Do you need to study bad grammar?

by voltaire 3 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  voltaire

  One of my favorite arguments by the society: You don't need to study evolution, read apostate literature or anything else that contradicts what we say, just as you wouldn't study incorrect grammar in order to learn correct grammar. I can't believe I ever fell for it. (In my defense, I was practically raised around the meetings. If you're trained not to reason, it's a very difficult thing to recognize). Here's why:(It's an excerpt from a textbook on linguistics)

  Consider an English sentence like the following:

  Shirlie just bought three new electrical gadgets

  You would probably agree that THREE, NEW and ELECTRICAL belong to the class of adjectives in English, because they all precede the noun and they describe that noun in some way. However this is the only order in which these three adjectives can be combined in a noun phrase; the following sentences are all ungrammatical:

  *Shirlie bought new three electrical gadgets
  *Shirlie bought new electrical three gadgets
  *Shirlie bought electrical three new gadgets
  *Shirlie bought electrcial new three gadgets

  The behaviour of these adjectives suggests that there are different types or subclasses of adjectives in English. (The Design of Language of Language, Crowley, Lynch, Siegel and Piau.

  You wil notice that liguists DO study incorrect grammar as an aid in identifying correct grammatical patterns. In fact, they even have a convention for marking ungrammatical sentences, the *. All of the above sentences are marked with the asterisk since they are ungrammatical.

  Another point that constantly impresses is that even though the authors of the textbook don't always agree with the arguments of other linguists, they refer to them and provide references so that you can judge the merits of the opposing arguments for yourself.

  Conclusion: You can not claim to understand something if you have not examined both sides of the issue. If anyone tells you differently, you know they are not serious about the truth.

  BTW, I strongly encourage you all to take courses at a local community college. Maybe you're not in a position to get a degree, but at least get acquanted with what eucation is all about.(The answers are not in the paragraph, so it's tough. On the other hand, you learn to think!)
• 

  slipnslidemaster

  Voltaire,

  This was a very interesting post. What made you interested in this?

  Slipnslidemaster: "The gods too are fond of a joke."
  - Aristotle
• 

  voltaire

  slipnslidemaster,

  For the past several years, I've been wrestling with the issue of whether or not JWs really have the truth. I've tried to talk to my wife about some of the things I've learned. We rarely have any discussions about the "truth" anymore because we can't even agree on the most fundamental of groundrules. #1 in my book is that any open-minded person looks at both sides of an issue. Another is that a person should at least be willing to admit that they MIGHT be wrong. Our conversations were sooooo frustrating because she won't do either. She is really an inteligent woman. She wouldn't approach any other area of life without a willingness to examine more than one side of an issue, but when it comes to the "truth", she is totally naive (or perhaps conditioned is the right word).

  It was very traumatic for me to come to the realization that what I had been taught was the truth does not rest on the firm scientific ground that I once thought it did. If she would just admit that she sometimes has a little twinge of doubt, that there is something that the society believes that she knows isn't true, but that she goes along with anyway, I'd have felt so much better. More than anything else, it's the society's demonization of ex-members, the way that it controls(or tries to anyway) what the members read and even think, that leads me to the conclusion that this isn't the truth. I feel like I'm the man in the story of "The Emporers New Clothes" who is staring at the naked king in disbelief but I know it would be useless to say anything.(And it sometimes drives me crazy.)

  What specifically led me to write the above? I'm studying linguistics, which is why I came across the discussion of ungrammatical statements. It reminded me of what a CO had once said about how you can discern what's true or not. "You just know that, "I is happy that you seen it", is wrong." As though you can detrmine right from wrong intuitively. Recently some magazine repeated the illustration about how it isn't neccesary to study wrong grammar to know correct grammar. The three clicked together somehow.
• 

  mustang

  My significant other is Chinese. She has two degrees, one from an Asian school and the other from a US university. Her native country was a British colony and she went to "English school" from before her teens. She is constantly asking me to check her grammar. (She recently surprised by getting something right the first time. It was short, though.) Even though she is very well educated AND actually exposed to English (but not necessarily 'American'), she still needs help.

  SHE CERTAINLY DOES NOT KNOW IT INTUITIVELY. The same holds for all the other Chinese that I have met who were not born here in the states. They all ask for help with their US grammar, no matter how well educated. I am always happy to help them.

  The assumption that we all (extend that to everyone) know these things INTUITIVELY is extremely wrong. We Americans happen to have had intense education in the subject of our version of English. Just compare this to someone who didn't have such training. I experience this every day.

  (In fairness, I am on my 8th year of 1st year Mandarin. Those who speak Cantonese are impressed, LOL. I doubt that I will ever get the proficiency that I would like to have. I DEFINITELY have to spend time studying how I did it wrong. In fact, I will have achieved a great step forward when I can spot wrong speech.)

  I find that having grown up with this speech, a great deal is ingrained in me (and the rest of us). I can almost always inherently point out correct usage. I remember diagramming sentences and learning all of the parts of speech as an elementary school student. The rudimentary technical details were put before; we could have gone further, just for the asking. But I have forgotten much of the detail of technical linguistics. We all had some of that pounded into us as students; we just usually don't remember it very well.

  I am very technically inclined in engineering subjects (so is she). So I find myself looking up some of the technical aspect of the languages (English and other) after one of these sessions.

  I agree that study of the 'wrongness' of a subject is a necessary part of the method of doing it right. You need to see both sides of the issue. You indeed have made an excellent point.

  You have made another excellent point in that the WTS does not use standard techniques of scholarship. Their decrying of higher education is a pointer to that. When you really go into studying any such subject, you find that there is a reason for the methods used by the scholars. Ridiculing or minimizing their method does not change the reason why scholarship is necessary.

  This brings up the subject of what is the real expertise of JW's. It certainly isn't the English language or linguistics. (WTS has learned to deal with these subjects out of necessity.) Voltaire has made that point plainly. What they are really expert at (their core competency) is psychological indoctrination techniques. I originally included religion in the preceding sentence, but I believe that is secondary to the psychological warfare process.

  Mustang