Step by step grammar 3: Adjectives

An adjective is a word that describes nouns (we’ve talked about nouns in Step By Step Grammar 1) and pronouns (we will talk about pronouns in the future but to give you a rough idea these are examples of pronouns: he, she, it). E.g. White cat – cat is a noun, white describes a cat, therefore is an adjective.

Words in bold in the following sentence are adjectives:

I started reading this fantastic book about a brave captain who goes on a transatlantic journey in order to win the heart of a beautiful princess.

Sometimes it also quantifies nouns and pronouns e.g. many people – many is an adjective. Attention: an adjective does not describe a verb (we’ve talked about verbs in Step By Step Grammar 2) or another adjective. E.g. I talk openly about my problems – openly describes a verb talk and therefore is NOT an adjective but an adverb. We will talk about adverbs in the future. Those two parts of speech i.e. adjective and adverb often get confused.

There are different types of adjectives, but you don’t need to know about them just yet, we will probably talk about it later on when you feel a bit more comfortable with grammar and its basics.

I hope this was easy. If you haven’t subscribed to www.englishfocused.com yet do it now as there’s more to come. Next Wednesday we will explain what a pronoun is.

 

Not Exactly What I Meant

We all make mistakes and it just so happens that some of those mistakes are truly hilarious. I think the funniest ones I come across are made by non-native English speakers, including me.

1. When I first moved to the UK I must have been 18 or 19 and my English, though good, was nowhere near its present level. Everytime I was asked for "pennies" in the shop, I'd blush as with its pronunciation it resembles the Polish equivalent of "penis". No, sorry. I don't happen to carry any penises with me. I might have some change if this helps...
2. Went for ski break holiday last year with my, then boyfriend, and his family. I can't remember the exact circumstances in which I made this mistake although I clearly remember standing in the bathroom door and talking about a "serious killer" when I surely meant "serial killer". I also remember my ex crawling on the floor laughing. 
3. This was a really embarassing Twitter status update fail from last night, when after having a bit to drink, I updated my status saying "I'm dancing around my bedroom with wine in my knickers and sweater". I hurriedly explained that I did not actually mean that the wine was in my knickers... It was then followed by a couple of comments such as "ran out of clean glasses again?" and "I thought this was an unusual way of storing alcohol". This has been now officially proven - my English achieves its lows when I'm intoxicated.
4. One of the kids I used to teach English back in Poland still sometimes sends his homework for me to check for mistakes. His task was to describe his mother. He writes: "My mum has back hair". Yes, I certainly seem to remember her having black hair, didn't realise she had some on her back too! He then goes on to write about an unfortunate event from her life as follows: "My mum broke her rib and got laid in the hospital". It is indeed bad news she broke her rib but she's still a pretty lucky mum as far as getting laid in the hospital goes... 

Remember, if you make a funny mistake, laugh with others. No need to get frustrated or feel embarrassed. Learn from it, the short-lived embarrassment will certainly make it easier to remember! And please, don't forget - speaking a foreign language is very difficult and errors are inevitable. You are amazing and doing a brilliant job!

Speaking indirectly about indirect speech

As I was complaining to my friend last night about how I don't know whether the guy I'm interested in is single, they suggested I simply ask him, to which I hysterically responded with a big "no". This would be, of course, too blatantly obvious and therefore simply inappropriate in the delicate matter of flirting. It made me not only laugh but also inspired me to think about the wonders of speaking indirectly.

Why do we communicate in ways which seem error-prone instead of stating our intentions unambiguously? Why do we bother with employing innuendos which puzzlingly seem rather unnecessary and inefficient? "So what are you up to tonight then? Going out with your missus?" It's hilarious, really.

I remember reading ‘’The Logic of Indirect Speech’’ by S. Pinker, M. A. Nowak and J. J. Lee a while back and thinking how brilliant this article was. I recommend reading it as well, here’s where you will find it:

The logic of indirect speech

What strikes me, however, is that they use rather confusing terminology as what they describe as indirect speech in their article is not what grammarians understand as reported speech. Those two terms are often synonyms in grammatical sense but in sociolinguistcs they obviously aren’t. I think it’s safer to refer to what Pinker, Nowak and Lee are talking about as speaking indirectly rather than indirect speech. Yes, it’s one of those paradoxes of English language where you have the same term that means two completely different things.

Moving on, I feel I owe you a bit of explanation on what indirect speech/reported speech is as well. In English grammar we have both direct and indirect speech and reported speech is a synonym for the latter. When we give information about what people say or think we can say exactly what it was and quote them e.g. He said, ‘’You’re fit!’’. We can also ‘’report’’ what they said without quoting them word for word e.g. ‘’He said I was fit’’. The first is, of course, an example of direct speech whereas the latter – indirect speech.

A heated debate ensued last night when my friend was adamant that my article wasn’t about indirect speech. So, I pointed him in the direction of the article by Professor Pinker et al and the matter was resolved. However, I never fully found out the aforementioned guy’s relationship status…

Evolution of spelling?

I got involved in an interesting discussion with @ciarancurran76 and @rougeit on Twitter which I’d like to share with you. I might be following it up with a longer article soon as well. Let me just add that both lovely gentlemen are totally worth following too!

ciarancurran76 What is really sad is that you know the difference between your and you're, and most English people don't!

EwelinaGonera I know, they're both pronounced the same so I can see why people get confused! Similarly with they're/their/there too.

ciarancurran76 It's lazy though - especially when people here rarely speak another language - you should at least get your own right… But I am intolerant of bad grammar!

