same thing.
Dr Dre is a professional poet and a very successful one by any standard. His whole stock-in-trade was American urban colloquialisms most of which can be traced back to English rural and working class and predate the colonization of the Americas. The early development of English "prestige grammar" and word usage dates back to the court of William the Conqueror and the reintroduction of romance linguistic influence on Anglo-Saxon English that lead to the development of Middle English by the 13th Century. What you understand as English "prestige grammar" today is a moving target, consistently evolving but still full of contradictions and single-case rules. Many popular European languages today have been modified to exclude these linguistic anomalies, making them more consistent, less error prone and easier to learn. I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
*stock-in-trade: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stock-in-trade
Sorry, in this thread, I had to!
> I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
This has already been happening in English, for centuries. Compare these examples given in the article to modern English:
> 3) ...howe and by what certaine and generall rule I mighte trye and throughly discerne the veritie of the catholike faithe, from the falsehood of wicked heresye... (1554) > 4) You maie (saide I) trie and bring him in, and shewe him to her. (1569)
I suppose after more than 450 years, one might expect even more simplification, but it is perhaps the fate of a lingua franca to have more "backward compatibility" than less widely-used languages.
My point was that English has been changing and in some instances those changes might have occurred to remove anomalous characteristics but English does have more old warts than most popular languages and I expect many of those will be removed as English recedes from its position of dominance over the next century.
In that context, 'literally' as figuratively makes the same sense as inflammable and flammable.
It's just one more errata in a language that's filled with horrible hacks from centuries of iterative development.
My hill to die on would be exactly one way (NOT the funky dictionary way!) of spelling words exactly as they should be pronounced and writing them back similarly.
The hill to die on part of that is they need to start with children, teach them ONLY the correct way of spelling words as use in school and stick to it. While we're at it, FFS, do metric measures conversion the same way. Cold turkey force it, and bleed in dual measures and spelling with a cutover plan that starts to make the new correct way required to be larger text by the time the grade -2 kids graduate. (So about a 14-15 year plan.) That's to give all us adults time to bash into our heads the new spellings for old words too.
Why can't it be dictionary spelling? Offhand, 1) those phonetics aren't used quite like that anywhere else. 2) those phonetics are more strongly based on the other languages in Europe so the structure isn't as expected. I'd sooner force everyone to learn how to write TUNIC's shapes... though there's some coverage issues for that.
Effectively I want different shapes for the chart ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... ) that DO NOT MATCH EXISTING ENGLISH LETTERS so that when I look at a 'new spelling' my old pronunciation programmed brain doesn't index the wrong lookup table.
The problem with "one spelling the way it is said" is that (1) pronunciation varies among native speakers even within the same country or region. (So, at best, you'd have to pick a winner or just count them all as different languages with their own spellings.) (2) Pronunciation drifts over time (and I'm not sure an official spelling and pronunciation could stop it).
The other reason is that there are many countries that speak English, and the largest and most powerful one is too politically dysfunctional to ever agree on something that would be this controversial.
Not going to happen. No one’s ever going to successfully retrofit a logical system into English. English has even got two words (guarantee and warrantee) which are spelled and pronounced slightly different while meaning the same thing because they were borrowed from French separately at different times.
There are loads of examples like that. Guard and ward, for example.
How would that work for wood?
Although it doesn't work for mosquitos, it does work for "bandits":
John will both try and kill bandits.
... meaning that John will serve as judge and executioner, if not jury.
Here's where HN needs a "cry-laughing" emoji. :-)
Irregardless of this, what's your take on irregardless?
Irregardless is fine and people who try to be pedantic about it are just mistaken. It is literally in the dictionary as an intensified form of “regardless”.
That's cap. 'Ir' is usually used in the english language to denote the negative of the following property that follows it, e.g. irrespective meaning not respective. Regardless alone signals the negative assertion of the following property, so a prepending of 'ir' before it connotes a not-not, a double negative, and against the context of what is trying to be communicated. Having a problem with this abuse of language/meaning/communication is to be expected.
It’s not an abuse of language or meaning or communication. It’s a rule that you really want to be true for English but which unfortunately has exceptions. Irregardless is one of those exceptions. It’s not a word that I personally use because I don’t like it (probably for the reasons you’re articulating) but English doesn’t actually care what you or I think. Using “irregardless” as a synonym for “regardless” or “irrespective” is not incorrect.
OED calls it a “nonstandard or humorous use” https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=Irreg...
