re: Eats, Shoots & Leaves page 5

So with a mea culpa, I reproduce her words: "Some historians of grammar claim, incidentally, that the original possessive use ... historians of grammar who say this Love-His-Labour-Is-Lost explanation is ignorant conjecture and should be forgotten as soon as heard." (p39)

I hope she goes on further, because that "differences of opinion" is like the "difference of opinion" over whether the earth is round or whether it's more than 6,000 years old. It's the difference of opinion between those who actually know something about the topic and those who merely repeat a (what seems to them) plausible story that somebody told them, but which turns out to be completely untrue and has been known to be untrue for a long time.

Evan Kirshenbaum + HP Laboratories >Its like grasping the difference
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 >between what one usually considersPalo Alto, CA 94304 >a 'difficult' problem, and what

is a mnematic pump where you fill up on hot air?

I'm afraid it sounds like she's in the category ... to tell any good yarn whether or not it's true?

Has it been generally established that Bryson is unreliable to the extent that he's justifiably held up as a yardstick ... others that the exception-proves-rule thing uses "proves" in the sense of "tests", but is he really SO bad? Matti

I'm sure there's a copy of his 'Mother Tongue' in a bookshop near you. Spend
10 minutes (I'm not recommending buying it; my copy was a present) flippingthe pages to see what you can see or use the index to follow your hobby horses.
The book begins with 'More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
He is fond of weaselling out of supporting the barmier assertions by adding 'it is said', 'it is sometimes thought' while nonetheless milking the sexier mythology for all it's worth. But he can go badly wrong when making unqualified statements.
Bryson asserts that Shakespeare 'coined' 2000 words (a subject we covered here not long ago).
He (rightly) praises Shakespeare as a phrasemaker but gets carried away a little. He says Shakespeare coined 'fast and loose', which may be true as Shakespeare is cited in OED as the first to use it, but fails to mention that as a game called 'fast or loose' it was known before Bard was born. He claims 'bag and baggage' as a Bardian invention though it was in use almost 100 years before Shakespeare employed it.
He asserts that Eskimos have 'fifty words for types of snow - though curiously no word for just plain snow'.
He says Esperanto has 'no definite articles' and 10 lines later quotes 'En la komenco, Dio kreis le cielon kaj la teron'.
Did you know 'The British are particularly good at lopping syllables off ... turning 'immediately' into 'meejutly', 'necessary' into 'nessree', 'library' into 'libree' '? And 'halfpennyworth' was pronounced 'haypth'. He thinks 'shufti' comes from India when everyone else thinks it comes from Arabic. He thinks 'buckshee' is from India, too.
'San fairy ann' is an 'East End expression', apparently. That's not to say there isn't some good stuff in there, or to imply that it is not mainly correct. But I'm sure it has put much that is wrong into the heads of people whose sole or major source of information it is, and I think a man of his calibre should be meticulous about his research.
John Dean
Oxford

Spehro Pefhany filted:

Speaking of rats, there are hundreds of hits for "bubonic plaque", but not a one for "mnemonic plaque".

Is that what helps you remember to brush your teeth?...r

> He says Esperanto has 'no definite articles' and 10 lines later quotes 'En

la komenco, Dio kreis le cielon kaj la teron'.[/nq]An Esperantist named Christopher Culver, in a post to the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.esperanto , recently wrote that (I translate) "There seems to be some law of nature that every article about Esperanto must have at least one printing error." Here we have two. The passage in question should read "En la komenco, Dio kreis la chielon kaj la teron." Writing "cielon" for "chielon" is on the order of seeing the German word "Übeltäter" ( = "wrongdoer" ) and writing it "Ubeltater." If you don't know that there exists a convention to represent "ü" and "ä" with unaccented letters, namely "ue" and "ae," respectively, then you can hardly be blamed for not knowing you should write "Uebeltaeter" if accented letters are not available to you.

In Esperanto, the "c" with a circumflex in the word in question is represented "ch" when writing in ordinary Latin letters.

