User talk:CapnPrep

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[edit] The expression "conditional mood" in English grammar?

"In English, the conditional mood is a compound verb form consisting of the modal auxiliary verb would (or could, might, should) and the infinitive form of the main verb."

Isn't this suggestion that there is a conditional mood in English somewhat contrary to modern grammatical analyses? The various grammars I use (Quirk and several pedagogical texts) do not introduce such an expression. Furthermore, the first line of the article seems to imply that conditional mood and conditional tense are one and the same. Again, grammars do not show a conditional tense in their verb conjugations. Would it not be better and more accurate to say that in English in a clause expressing a condition the verb group takes a particular form involving a modal auxiliary.

That is more or less fine with me — go ahead and edit the article! (And start a discussion on the talk page over there.) "Conditional tense" was definitely not my idea. And in English, whatever you want to call this compound verb form, it is mostly used in the clause expressing the result, not the condition. CapnPrep 00:51, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] help needed

Hi. I'm looking for a linguist to add some rational input on Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_November_1#Category:Finland-Swedish. More specifically, i'm hoping you can help prevent someone who's either a hyphen fetishist or perhaps just loves debating from making WP disregard established usage among English-speaking linguists. Thanks! --Espoo 16:20, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm kind-of a hyphen-fetishist myself… Actually, I do agree with you about dropping the hyphen here, but it looks like this particular debate has gone beyond the "rational input" stage. CapnPrep 15:14, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, we can't have the category spelled differently than the article, so either one has to be changed. Would you be willing to add a comment saying that as a linguist you would use what apparently almost all your colleagues who are native English speakers use to designate this language, namely "Finland Swedish" without a hyphen? In fact, as the links i provided show, English-speaking linguists don't use a hyphen even in "Finland Swedish dialects".

Am i correct in believing that most double-barreled language names never get "language" glued on? --Espoo 17:29, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I actually know one Swedish-speaking Finn who is also a linguist who works on the languages of Finland, so this would be the person to listen to. And it turns out that they feel exactly the same way about it as I do: "I don't know! And, as you know, I really really don't care! I guess I would write it without the hyphen, maybe." And having looked more closely at the discussion, I would tempted to vote for the "Category:Finland-Swedish language" proposal (sorry). I would prefer it without the hyphen, but what can you do. It's a good compromise. And as you all have noticed, there is no coherent naming policy for these categories on WP, but there is a definite tendency to include "language" systematically (and as for double-barreled names, I know of at least Category:Scottish Gaelic language and Category:Old English language). CapnPrep 21:58, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I can understand that many linguists don't really care about spelling issues due to the modern professional attitude towards language variation and prefer to leave those discussions to less scientific and more dogmatic minds, but i'm quite sure that this does not normally extend to the technical terms linguists use because these are professional tools, and all professionals want to standardise these. (In addition, linguists in many countries have realised their social responsibility in helping to update many languages' hopelessly outdated spelling "systems" that have been naively sanctified due to linguistic misconceptions and cause incredible amounts of personal suffering and social injustice.) It's senseless to repeatedly spend time on thinking about how to spell basic terms in one's profession, and the problems caused by databases and lists not being consistent (in many languages, entries are listed differently depending on hyphenation!) adds to the nuisance.

In addition, as i pointed out in the discussion and hinted at above, the spellings "Finland-Swedish" and "Finland-Swedish dialects" seem to occur only in texts by linguists who are not native English speakers, so i'm quite sure that their English spelling habits are influenced by language interference. Nevertheless, i'm sure that none of them would add a hyphen to terms like "UK English", "US English", or "Quebec French" that they have not seen spelled as often or more often by non-native speakers (as is the case with the many texts by Finnish and Swedish linguists on this topic).

Generally speaking, i'm all for compromises, but i don't think it's a good idea adding "language" to double-barreled language names unless necessary. In fact, i believe that the addition should be made even to single-noun names only where necessary. I believe that the misnomers "Swedish language" and "Scottish Gaelic language" were caused by illogical reference to "English", which can mean more than the language. It seems that "Swedish" as a noun cannot mean anything except the language since the people are called "Swedes" by all native English speakers. It would seem that the same is true of "Gaelic", but i haven't studied that situation yet. It would seem best to take "language" off of the article and category Swedish language and all other language articles that only seemingly correspond to "English" and its ambivalence. Due to the clumsiness of names with many parts, this is especially true in the case of double-barreled language names that are not ambivalent. Do you know any triple-barreled language names? --Espoo 06:16, 8 November 2006 (UTC)