My mil is correcting my kids grammar-rant! - Page 3

[DoctorGirlfriend]

Originally Posted by mavery

It's only incorrect if someone is aiming at speaking or writing standard English. Correctness has to do with the form of language you are aiming at. In a speech community where "you was" is the norm, it is grammatically correct in that dialect to say "you was"

No, it's still incorrect. It's just not noticed because most other people aren't using correct grammar. Just because most people in an area say "I seen it!" doesn't make it correct.

[mavery]

Originally Posted by DoctorGirlfriend

No, it's still incorrect. It's just not noticed because most other people aren't using correct grammar. Just because most people in an area say "I seen it!" doesn't make it correct.

What I am saying is that it is senseless to claim that that is "incorrect" in the language of that particular speech community. It is not Standard American English (SAE), but SAE is just one dialect among many, albeit a dialect which has a certain privileged status as the accepted dialect for most writing and most public, formal speech situations.

To go back to velochic's distinction between "My family are...", which she says is okay because the noun is conceptually plural even though it's grammatically singular, and "you was", which she says is just wrong, the fact that you don't understand the internal grammatical system of a dialect of which you may not be a speaker, or the history which has made the dialect as it is, does not make it wrong.

[velochic]

Originally Posted by mavery

What I am saying is that it is senseless to claim that that is "incorrect" in the language of that particular speech community. It is not Standard American English (SAE), but SAE is just one dialect among many, albeit a dialect which has a certain privileged status as the accepted dialect for most writing and most public, formal speech situations.

To go back to velochic's distinction between "My family are...", which she says is okay because the noun is conceptually plural even though it's grammatically singular, and "you was", which she says is just wrong, the fact that you don't understand the internal grammatical system of a dialect of which you may not be a speaker, or the history which has made the dialect as it is, does not make it wrong.

Are you talking GEOGRAPHICALLY? Because historically I would say, yes, you're right as long as everyone spoke and understood equally the dialectical nuances in a region. But we are living in modern times when geography no longer has the same linguistic influence it once had. A standard form of any language is required for mutual understanding from border to border due to the advances in media communication. This is what makes mistakes such as "we was" a... well, mistake. And why in the US media they don't say, "I went to hospital" or "My family are all idiots". Countries have used politics to influence these linguistic standards. The core aspects of the language do not change. If you want to argue that "we was" is correct, then you have to also agree that the order of phonemes as part of a morpheme makes no difference either as to the final semantic purpose. Therefore, if we no longer have rules in linguistics, indeed the word "Dog" might very well be a dialectical peculiarity of the word "God" just as "we was" is a dialectical peculiarity of the phrase "we were". In that case we can throw out all grammar rules and just speak gibberish to each other and expect the hearer to know what we are saying.

The rules of grammar of any language cannot be taken lightly. They are at the very essence of communication.

[mavery]

I only have a few minutes right now, so I will offer a very brief response and be back later for more.

Originally Posted by velochic

A standard form of any language is required for mutual understanding from border to border due to the advances in media communication. This is what makes mistakes such as "we was" a... well, mistake. And why in the US media they don't say, "I went to hospital" or "My family are all idiots".

You are not seriously telling me that you don't say "I went to hospital" because it impedes communication??? That's not crucial to anything I've said, but it is obviously false.

The core aspects of the language do not change. If you want to argue that "we was" is correct, then you have to also agree that the order of phonemes as part of a morpheme makes no difference either as to the final semantic purpose.

(1) The core aspects of language surely do change. Vocabulary, morphology, syntax, semantics, it all changes. Check out "Beowulf" if you don't believe me.
(2) See my comment above. You understand perfectly well what "you was" means. You would not understand "god" to mean "dog" unless some convention established it to have that meaning.
(3) Even if there was some dialect difference that made it hard for you to understand the English of the speaker, IT'S NOT AN ARBITRARY DIFFERENCE!! Not at all like rearranging phonemes randomly. There's a system to the grammar of ALL dialects. In some dialects, as someone else already mentioned, "was" is used for all singular subjects and "were" is used for all plural subjects, making "you was" for the second person singular perfectly normal and correct.

ETA: The obvious thing I forgot to point out is that nowhere did I say that it is not important to learn to speak and write Standard American English (if you live in the US). I am just pointing out that we do not all need to conform to the standard all the time, and that there is nothing WRONG or INCORRECT about nonstandard varieties.

