An interesting story from a newspaper across the Atlantic Ocean – the British government’s communication chief, Jean Gross, has warned against parents using in-car TVs, but not over concerns for safety. Instead, she fears that children would not be using the time to learn new vocabulary from interacting with their parents on the road, and playing spotting games in the car like “I Spy” – all of which means that parents aiming to keep the kids quiet during long car journeys could be doing just that, and having an adverse effect on their speech development.

From the article:

[Gross] said that long car journeys were opportunities to “double their vocabulary” and warned that children of wealthy families were most at risk because they were likely to have the latest technology.

“I remember [when my children were little] we did spotting games in the car, but with the Nintendo DS and other hand-held video games it’s going to be more affluent parents whose children have problems learning to speak, not just those from poorer homes who have less exposure to a wide range of language,” Mrs Gross told The Times.

Personally I feel like this is going a little over the top, but I do see where the concern is coming from. Children absorb new information so easily during formative years that it is a shame to waste hours of possible interaction during a journey where their changing surroundings are almost guaranteed to show them something new.

However, surely a compromise would be to let the children watch the TV in the car, but give them Sesame Street to watch?

One of my favourite webcomics, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, recently updated with a brilliant strip relating to this particular annoyance.

To be honest, this one doesn’t particularly bother me. The key is in the difference between the nominative and objective cases for nouns in English – and in 99.9% of circumstances, words in either case have exactly the same form.

However, there is in fact a relatively easy way to know whether you should be using who or whom in any particular sentence:

If you can replace the person in question with “he/she”, use who. If you have to use “him/her”, use whom.

For example:

He went to Florida for the weekend: Who went to Florida for the weekend?

The bell tolls for him: For whom does the bell toll?

So there you go: who is to whom as he is to him. Replace the words in a sentence and see which one sounds right.

In some ways the findings of this research seem strange, but in another way, it makes sense.

Children with hearing loss in one ear have lower speech-language scores than siblings with normal hearing, new research shows.

A team of scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis recruited 74 children from the St. Louis region between the ages of 6 and 12 with one-sided hearing loss. Each child was compared to a sibling with normal hearing.

This allowed the researchers to take into account the possible effects of environmental and genetic factors on language skills.

The research showed that the siblings who were deaf in one ear had poorer oral language skills than their aurally fit siblings.

“The effect of hearing loss in one ear may be subtle”, says Judith E C Lieu MD, a a Washington University professor and ear, nose and throat specialist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “These children may shun large group situations because the noise overwhelms them, and they have a hard time understanding speech.”

Deafness in only one ear also affects a child’s ability to play team sports, since it’s much harder to locate the source of calls and other noises, and depending on which way they’re facing, they might not be able to hear some calls at all.

Estimates from the research conducted showed than as many as 1 in 50 school-aged children in the US have only partial hearing in one ear.

I read an interesting article today about how Persian is a deceptively easy language to learn – far easier, in fact, than most western European languages that are the staple of many schools’ foreign language courses (e.g. French, Spanish, German etc.).

Check out the blog entry on pagef30.com for the full article, but here are the two main reasons why people think Persian is hard, or automatically dismiss it when considering what language they would like to learn:

• It uses the Arabic alphabet
• Persian speakers are not as numerous or as widely spread as users of more popular languages like Spanish or French

However, some of the details that make it easier than you’d think include:

• Verbs conjugate very easily, and are very regular in form – fewer irregularities mean much less to learn
• Nouns don’t require articles (the, the definite article, and a/an, the indefinite article)
• Nouns and pronouns also don’t require cases
• Adjectives are the same in form as adverbs – “you did good” is the same as “you did well”
• Persian is agglutinative – that is, longer, more complex words are formed by sticking together shorter words

So there you have it. Check out the full article for more detail. But if you’ve always wanted to pick up a Middle Eastern language but you’re worried of the difficulty curve, perhaps Persian is one to consider.

However, the only thing worse than a pedant is an incorrect pedant – a stickler to the rules that is not aware of the correct rules themselves.

English is a constantly evolving language, as you so often hear, so rules that were once considered solid can be eroded over time – for example, the hyphenation and/or capitalization of words like E-mail (or if you want to go much further back, good-bye). Nowadays it is perfectly acceptable to see email and goodbye.

However, there are some ‘rules’ that have permeated into the English language which simply have no basis in fact. Here are my top three:

1. “Irregardless” is not a word.
As much as it pains me to admit it, this hideous travesty of a word is actually included in most editions of most English dictionaries, in the ‘non-standard’ section. This, for all intents and purposes, makes it a word.

However, this does not mean that you should ever use it. “Regardless” is fine by itself – there is simply no need to add the ‘ir-’ to the beginning. I assume this started because people wanted to combine the words “regardless” and “irrespective”, and thus the bastard son “irregardless” was born.

Similarly, words such as “bootylicious” are also in the non-standard section of some dictionaries, but this doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable to use… in polite company, anyway!

2. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.
I always find myself trying to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition wherever possible, but I recently found out that you don’t necessarily have to.

Again, this doesn’t mean that you have free license to add prepositions to sentences that already make sense. “That’s what I’m talking about” is fine (you simply can’t rephrase that to avoid the preposition being at the end and have the sentence come out sounding natural – “that is about which I am talking” just sounds silly). However, saying “That’s where it’s at” is incorrect, because you can remove the preposition from the end and still have a sentence that makes perfect sense: “That’s where it is”. Of course, both these sentences have a basis in slang, which makes it harder to apply rules to them anyway.