Yep "correctness" only exists contextually. A language teacher can say "no that's wrong" with the implied meaning of "that doesnt follow the patterns of the dialect I'm teaching you". Ditto for newspaper editors and their house style.
But in 99% of situations no such context exists and "that's grammatically incorrect" is a bullshit statement.
In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling. It's widely done and widely accepted but personally I think it's pointless and somewhat toxic.
(Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".)
> Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".
Many of those languages have mutually unintelligible dialects. The reference implementation exists to patch communication when you run into trouble with people who aren’t from your village.
Even American English has this. People from Appalachia register switch to more standard English when they’re not home, for example. Or a high schooler will tamper their slang when talking to grandma.
You could also argue international business English is a contrived dialect used primarily by ESL speakers. It definitely has many differences from any English spoken natively at home.
Yes I experience this regularly with Hochdeutsch and I stand by my point. You still don't speak the language exactly as specified and it's still nonsensical to "correct" someone's grammar/pronunciation if you understood them.
> In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling.
Same is true in the US, though ethnicity is in the mix too. White and black Americans are historically distinct cultural groups which speak different dialects (though obviously, since the end of slavery and segregation the groups are mixing more and more). It is no coincidence that varieties spoken by white people ended up as the “standard”.
I've thought a lot about this one. It really is the message that matters, not the grammar. It's the song, not the notes.
It's also that language is pretty inherently a very fuzzy, ambiguous, and imprecise thing. If I say, "I've left my cup on the table," then you know what I mean even though you've never seen my cup nor my table. Everyone reading that sentence is equally convinced that it's quite concrete, even though everyone is also imagining a completely different cup on a completely different table.
Even more fascinating, it's likely that nobody that ever reads this post will have met me in person. We have not specifically agreed in advance what our words mean, merely relied upon collective agreement based solely on historic usage.
Honestly, the idea that two people who have never met, never seen each other, maybe never even lived in the same hemisphere, might speak the same language and be able to converse freely is an astonishing feat of magic.
As far as grammar is concerned, yes, that's true.
But register also matters. A communication is about much more than the surface meaning. It conveys a lot about the relationship between speaker and listener. Some languages formalize that grammatically, but it's present in myriad other ways.
Adhering to the arbitrary rules of correctness is one. Saying "try and" in a resume cover letter probably conveys a message of slackness and over-familiarity. Which might be a deliberate choice, but you're better off if you at least know you're making it.
I fail to imagine how one could use "try and" in a resume, without actively trying to.
Yes and constantly obstructing communication is annoying and boring!
Imagine sitting listening to a lecture on quantum effects in biology or something similarly fascinating and someone in the audience obstructs because the lecturer said paetent not patent (or vice versa). Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.
> Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.
Ellipses are properly written as three dots.
Anything over one dot communicates the idea effectively.. the difference between two or three dots is irrelevant... Ellipses look like squares......... Close up they are circles....
That’s not true. With two dots, it can as plausibly be a typo of a single dot. In fact, in your GP post I was assuming that you hit the dot key a second time instead of the space key by mistake, and ignored the resulting lack of auto-capitalization. (Granted, the fact that ellipses are usually separated by a space from what follows also played a role.)
This is tedium... what was the original message about? Can't remember now!
As a EE wannabe, I see everything in terms of impedance matching. It's all a very high dimension matching problem we tend to get good at, in order to survive.
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin
That depends on the purpose of your writing.
I think we can all agree of "5 items or fewer" though right
(jk)
Sure, but you do still have to try and get your point across.
I think of language like a lossy encoder-decoder system.
You compress/encode your thoughts into words. The the listener/reader decompresses/decodes your words into thoughts. As long as we don't think thoughts and words are the same thing, then yeah, you're right.
I think this also helps with communication in general because it forces you to think more about what someone is saying. There's no way you can put all your thoughts into words. Decoding is highly affected by prior knowledge, culture, and all that jazz. It's why you can make a confusing array of unintelligible noises and gestures at a friend and they'll understand but everyone else around is left confused. I think this also explains a lot of fights on the internet, as it is easy to misinterpret and with no perfect encoding it's hard to write to an audience of everyone.
> there is truly no correct way to say something
Yes, there is. Linguistic descriptivism is a stale 1960s academic fad wrapped up in a revolutionary energy that's dead and cringe now. Like that era's other insane postmodernisms, it rejects reality and reality has rejected it right back.
"Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.