[velochic]

I am going to agree to disagree and end with a quote from one of my mentors (although I did not study directly under him, he was a colleague of Chomsky), Roman Jakobson... a giant in the field of linguistics and a contemporary of Bloomfield. This is from a book that I had much pleasure reading, if you're interested. I've studied many theories of linguistics and you aren't going to change my mind. We've hijacked the thread enough.
(bolding mine)
p. 117 - 118, "On Language", Roman Jakobson

"Speech implies a selection of certain linguistic entities and their combination into linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity. At the lexical level this is readily apparent; the speaker selects words and combines them into sentences according to the syntactic system of the language he is using; sentences in their turn are combined into utterances. But the speaker is by no means a completely free agent in his choice of words; his selection (except for the rare case of actual neology) must be made from the lexical storehouse which he and his addressee possess in common. The communication engineer most properly approaches the essence of the speech event when he assumes that in the optimal exchange of information the speaker and the listener have at their disposal more or less the same "filing cabinet of PREFABRICATED representations"; the addresser of a verbal message selects one of the "preconceived possibilities", and the addressee is supposed ot make an identical choice from the same assembly of "possibilities already foreseen and provided for". Thus the efficiency of a speech event DEMANDS the use of a COMMON code by its participants.

[mavery]

Velochic, I am happy to end the discussion, but not without a response to your last post

I've studied many theories of linguistics and you aren't going to change my mind.

I, also, have studied linguistics -- I teach it, I have a PhD in it, and you also are not going to change my mind. I say that just to lay where I'm coming from on the table, not to be dismissive or pull rank.

I am acquainted with the work of Jakobson, but thanks for offering the reference. I do, however, feel obligated to address your misuse of the quotation. Nothing Jakobson says contradicts anything I have said, and I am quite confident that if he were alive, he would not agree with your claim that there is a "correct" English and people who say "you was" are using bad grammar. You would be hard-pressed to find a linguistics professor in any university's linguistics department -- functionalist, formalist, Chomskyan, non-Chomskyan -- to agree with you on this.

In the quotation you provide, I would summarise what Jakobson is saying as, roughly:

(1) language is a system with multiple layers of organisation
(2) language is conventional, and participants must share those conventions in order to understand each other.

I wholeheartedly agree with both of these statements, and they have nothing to do with your claim that we should all speak a standard dialect and any nonstandard grammatical usage is wrong.

In the cases we have discussed, like "you was" or "he winned", communicative success is not at all compromised by the supposed error -- in other words, the participants have almost all of their linguistic conventions in common ("more or less the same storehouse"), and a minor variation causes no problems.

But this is not even addressing my main point. A speaker of ANY nonstandard dialect, however intelligible or unintelligible to those who are not speakers of the dialect, is perfectly correct and perfectly efficient in his use when speaking to other speakers of the dialect. Two speakers of a "you was" dialect (this is a crude way of describing dialects which no doubt vary in all kinds of ways but share that second person singular past of "be") SHARE A COMMON CODE, which includes in the common storehouse of expressions the past tense second person singular form "was". That paragraph from Jakobson no more supports your claim that there is a "correct" way to speak English and all nonstandard usage is wrong than than it would support the claim that French or Tagalog or Russian speakers are wrong because they are speaking French or Tagalog or Russian to each other instead of English.

Let me take the analogy between different dialects and different languages a little further -- the same principles hold. Just as a native Spanish speaker needs to learn Standard American English to succeed in formal education in the US, so does a speaker of African American Vernacular English. But speaking AAVE or any other variety of English in other contexts, and especially with other people who share that variety of English, is no more incorrect than a Spanish-speaker speaking Spanish at home.

Our education system does not lead us to believe this easily, and it's something I find I spend a long time on with my students. We are taught in school that there is a "right" way to speak and write.

I do not wish to undermine the use or value of SAE as a common standard for written and formal spoken English. I just claim that there is a perfectly legitimate place for other forms of English, and that regarding these forms as incorrect, ignorant, or otherwise lesser in value is based in a misconception about the nature of language and does a great disservice to their speakers.

End of hijack, over and out.

[velochic]

Your PhD trumps my MA, but I still stand by what I've said... feel I did not misinterpret my hero, Jakobson... and maintain the same opinion. PM'd you, my friend.

[mama2kds]

Wow, I don't know if my crazy mil deserves such lengthy replies!

But at least I know my 10 yo B.A. in English was on the right track.

Since my kids speak correctly most of the time, I am just going to stand my ground on this one with mil. I really think she is imagining most of what she hears.