EwelinaGonera I make mistakes myself all the time as a foreigner plus I try and explain things to people rather than preach them. They'll never learn otherwise as we are all sensitive to criticism!

ciarancurran76 I make mistakes too, and I wouldn't preach - but here in the UK there seem to be many people who don't want to learn. It sounded like I hated people making mistakes - I don't, it is the only way to learn!

EwelinaGonera Agreed. I sometimes get the impression that spelling things wrong is even considered "cool" nowadays. Why? It's a puzzle.

rougeit it's not cool. It's the evolution of language. Wasn't spelling 'set' by the invention of the printing press?

EwelinaGonera I agree, some of it is very inventive and clever, e.g. homophones such as gr8 or acronyms LOL etc., however, some of it is simply the fact people can't spell and it has nothing to do with evolution but illiteracy.

rougeit may not be illiteracy. Chaucer sometimes spelt same word 3 different ways in same sentence. Illiterate. Him?

EwelinaGonera No but people could spell as they liked before the late 18th century and writers would rely on their own phonetics when spelling. This has changed with the era of dictionaries of Johnson and his ilk. If we started spelling things as we like again this would mean we are regressing rather than evolving.

rougeit we communicate in many more ways than ever. Language is evolving again after centuries of stagnation. Cultural values change too. Spelling is much more fluid again. Color/Colour both aceeptable in UK now. Not to mention email/e-mail. Late night/nite and even lite.

EwelinaGonera I totally agree but evolving and not knowing how to spell something are two different stories!

rougeit why shouldn't we spell how we want, so long as we are understood?

EwelinaGonera I ask myself this question as Polish is a phonetic language and we don't encounter as many difficulties when spelling. Also in English it would ‘’maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound.’’ Unfortunately there are lots of dialects of the English language and people pronounce things differently anyway.

Step by step grammar 2: Verbs

As mentioned last Wednesday, today we are talking about verbs. The verb is perhaps the most important part of the sentence as the sentence would not exist without the verb! It’s a word that we use to express actions, emotions and beings. In its dictionary form it follows the word ‘’to’’and we call this form infinitive e.g. to take, to hate, to be.

In English verbs take different forms too and there are also different types of verbs. You might want to find out more about it once you feel a bit more comfortable with all those grammatical twists as I don’t want to confuse you just yet! For now it’s enough to know that the forms verbs take are to do with the tense and the person in the sentence. For instance the verb to be can take following forms: I am, you are, he is, I was, you were, I am being etc.

Words in bold in the following sentence are verbs:

I met Jack at school and he mentioned he was going to walk his dog with Susie.

I hope this was easy. If you haven’t subscribed to www.englishfocused.com yet do it now as there’s more to come. Next Wednesday we will explain what an adjective is.

Step by step grammar 1: Nouns

It was suggested to me that I should write more about basics of the English language, particularly the grammar as sadly, many of us, including native English speakers, struggle with terminology that is used in grammar books of various shapes and forms. This is the first of a series of articles which aim to make you familiar with terms describing elements of English grammar. We will start off slowly and discuss one term only in each article. Today’s question is: What is a noun?

Noun is an arbitrary word that we use to name a person (doctor), animal (giraffe), thing (shoe) or abstract idea (hatred). They are the words that little children learn first when exclaiming mummy, daddy or poo. Basically what you need to remember all the names are nouns. Words in bold in the following sentence are nouns:

I met Jack at school and he mentioned he was going to walk his dog with Susie.

Nouns can change their forms to indicate quantity/number. It means, that if Jack had two dogs rather than one dog, we would add –s to indicate that. In the same way we create other plural nouns (plural indicates there are more than one) e.g. school – schools, book – books.

Easy! If you haven’t subscribed to www.englishfocused.com yet do it now as there’s more to come. Next Wednesday we will explain what a verb is.

Both a borrower and a lender be

I have written an article on word formation processes in the past and the topic has been always close to my heart. I recently tried to do a little research on borrowings and particularly English borrowings in the Polish language. Although I haven’t yet finished, here’s a few points I made so far.

Borrowings assimilate in new languages on phonological, graphic, morphological and semantic levels. The first question that came to mind was: Why is it that borrowings are mainly nouns, verbs to a lesser extent and relatively few adjectives, prepositions and other parts of speech? Is it because there are more nouns than other parts of speech in total? Or is it because we only borrow words we can't do without - the ones that are therefore essential and often arbitrary? We didn’t have, for instance, a word anywhere close to joystick in Polish so we borrowed the term from English. As I am wondering about it on Twitter, @talkclouds suggests:

The book I'm reading on vocabulary learning also says that nouns are easier to remember, too. Plus we import STUFF more. We don't import actions and ideas as much.

Manfred Gorlach asserts in A Dictionary of European Anglicisms: A Usage Dictionary of Anglicisms in Sixteen European Languages that modern borrowings from English aren’t assimilated into European languages on the morphological level. That certainly isn't true, not in Polish anyway. Practically all the nouns in Polish borrowed from English are assigned the grammatical gender and are declinated AND take Polish marker of plurality so... what on Earth do I get confused here? Take the aforementioned joystick. We have in Polish plural form from masculine joystick -  joysticki  and appropriate declinated forms: joysticka, joystickowi, joystickiem, joysticku. Gorlach’s book is available on Amazon for £33. Money well spent… I think not!