Well said. Linguistic descriptivism is completely incoherent because it can't actually tell you anything. All a descriptivist can do is say "yep, you sure are using the word that way" which isn't remotely useful or interesting.
>when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions
And who will be the keepers (or should I say gate-keepers) of this glorious collection? And will they prevent Tolkien from spelling plural of dwarf as dwarves? Will they force Cormac McCarthy to use quotation marks?
> "Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster ~when we out speech draws from a a collection of words~, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.
It’s okay. I still understood you.
Sorry, but you are completely misunderstanding what “descriptivism” means, why it’s the viewpoint taken in serious linguistics, and how common it is there (i.e. absolutely 100% universal among everyone who studies language scientifically).
> absolutely 100% universal among everyone who studies language scientifically
They are all wrong.
The argument from about 10 years ago forward is that because English is already messed up, we should allow any usage of the language possible.
When you say "allow"... what exactly do you imagine happening if Yale's linguistic department forbids people from using English in certain ways?
Or is this more of a federal government thing? Grammar Force as the seventh branch of the US Military? What about other countries... are we thinking NATO or UN? Either way, gonna be tough to try and convince the Brits that US English is the correct one, since we didn't exactly get permission from them in the first place.
Descriptivism is much much older than 10 years but that is perhaps when you first became aware of it.
> The argument from about 10 years ago forward is that because English is already messed up, we should allow any usage of the language possible.
Makes me wonder how people managed to speak English before they invented grammar rules. /s
The whole parent directory of "Phenomena" https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena-by-category is an amazing source of information!
I might have to adopt this way of differeniating OR and XOR in English https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/alternative-one
The syntactic quirks make it feel like a weird halfway point between coordination and some fossilized idiom
British English speaker here (southern demographic) - I'd say "to" but "and" doesn't feel wrong so I think it's pretty prevalent.
I'm curious how common it is in Indian English.
"try and" is a pet peeve of mine.
"try 'n" sounds suspiciously close to "tryin'", so I suspect that people who were saying "tryin' to" began to reanalyse the first two syllables as "try 'n" and then started dropping the newly-superfluous "to".
What’s your position on “finna”?
Never heard of it ! (Am from NE US.)
> In dialects of Northeastern Canada, parallel inflected forms are acceptable:
> 12) They tries and does that.
There is a Ricky Jervais show https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(TV_series) where the main character talks like this alot but not because that is common in the UK but perhaps to show he is a bit simple/slow. I think there is a danger in making that assumption about anyone based on the accent or general way they talk.
The "and" in "try and..." may be a shorthand for the material implication of two temporal modal paths:
"try and X" = can X -> must X = not can X or must X
That said, the word "both" doesn't collocate before "try and X" because it instead pushes us toward an interpretation as logical conjunction:
"both try and X" = can X and must X
Likewise, despite the usage of "try not to", the phrase "try not and" doesn't show up, because under material implication the phrase becomes nonsense:
"try not and X" = not can X -> must X = can X or must X
OTOH "you mustn't try and X" sounds plausible, which tracks.
I did an introduction into the basics of linguistics in secondary school and something my teacher pointed out that a rule of thumb is that common phrases or words are the most likely to break grammatical rules.
He then told me a story about a language that was invented to be perfectly regular, and then there was a generation of native speakers of this artificial language and the first thing that happened was common phrases became irregular.
I believe the language must be Esperanto but I'm struggling to find a reference to this anecdote
I spent 20 minutes looking for an Esperanto reference to this but could only find pages related to "in" words [1] and profane neologisms [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#Cultural_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_profanity#Neologisms
I'm not a native English speaker, but to me "try and" has always conveyed a sense of more deliberate trying, of getting over yourself, in the sense that the "try" means the choice to give it a real proper go. So first you try (or, in fact, decide to try) and then when you're fully committed and mentally prepared, then you do it.
With an interpretation like this, none of the syntactical stuff in this story seems useful anymore. You try, and then you do.
Does this make any sense at all or am I just a foreigner imagining things?
I'd describe it as:
- "try and" implies that the reason for failure is slightly more likely to be from laziness / not actually attempting it
- "try to" implies that the reason for failure is slightly more likely to be from incapability
As in:
- I'll try and kill the mosquito... that has been annoying me all day
- I'll try to kill the mosquito... but it's quite hard to hit with this gun
But nobody would notice if you used the wrong one.
I grew up in the Southeast, and this usage is common. Both in Southern accents and AAVE.