My 9yo, who speaks correctly 99% of the time, did complain one time that Grandmother told her she was saying something wrong and she was not. I forget what she said, but my dd was correct.

mil is slightly a control freak

[gnutter]

my mother always corrected us-it bacame a seamless part of the conversation.

me "me and kristie went to the store"
mom " kristie and I"
me "we went to the store"

so as you see it didn't always work the way she meant for it to-but it became something I was so used to I don't even notice it now-and yes, she still does it.

her favorite--"I didn't do nothing"~~"oh, so you did something?" I was like 12 before I understood that-not doing nothing meant you did something. I was sorta slow I guess

I correct grammar as the conversation flows when it is word usage like I winned instead of "I won". but all I do is saw "I won" and go on with no explanation or big deal over it. I repronounce words that are said wrong but no further explanation-just on with the conversation KWIM? With my oldest I didn't do it at all and he had some problems once he was older with spelling because he had awlays pronounced certain words incorrectly and then tried to spell them the way he thought they sounded. I started with ds#2 once he was really talking.I always tried to do it in a way that did not disprupt the conversation--so sometimes things went uncorrected--no big deal. I don't think it is good to make a big issue of it though you might keep the kid from wanting to talk at all.

[Blu Razzberri]

I know it's been awhile, here, but I'm really angry about this reply....

Originally Posted by Manena

...unless she's beating them over the head with a book when they don't speak properly...

Beating a child over the head with a book is a physical damage. Her MIL is causing emotional damage (read previous posts) with her methods. It doesn't mean she can't change her correction style to correct gently. That would be win-win. The OP said she'd be ok with the corrections if it was done in a repeat/remind fashion; so she's not being un-flexible about it.

Originally Posted by Manena

...Yes, they learn subconsciously, but kids should be gently corrected if they consistently make the same grammatical errors....

That's the argument though...they're not being gently corrected. She (the MIL) is very "military" about it.

Originally Posted by Manena

...she has decades of wisdom and experience, which you don't....

If you do the wrong thing for 50 years; it's still the wrong thing. Length of time passed doesn't make her the source of infinite wisdom.

The fact of the matter is, a mother has a right to choose how to raise her children. Obviously the OP isn't harming her kids (because that's where I draw the line on parental "right"); so I back her 100%. But it's like I said earlier, it's not even like the OP is standing a firm "don't do it in any way shape or form ever" ...she's simply asking MIL to change her technique.

I personally think that MIL's got some 70 year old nerve calling the DP and telling him that she simply doesn't care to respect the children's MOTHER and to hell with the OP, MIL will do what she pleases. That's rude, and I think the OP's a very forgiving person, because if that was any of my family (regular, inlaw or otherwise); they'd be getting a good swift kick in the behind, right out of my life until they learned who makes decisions for my children!!

Originally Posted by Manena

...(what's wrong with cheap plastic toys?)...

Nothing. But that's my opinon (and yours, I assume) and that's our right. Same goes in the other direction, the OP has a right to disagree.

Originally Posted by Manena

...If you plan on paying her fair wages to babysit, then you can treat her like an employee. If she’s doing you a favor (looking after the kids for free), butt out...

Ok...it seems to me that the MIL is the one who wants to babysit more; and not the OP asking her to. I'd say that the OP is doing MIL the favor of letting her be around the kids more.

But either way (and this is where I will have trouble responding to your comment nicely); even IF the MIL was doing her the favor, it doesn't give her the right to come into another woman's life and tell her what's what about her own children!! Without the OP, those kids wouldn't even be here for MIL to enjoy, and she should be respectful. It's one thing to suggest things to someone, it's another to cram your opinion down their throat. But in this case, the OP's MIL is playing a whole different ball game. She's not suggesting, or pushing her opinion on the OP; she's blatantly disregarding the OP's wishes and doing whatever she so pleases to do with the OP's children. Note: I said THE OP'S CHILDREN.

Originally Posted by Manena

...Who has the control issue?

Oh, that's easy: MIL. Thanks for asking. :

[Rio Mama]

When I was a child, my aunt used to correct my grammar with some frequency. She also used to encourage my creative writing and take me on trips to amusement parks. I didn't love being around her, and happily, she lived far away, so I only saw her once or twice a year. I did like the adventures she took me on, though, and I also liked her accounts of family history. All in all, I was a bit put out by always having to mind my ps & qs around her.

My mother rarely corrected me (except for "me and her went to the store" - this pained her such that she couldn't keep silent, yet I persisted in order to vex her). I didn't always get along with my mother, but I did have room to work things out without constant instruction from her. She unfailingly provided me a stellar example of proper usage.

