Broken rules in English

[Chopstik]

Following up on the thread on whether English is difficult, one of the points made was regarding how rules in English grammar are neither hard nor fast because they are always broken. An example that comes to mind (I had to ask my wife about this as she is a non-native English speaker and she could give me examples much easier since I don't always recognise it) is the use of numeric descriptive words. (Hopefully I can explain this correctly since I know how it is supposed to work natively but usually don't have to describe it.)

"They each have their own cars." Each describes a single unit, yet cars is more than one. I know this is a frequent mistake even with native English speakers and it absolutely pains non-native speakers.

Other examples?

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"If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself."
-- Albert Einstein

 

[sleipnir214]

Chopstik:
Your example is particularly interesting to me. As much as anything, I see in the statement "They each have their own cars" the convolutions American English is currently undergoing to avoid use of the impersonal pronoun "he".

In American English, the current trend is to replace "he" with "they" in an attempt to remove any unconscious sexism. It's similar, I suppose, to the English royal "We" and the German "Sie" ("you" singlular, formal).

Unfortunately, a lot of speakers forget that in such usage "they" is actually a singular pronoun.

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[SQLSister]

Uh Chopstick, I'm an 'each' and I have more than one car.

However the rules for agreement are frequently violated to the point where most people no longer understand agreement. Yes, it is a way to avoid using he when you don't know the sex of the person you are speaking about. But in correct English, you are supposed to reword the sentence so that you no longer need to use a singlular noun and a plural possesive or adjective. I find sentences like, "The programmer killed their boss." to be awkward and incorrect, but this structure has now become so common, I even find myself using it.

 

[sleipnir214]

I don't like "their" in "The programmer killed their boss" either.

I will admit "their" is marginally better than the invented pronouns that cropped up in the U.S. in the 1980s.

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[Chopstik]

Actually, switching over to pronouns, in Chinese they do not have the masculine/feminine forms of those, just a single word that serves the same purpose and can be interpreted based on the context of the conversation. This is a problem for some non-native English speakers, but not necessarily a broken rule, per se.

"Their", I suppose, is the PC form of the continuing bastardization of the English language. I wonder if that was the easiest compromise...

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"If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself."
-- Albert Einstein

 

[sleipnir214]

<facetious>
I wouldn't waste too much time decrying the "bastardization" of the English language. I'm sure that some Elizabethan author was complaining about the same thing as he watched Middle English evolve into Modern English.
</facetious>

German's workaround is to use the pronoun that matches the gender of the class of people being talked about. If it's a group of teachers whose cars we're discussing, in German you can use the masculine gender pronoun, as "Lehrer" is a masculine noun. English, however, has shed noun genders.

We also have a builtin prejudice in English against using "it" when referring to people.

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[SQLSister]

So we should use she, right? Because he is included in she.

 

[sleipnir214]

<facetious>
That's true. But only because the masculine pronoun "he" predates the feminine pronoun "she" by about 4 centuries.
</facetious>

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