I agree with skrebbel's feeling about the phrase, and I think yours is also a little bit correct.
To add more character, I also think "try and" feels more casual and friendly. Less like a technical suggestion and more like a form of encouragement. More caring, less distance or annoyance.
"You should try and get some sleep. [I care about you, you poor thing.]" vs "You should try to get some sleep. [Why are you still awake?]"
There's more closeness with "try and" and more distance with "try to".
"Try to" feels formal, technical, distant. "Try and" feels comforting, compassionate, friendly, but definitely not something you'd use for a complex task.
I couldn't imagine "You should try and recalibrate your photon detector" ever being said.
I definitely agree with the difference in formality.
> You should try and recalibrate your photon detector
I can totally imagine this, in a lab where all the equipment is old, and out of calibration, and the person saying it knows there are 10 other things that are more important, but this thing is still pretty bad and they feel obligated to point out the issue.
Whereas "try to calibrate" sounds to me like the process of calibration is quite hard and it's likely to end up no better calibrated than you started with.
It seems like you would say: You should try to recalibrate your photon detector
To someone who asks for advice.
“I can’t understand these results! You should try to…”
I think that's exactly right. I say "try to" in more neutral situations, or noncommittal, or pessimistic. It conveys it's not my top priority to succeed. "I'll try and get it done today" is easy to imagine with a neutral tone or a downward tone, conveying that I may not get to it and it isn't my top priority. "I'll try and get it done today" is easier to imagine with a chipper tone, it's a higher priority for me, I intend to get to it.
This makes logical sense too, doesn't it? "Try and" implies success. I'm not actually saying "I'll try to get it done and I will get it done", if that was the case I'd skip the try, but I am evoking an idea in that direction.
It makes sense, as folk etymologies often do. But the phrase acts in a more conditional manner in Southern American English at least.
If I say "I'm going to change that light bulb," I'm probably already getting up to fetch my toolbag.
If I say "I'll try and change that light bulb," I may be wondering whether I have a spare or a ladder or something else whose lack will interrupt the job, or in some other way doubtful of success: the implication is I expect I may come back and say something about the job other than that it's done.
If I say "Well, I might could try and change that light bulb," I probably don't mean in any particular hurry even to get up off the couch, and indeed may already be dozing off.
"You try, and then you do."
But it doesn't mean that - it just means you will try which doesn't actually imply any level of action
I’m a native speaker from the US and I think you’re imagining things. “Try and” and “try to” are completely the same.
As a native speaker my feeling is that if we're talking about "I'll try and X" vs "I'll try to X," they're mm@$be asking you neutrally to attempt something for the first time, but "try and get home without taking any detours" sounds as, if we've been through this issue on several occasions, and now I'm annoyed.
I'm also a native speaker from the US. Non-native speakers often have extra insight into the nuances of language, and I think skrebbel's headcanon here is really interesting.
I almost see "try and" as a form of "manifesting", of optimism, of believing that you will succeed. This would sort of comport with what he's saying.
But any difference is subtle, and most native speakers won't notice it, beyond maybe the more formal register of "try to".
Usually these extra insights are interesting but incorrect. Like here I think. I don't think there's any different expectations between someone saying "try and" and "try to" except it's maybe a very loosely correlated signal of social class
Another example is I've seen people several times online trying to argue y'all can be singular and all y'all is a way to make it clearly plural. Ok it's interesting that y'all is used as singular and all y'all isn't just about inclusion, but its not true.
It's an exception that English doesn't need, and it only adds to the difficulty of learning the language. You being used to it doesn't make it good.
I'm going to try and learn English. I'm trying and learn English. I tried and learn English.
vs.
I'm going to try to learn English. I'm trying to learn English. I tried to learn English.
The article literally shows the “bare form” example where this kind of meaning can be inferred: e.g. “I will try and finish the assignment.”
Which is identical to "I will try to finish the assignment", so what's your point?
When you say “I’ll try to do something…” you are giving a heads up to the other person that you may give up on that thing at any time. There is no commitment.
To me "try and" is like a more confident version of "try to." For example, "I will try to win" vs "I'll try and win."
That would be "try, and".
Although the default rule for conjunctions joining predicates is that the comma is optional (by contrast, in most other contexts it is either mandatory or forbidden), there are a lot of circumstances where the comma becomes mandatory to avoid ambiguity or just because.