I had another aunt who used to try to correct me occasionally, feeling it was the family duty (she was the youngest sister of the aforementioned aunt). I knew her heart wasn't in it, and I liked being around her a lot, as the adventures she took me on were full of imagination and fun. I rarely, if ever, held her corrections against her.

At one time, I entertained thoughts of growing up to become an English professor. As it turned out, I became a lawyer. Perhaps there's a lesson here. Perhaps not.

[OakBerry]

Improper grammar and usage bugs the heck out of me. I correct ds, and see nothing wrong with it, if it's done gently. He doesn't get upset, his life is not ruined by this. I don't see what is wrong with saying "we say won, not winned"? How does this demean an child if said in a kind, non scathing way? :

I would not be offended by my mil or parents correcting him either. My mother is 78 years old and very "old school". To her, she is helping him when she corrects him. I guess I was brought up this way and see no harm in it.

[Jenlaana]

Regardless of the issue... people who overstep their bounds and disrespect the parents as the final word on things are a no no, and the issue itself IMO is unimportant.

As far as I'm concerned, as mom, anyone who does not respect my rules does not get to be in a position to enforce rules.

[_betsy_]

Hmph. You learn something new everyday.

I also have a BA in English, but never studied linguistics much nor early childhood education. It never occurred to me that correcting a child's grammar was so improper. I know I have corrected my niece's and nephew's grammar, though probably only when they were over the age of, say, 7 or so.

Now that I've heard your theory and reasoning, it makes perfect sense to me that you wouldn't want your beginning speaker's grammar corrected every time. It seems to me to be a reasonable request to ask MIL not to do it, and explain your reasonings once. If she continues to do it, have a discussion about your right to parent your children in the way you see fit, and let her know she's overstepping her boundaries. If she still continues to do it, I'd probably have to limit contact.

[Max'sMama]

Originally Posted by mama2kds

But yes, it looks like the ban must be reinstated.

Hard to argue w/ yourself on this one She should not be acting this way. The job of the grandma is to spoil & play only!

[LovinLiviLou]

I just have to share this really funny story related to this issue, and hopefully it will cause a little chuckle after the more thought provoking previous posts . . .

My DH and I were having a conversation about this issue - he thinks we should correct our DD - aged 3, I don't. This was a few months ago, when we were not yet so careful about talking in front of her (yes, I know, shame on us). So, DH corrects something she says (he does do it gently, though). To which I respond "Hun, we don't need to correct her grammar - it is developmentally appropriate for her to learn by applying the common rules and pick up the exceptions later." DH replies "It is our job to teach her what is correct." Then my smart, brilliant, dear daughter says, without missing a beat, "It is MY job to teach MY daddy what is correct."

Oh my gosh, I busted out laughing and nearly wet my pants. Ok, not the most grown up reaction, but wasn't that the best? Needless to say, DH hasn't corrected her grammar much after that!

[DoctorGirlfriend]

Originally Posted by Blu Razzberri

Beating a child over the head with a book is a physical damage. Her MIL is causing emotional damage (read previous posts) with her methods.

Okay, I've read the entire thread 3 times. Please, please point me towards where there's emotional damage. This seems like a gross overreaction.

[mamamelia]

Originally Posted by mavery

There's a cute dialog that appears in linguistics textbooks to illustrate this fact, between some linguist or other and his 2-yr-old kid:

Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Daddy: You mean, you want "the other spoon".
Child: Yes, I want the other one spoon, please, Daddy.
Daddy: Can you say "the other spoon"?
Child: Other one spoon.
Daddy: Say "other".
Child: Other.
Daddy: Spoon.
Child: Spoon.
Daddy: Other spoon.
Child: Other spoon. Now give me other one spoon? (1)

(Dialog on the web at http://www.iatefl.org/content/newsletter/154.php)

oh my. this is my husband and 32mo every day.

to the OP, if my MIL was being rude and demeaning about correcting them, i'd be pissed too. i do think that emotional damage can be caused to a young child who is *constantly* corrected about everything they say. they may start to feel stupid and develop low self esteem - it's all in the way you go about correcting them. if you are gentle, they will probably absorb what they can and shrug the rest off. if you are acting in authority fashion, they will just retreat and take offence. isn't that the basis of GD, too? i mean, wouldn't YOU feel stupid and useless if your superior was constantly correcting you in a mean manner, about everything you say?

once a week visits are probably not going to harm, but if she plans on babysitting everyday, well, you'd better sort this out pronto.