Englishes: Some thoughts on the different types of English

[Jamie (K)]

You guys are assuming that language variation and change occur at the conscious level and that social or national groups one day say, "Let's distance ourselves from the colonial powers," or, "Let's create our own national form of English." It doesn't happen that way. Most of that stuff happens at the subconscious level, and people are relatively unaware of it, just as people everywhere are quite unaware of how they really talk. It's very easy, for example, to find a person who speaks a heavy local dialect, is completely unaware of it, who swears he doesn't. Even if you point out some specific dialect sentence he said, he'll swear he didn't say it and get very upset at the assertion. If you don't believe me, I can give you some experiments to try.

In the Caribbean and the American south, the people whipping the slaves usually did not speak standard English, but more likely some Scots-Irish dialect, and the fact that the slaves did imitate their speech can be found in many features of Caribbean English and what (this week) is called "African-American Vernacular English" have in common with those dialects. (And lest you think that relations between slaves and their owners were always brutal, read the accounts of Booker T. Washington about the various types of relationships former slaves had with their former masters after emancipation. If you need people to work, it makes no management sense to keep them all in constant pain and terror, horrible as the mere status of being a slave was.)

Molly's problem is not that she's entrenched in her position, but that she thinks that people who don't believe in her entrenched position must be uninformed. She thinks that if she bangs away at it, and keeps referencing various published articles, that people will suddenly say, "Gosh! You're right!" The error of this approach is her not realizing that some of the people who are arguing with her have many years or even decades of exposure to her idea, are probably better-read about it than she is, but simply do not find the arguments convincing and for honest, informed reasons do not accept them. (I used to be this way in matters of art and politics when I was younger.)

[Molly]

[Jamie (K)]

[Molly]

[Jamie (K)]

It was a subconscious development, but it probably comes from some older variety of English imported from the British Isles, as most of those variants do.

[Molly]

So it was originally an error, right?

[Jamie (K)]

You're the one being prescriptivist now. It was originally a variant usage, just as the habit of dropping post-vocalic R's was in England before it became standard.

However, to really get an idea what happened, you have to look into the history of the usage of the present perfect tense. It could very well be that the use of the simple past was the original usage in that type of sentence and that the use of the present perfect in that context came later, probably imposed by grammarians in the 19th century, just as the rules against "dangling prepositions" and other things unnatural to English were. Another possibility is that the simple past and the present perfect existed side by side and had the same meaning, as they do in some other Germanic languages and that the meaning difference developed later. Everything depends on what the historical usage was.

Very often, the American variant is the older one, and the standard British usage is a later development.

[Daemon99]

Oh Jamie! You have an explanation for almost everything, don't you?
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Non-native speaker of English
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I intend to live forever - so far, so good.

[Torsten]

As a professor of linguistics and English language instructor Jamie simply knows a lot about the English language. What I like about his answers is the fact that they are based on his expertise and experience rather than on his personal opinions.
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Ralf]

[Molly]

[Molly]

[NinaZara]

I rather give my love to a person who gives me straight answers than fire me back with more and more questions.
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We know we're getting old when the only thing we want for our birthday is not to be reminded of it.

[Lost_Soul]

C'mon, Molly, don't be jealous

[NinaZara]

Yeah, Molly. Don't be jealous. I like Jamie more...
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We know we're getting old when the only thing we want for our birthday is not to be reminded of it.