The two are not interchangeable though, as shown in the article. If someone asks you "Are you going to win?", you could say "I'll try to", but not "I'll try and".
Not sure this works in simple past though. Cf. Dune “They tried and failed? They tried and died”
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What about "try ya" as in "try ya some of that there salad." Something my mother-in-law would say.
That sounds like a "personal dative" to me: https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/personal-datives
This article illustrates the main reason why prescriptive grammar is so boring.
If instead of just writing things off as “wrong”, we accept that they happen and try to understand why and under what circumstances, we unlock a whole incredibly interesting new field of science.
Why not both? ;)
This construction is similar to a hendiadys (which comes from the Greek for "one through two"); e.g. "nice and warm." (So says Fowler anyway.)
Reminds me of the incorrect "A whole nother"
I don't understand the 'both is not possible' point, the example given just doesn't even attempt to add a second thing?
> John will both try and kill mosquitos[, and find where they're coming from].
Works fine?
The point specifically is that the "and" in "try and" conceptually should be "adding a second thing" (what they mean by "coordination"), but isn't doing so in a fully regular way. Specifically, it seems like it should coordinate "try to kill mosquitos" and "[actually] kill mosquitos", but that interpretation isn't fully compatible with how the word "and" normally works.
On the other hand, there does seem to be a nuance in the meaning of "try and kill mosquitos" that makes it not just a dialectical form of "try to kill mosquitos"; there's an implication of expecting success. One might also point out that "try" can be replaced with synonyms in "try to" ("attempt to kill mosquitos"), but not "try and" (*"attempt and kill mosquitos"). So this is a very particular idiom.
Ahh, got it, thanks - re-reading it makes more sense with the example of it being possible:
> Usually, coordinated verb phrases can be preceded by both:
> 9) Reality is Broken will both [stimulate your brain and stir your soul].
which would be a better example and clearer to me the first time if it didn't use two nouns ('stimulate and stir your soul').
The conjunction is "and", as in "try and kill" vs "kill and try".
Maybe it's different in America but this is being bizarrely over thought in the comments. It's a synonym for "try to".
The article discusses how it’s not.
When I was in high school in France, where they teach British English, we were taught try and is the grammatically correct form.
The use of "try and" is usually grammatically incorrect (when "try to" was meant).
Prescriptively, maybe. But it is certainly grammatical in the sense that linguists normally use. "Try and" sounds perfectly natural to my own ears and it is regularly used by native English speakers.
Good grief. Quote Dre up top, then totally ignore AAVE and Southern American English which both heavily feature the construction of interest, despite being interested to find out what the Boer pidgin, of all things, has to say. (Why not Basque next? That would be about as relevant!) This they call a linguistic diversity project? Surely they could not have found themselves short of sources!
AAVE is definitely underappreciated as the source of a lot of common modern slang. But in this case, the article makes it pretty clear that "try and" is not nearly modern enough to have come from AAVE - they show several attestations from the 1500s and even mention one from 1390.
If they had headed the first section differently, I would credit this argument. Under the name "Who says this?" as at present it bears, and with nothing there or elsewhere to justify the substantial and obvious exclusion, that section is substantially incomplete.
edit: But so is your own criticism, in that it ignores AAVE is not the only dialect I mentioned. It isn't even one I would say I really speak, except inasmuch as AAVE and my own SAE heavily overlap as the close siblings they are. Both deserve to be treated, not least for that interrelationship, as well as the one you mention with their forcible deracination into mesolect and acrolect slang, where the class origin makes such terms feel "edgy."
Randy Meisner was not trying "to" love again. Usage settled.
Why there are so many rules for speaking
"However, De Vos (2005:59) points out that try and may not be preceded by both: " [example] "John will both try and kill mosquitos."
Then the next sentence has "try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected". (only when "both try and") I know the italicization of "try" and "and" makes it a different thing grammatically, just thought it was amusing.
Example usage: I will try and figure out how this page is causing the scrollbar to be white-on-white in a way that makes it useless.
This pales when compared to my favorite grammatical annoyance, a common perverse construction, for example "... similar effect to ..." when "... effect similar to ..." is actually intended. This misordering is so common that, in a Web search, it appears to outnumber the canonical ordering.
I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
I don’t follow, can you give examples of what you mean?
One might say, "benzodiazepines have a similar effect to alcohol", or "benzodiazepines have an effect similar to alcohol." The second construction is clearer in its meaning.
I don’t really get why one is in the wrong order? Maybe we’re parsing them differently somehow. The meaning reads identically to me although the parse tree is different.