Writing "le" for "la" is a simpler sort of error: At some point, someone miscopied the passage.

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

True, but is that the error (or is it errors) that is being alleged?

"in the same category as", but what do *I* know? :-)

I would have done the same as you, and I briefly considered Donna's version to be an error, but then I became unsure of that. It may not be quite idiomatic, but is it an error?
The lack of an explanation by Gerald makes me think other thoughts ...
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/

Has it been generally established that Bryson is unreliable to ... the sense of "tests", but is he really SO bad?

I'm sure there's a copy of his 'Mother Tongue' in a bookshop near you. Spend 10 minutes (I'm not recommending ... major source of information it is, and I think a man of his calibre should be meticulous about his research.

Piling on, here are some criticisms Brian Scott made a few years ago:

Removed)

But Bryson didn't simplify: he threw together a grab-bag of 'facts', many of which were wrong. For instance, the name is not Welsh for 'white-haired', is not from Latin , and is not from some imaginary German . and are not the only two words in English with the suffic , because neither contains such a suffix. It is not true that in Oslo and Amsterdam 'almost everyone speaks superb English'. The edh is not still used in Ireland.
He is also absurdly inconsistent. For instance, he spends a whole chapter bemoaning the inconsistencies of English spelling, in particular the fact that each letter corresponds to more than one sound. Yet after noting that English has some 40 'sounds', he ridicules Ben Franklin's scheme for reforming English spelling on the grounds that 'since (it) required the creation of six additional letters, it can hardly be called a simplification'! My favorite, though is a pair of consecutive sentences in which he (1) lists 'Celtic' as a European language (sic) that 'disappeared over time' and (2) avers that 'Celtic ... is not dead'.As I mentioned before, his linguistic chauvinism is appalling. The English range of sounds is 'pleasingly' diverse, but Anglo-French was 'harsh, clacking, guttural'. 'Italians cannot distinguish between a niece and a grandaughter', he tells us; of course they can, whether they have separate words for them or not. Welsh, so he says, is 'about as unpronounceable as it looks', '(i)n fact more so because Welsh pronunciations rarely bear much relation to their spellings at least when viewed from an English-speaking perspective'.

That last qualification does little to correct the highly erroneous impression created by the first two assertions. He makes a great to-do about the lack of a future tense in Japanese, as if this were a defect, and he claims that Germans suffer 'immense social anxiety' because they must choose from seven(!) words that all translate into English as 'you'. (He loves to count inflectional forms in other languages, usually to show how much 'simpler' English is; the value of such counts is obviously very questionable, and in any case he usually gets them wrong.)
And of course we get the usual nonsense about Eskimo words for snow.

As regards English one should note that Shakespeare used the form on at least one occasion. In 'The merchant of ... I don't have time to check. Whether this is popular etymology on Shakespeare's part or not I have no idea.

I could not find that at Rhymezone.com nor the Shakespeare First Folios site
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/shakespeare/folio/
The only slightly relevant quote (duke & possessive) was

Merchant of Venice: I, ii
the Duke of Saxonies Nephew? (First Folio)
the duke of saxony's nephew?  (Rhymezone edition)

Best Donna Richoux

In Esperanto, the "c" with a circumflex in the word in question is represented "ch" when writing in ordinary Latin letters.

I don't actually read Esperanto, but I seem to recall seeing "c^" rather than "ch". Googling in soc.culture.esperanto, "chielon" gives
41 threads to three for "c^ielon", but the range for "chielon" is1996-2004, while for "c^ielon" it's 1993-2001. Looking at "chu" vs. "c^u", both go back to 1989, but there are more early hits for "c^u" than for "chu". And both of them seem to have been less popular than "cxu".
So what's the deal?

Evan Kirshenbaum + HP Laboratories >This isn't good. I've seen good,
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 >and it didn't look anything likePalo Alto, CA 94304 >this.

(650)857-7572
http://www.kirshenbaum.net /