Try and
ygdp.yale.edu
ygdp.yale.edu
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?"
I won't mind "await y'all" to await multiple promises.
try {
let x = parseInt(input);
and {
displayResult(x / 0);
}
} catch {
displayError("Parsing error.")
}
There might be something to this idea, because I’ve often been in situations where a try catch catches an error that originates a dozen frames down the call stack, which is sometimes (but not always) unrelated to the original point of the try catch block. People try and deal with this by adding more try catches around the code deeper in the call stack, but maybe there’s a better way.
I guess I come from a different era:
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.
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]."
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.
Because it promotes itself as a platform to learn fluency. That’s why it’s important to recognize its limitations.
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.
That's overly harsh. I use Duolingo for Japanese because
- I thought it would be fun to learn a little about Japanese. And I do learn some, and it is fun.
- I wanted to "understand" a bit of what was being said during subtitled anime I watch. This was _partially_ successful. I understand some words, and I notice some things like "oh, that was a question", and sometimes notice when what was said doesn't match the text. I get enough out of it that it adds to my enjoyment
So, clearly there's a group of people out there that are there to gain some knowledge out of it, and _not_ to rack up some kind of score (and feel superior).
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.
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".
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
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/v08pbp/brief...
I would note that we have that one in [vernacular] English, too, but only in the past tense: "done [X]ed", i.e. "he really done made that."
> (make and go) gradually make (or make more and more)
And we have a construction equivalent to this, but that means more like "set out to [X]" — that being "go and [X]." I.e. "now why'd you go and make that?"
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.
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.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/were-going-to-explai...
FWIW I grew up mostly in the Northeast.
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.
> 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]
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.
"In this quest I shall be victorious and wash the dog" = "I'll try and wash the dog"
Jag tror *att* han gillar *att* äta
I think *that* he likes *to* eat
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.
“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?
The examples in the linked article involve extraction from just one coordinand, which is impossible in “real” coordinate structures.
“Try, and [if successful] [do the thing].”
Parent post said "most"; you've identified an exception.
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.
> 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.
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
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-are-perfect-...
That is not true, at least in mainstream serious academia. Prescriptive linguistics doesn’t exist any more than prescriptive biology or astronomy.
> And members of these institutions are very much considered the top of their field in their countries.
Maybe, but their field isn't linguistics.
Some things like this are nevertheless generally known to be wrong despite usage
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.
(Source: I say that shit all the time).
If I expected failure, I'd instead say "try to" fix it.
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.
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.
A contraction containing another contraction, in fact.
"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."
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."
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.
Is there really a difference in how “should have” and “should’ve” are pronounced? There isn’t in any accent I’m familiar with.
I sure hope so, one's a contraction and the other is not...
And yes, there can be and often is a difference between saying "should've" and "should of".
(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.)
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).
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.
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.”
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."
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).
"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.
Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
"Try to catch me" means I think you might have some chance.
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".)
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.
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”.
Only the ones where your manner of speaking doesn't influence how the recipient thinks of you.
Good luck.
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.
Ellipses are properly written as three dots.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
In contrast "try to always tell the truth" and "try always to tell the truth" are both valid and mean the same thing.
"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."
"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.
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.
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.
OED calls it a “nonstandard or humorous use” https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=Irreg...
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.
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
"it hurts so bad I’m intensely dying" would be wrong too. 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".
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.
"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.
People do that all the damn time!!! It's one of the single most abominable practices in modern English.
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.
Previous lingua francas such as Latin and French, by comparison, had tens of millions of speakers at most during their heyday, and were less broadly geographically distributed. There are more French speakers in the world today than there were when French was dubbed the lingua franca.
It's difficult to predict how English might evolve, but it's unlikely to undergo a significant global simplification. You already get significantly different dialects in different parts of the world. If anything, if English starts to lose its position as a global language, it will fragment further and pick up new dialect-specific complexities as other local languages mix with it.
Could there be a reversal of this trend? Maybe, but it seems very unlikely, even with the potential for geopolitical instability from global warming, autonomous warfare, the rise of autocrats and other factors.
Can we have also declare war on using "exponentially" in place of "significantly"?
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 :)
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.
> 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, quite.
What if two non-native speakers say something and understand each other?
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.
John will both try and kill bandits.
... meaning that John will serve as judge and executioner, if not jury.
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.
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.
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.
It’s okay. I still understood you.
They are all wrong.
The point of science is to understand natural phenomena, not to pass value judgments on them. Biologists’ job is not to decide which out of dogs and cats is “correct”. Why should linguistics be any different?
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?
(jk)
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).
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.
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!
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
I'm curious how common it is in Indian English.
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.
Benzodiazepines have a similar effect to [the effect of] alcohol
Vs.
Benzodiazepines have an effect [which is] similar to [the effect of] alcohol.
Makes me wonder how people managed to speak English before they invented grammar rules. /s
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".
"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
> 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.
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 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".
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.
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.
But it doesn't mean that - it just means you will try which doesn't actually imply any level of action
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.
- "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 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.
> 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.
To someone who asks for advice.
“I can’t understand these results! You should try to…”
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.
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#Cultural_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_profanity#Neologisms
> Feel free to let djtango know that the paper they're looking for is Bergen (2001), "Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto". It's a minor classic and deserves any attention it gets!
I searched for the title, and this PDF was among the top matches: https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/NEJCL.pdf
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.
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.
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."
- Down the shore - done school, done work, done dinner.
Also my favorite is anymore:
- gas is so expensive anymore
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.
> 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.
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.
> John will both try and kill mosquitos[, and find where they're coming from].
Works fine?
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.
> 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').
Using try and is such a huge pet peeve of mine. I almost don’t want to understand how it might be acceptable even though the ship has sailed.
"Can I leave work early?" "Try and see."
This is at worst a threat, and at best telling the other person to just do it and ask for forgiveness later afterward than for permission beforehand.
"Can I leave work early?" "Try to see."
This is telling the person to go research the answer to figure it out properly. And it feels less natural to say it too.
How can these be interchangeable in meaning? If anything they feel closer to being opposite in meaning here.
Maybe "try and see" is an exception to "try and ___".
FA = "try" (as a vulgar slang)
When you de-vulgar/de-slang it it becomes: try and find out
That said, the one-off simple example of “would of” is probably not interesting enough to write a big article about.
It genuinely is used essentially equivalently to "try to". Maybe there is some very slight semantic difference, but it's essentially the same.
There might be some boomer grammar prescriptivists who are saying otherwise, but they aren't doing linguistics.
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.
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.
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".