Benzodiazepines have a similar effect to [the effect of] alcohol
Vs.
Benzodiazepines have an effect [which is] similar to [the effect of] alcohol.
Try and is good. Philadelphia we also have good ones. especially dropping with/tos
- Down the shore - done school, done work, done dinner.
Also my favorite is anymore:
- gas is so expensive anymore
Hadn't heard about this project before; it's a really good idea.
English is not a language that either lends itself well to, or is historically regulated by, prescriptivism (with a few specific attempts that didn't claim universal adoption). Treating it as a language where "If you've heard this novel construct, here's where it came from and what it's related to" is a good way to approach it.
(I liken it often to C++. C++ is so broad that the ways you can glue features together are often novel and sometimes damn near emergent. It's entirely possible to be "a fluent C++ user" and never use curiously recurring template pattern, or consider case-statement fallthrough a bug not a feature, and so on).
What you’re saying is probably true of all human languages. I don’t know of any where usage is actually governed by a governing body. Some try, e.g. the French Academy, but they are widely ignored in actual usage.
Likewise. A really cool site.
The English language has so many little quirks. You can try to document them all, and it's a fun endeavor, but you can't try and document them all.
Surprised if they are quoting Dr Dre they don’t mention “run and…” (as in “run and tell that”)
> (a) try (./!)
> She shouted: Try! Try, try, try! Just fucking try it!
> try as you may/might
> try is my favorite word
> try harder
> try 1/2/3/…
> try, quickly!
Do my examples fit in those 3 examples?
Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well.
And I am not even a native speaker.
But then again, I have no Harvard education, so what do I know.
The sentence begins with "typically," indicating that the examples are not representative of all possible uses.
When writing numbers, spell out one through nine and use numerals for 10 and above.
The correct construction of "Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well" is actually "Methinks thou dost not know English very well."
The site is hosted by Yale, not Harvard.
Your last sentence has an extra comma and needs a question mark at the end.
Not too long from now, Yale will likely also give the "would of" construction its blessing.
This article is not “blessing” anything, it’s trying to understand it. And I promise you that linguists have indeed given thought to why and under what circumstances people write “would of” instead of “would have”.
isnt it fundamentally just a mispronounced contraction of would've
Yes, and a huge chunk of language evolution is driven by things getting confused with other things due to phonological changes making them sound the same, so studying this is squarely within the realm of linguistics.
That said, the one-off simple example of “would of” is probably not interesting enough to write a big article about.
Of course, but linguists consider themselves to be scientists, so they are only allowed to describe and explain. They can't say that anything is wrong or bad. Even "would of." Prescriptive judgements are restricted to philosophers of language.
Try’n ta
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Try and is one of my worst grammatical nightmares. It pains me every time I hear it.
A lot of American commenters here are very much misunderstanding how "try and" is used in British English.
It genuinely is used essentially equivalently to "try to". Maybe there is some very slight semantic difference, but it's essentially the same.
The majority of the article is describing how it is different from “try to” in its usage. In short it acts more like a single phrase than as a literal future infinitive.
There's no usage of try and where try to wouldn't fit perfectly well and mean exactly the same thing. It's a weird construct with weird restrictions on how it can be applied grammatically, but it's not different in usage.
I'm American and use the phrase that way literally all the time. Also "Go ahead and..."
Try and find out.
Ah, prescriptivism versus descriptivism.
Prescriptivism is appropriate for technical or legal discussions, where the specific meanings of words are hugely important.
Descriptivism is appropriate for casual communication, where it's fine as long as your intended meaning comes across.
That's absolutely not what the article is about. Did you even read it?
People don't really have that debate anymore outside of twitter casuals, and it's dismissed with a wave almost immediately in this article, which then goes on to examine the complex grammar of "try and".
Yep. This is like someone seeing an article about geology and saying “ah, sphere earth vs. flat earth”. Like, no, the article already presupposes that the earth is spherical because that’s the viewpoint taken by all people with a serious academic interest in the topic.
Prescriptivism is inherently limited to situations where near-unanimous consent exists between all speakers.
Nah, prescriptivists love writing books saying that a thing almost everybody does - sometimes including themselves - is wrong. Prescriptivist amateurs with strong opinions sell reasonably well, publishers are quite fond.
But this is part of a project by academics and the academics abandoned prescriptivism because it's not science. We don't have prescriptivist chemists or physicists either.