The rule shouldn’t be “don’t end a sentence with a preposition”, but more like “don’t use unnecessary prepositions”!

3. It’s incorrect to split your infinitives.
For those of you unaware of what a split infinitive is, the infinitive is the form of any verb which is prefaced with the word “to”. For example, “to play”, “to love”, “to see”, etc.

To split an infinitive is to put a word inbetween the “to” and the verb – the most famous split infinitive in history is probably the tagline to Star Trek – “To boldly go where no man has gone before”.

The reason grammarians often tell people not to split their infinitives goes all the way back to good old Latin and Ancient Greek – the founding languages of much of the English language. In Latin and Greek, infinitives are one word: “to play” in Latin is ludere, “to love” is amare, “to see” is videre.

Thus the split infinitive rule is a throwback to English’s roots – but English splits the infinitive anyway, by dividing it into two words. However, it is still considered a single part of speech, and is an issue that will no doubt continue to divide anal retentives for centuries.

English being English, there are some situations where refusing to split the infinitive will actually change the meaning of a sentence. For example, “I told my sister to quickly get off the bus” means that my sister should get off the bus quickly; but “I told my sister quickly to get off the bus” coupld imply that I spoke rapidly, or my telling her was a fast reaction to a previous event.

Personally, I always try to avoid splitting infinitives wherever possible – to me it just sounds inherently wrong – but I don’t correct others when they do… because it just isn’t a hard and fast rule.

“Too” can either mean ‘in addition’ or ‘to an excessive degree’. For example, “I’m going there too” (i.e. “I am also going there”), or “I’ve had too much food”, or “You’re standing too close to the fire”.

For pretty much everything else, you use “to”, which is a word that usually expresses motion towards something (e.g. “I am going to work”, “The plant has grown to six feet”, “Give it to me”, etc.). It has many other meanings, too – which is probably why it is occasionally confused.

Back when I first learned this rule, I remembered it as there being “too many Os in ‘too’”. This helped me remember only to use the word when I wanted to express that there was an excess or something.

A conditional clause in English requires a couple of things – the word if, on one side of the sentence – and then a verb in the conditional tense (for example, “I would have seen”, or “I would go”) on the other. Let’s look at an example:

In this (correct) sentence, the second part of the sentence is hypothetical – since I did not enter the competition, I did not win.

However, often in American English you hear:

This may sound correct due to the fact that you hear it so often, but you should not have a conditional verb on both sides.

A similar error involving conditional sentences is the difference between “would have” and “would of”. It is quite easy to see how this mistake comes about – since “would have” is so often shortened in conversation to “would’ve” (see my earlier post about apostrophes to see why it contracts like this), it can sound a lot like “would of”.

For example:

When written out like this, it is easier to see that the first sentence (“would have”) is correct, and the second (“would of”) is incorrect. “Would of” means nothing, since “would” modifies the verb that follows, and “of” is, of course, not a verb.

The very same applies to “should have”/”should of”, “will have”/”will of”, and “could have”/”could of”. In all instances, “have” is correct.

Happily this is a very simple error, with a very simple rule to prevent yourself from falling into the trap.

Use fewer when you are talking about things that can be counted. For example:

Use less when you are talking about things that can’t be counted in the traditional way. For example:

Hopefully if you learn this rule, you will make fewer mistakes, and find yourself less susceptible to making this error!

It is a fairly well known fact that English borrows words and word roots from a variety of sources. Wikipedia states that that majority of English roots come from Latin and French (Old Norman), though the 100 most frequently used words are all Germanic in origin. This graph demonstrates a full breakdown, taken from a sample of 80,000 words from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary:

Although we have a rich vocabulary (by far the widest of all languages, with some 2 million words at last count), the English language treats nouns and verbs (and, to an extent, adjectives and pronouns) rather differently from the Romance languages from which it borrows heavily. One of the main differences is in the morphology of words – that is, how they change depending on gender and number (for nouns and adjectives), and person, mood, voice, and tense (for verbs). Verbs in English, for example, do not change in form much, usually adding an ‘s’ in the third person singular. For example, the verb “to see”:

In the future tense, the verb form (or inflection) itself does not change at all – instead, we use the auxiliary verb “to be” in its future tense, and the present participle of the verb (in this case, “see”). For example:

This makes learning regular English verbs pretty easy. Making a “verb table” like this seems a little pointless in English, since there are only two different forms in the present tense for this particular verb. This process is also known as conjugating a verb.

Let’s compare our relatively simple English verb table (the top one, indicating the present tense) with the French equivalent, then – the French verb to see is voir:

There are 5 different forms here. The future tense in French has another 6 different forms (je verrai, tu verras, il verra, nous verrons, vous verrez, ils verront), meaning that there’s a whole lot more learning to do.

Likewise, nouns in English have a singular and plural form – we don’t have to worry about gender or case, which explains why these are seen as new and slightly unusual concepts when it comes to learning a language like Spanish, French or German.

Let’s take the word ‘table’ as an example (since above I listed two ‘verb tables’) – in English, you either have a table, or you have several tables. Singular and plural – simple, right? Let’s compare the Latin word for ‘table’ (mensa, which happens to be a 1st declension feminine noun) and see how many forms it has (listing the different forms for a noun is also known as declining):

You can safely avoid the case names for now (though you may recognize a few), but straight away you can see that there are far more noun forms in Latin than in English (in this case, 7 different inflections in Latin vs. only 2 in English). Latin is perhaps an extreme example here, since it is an extremely inflective language and relies on the inflections of the words to ‘fill in’ the rest of the words in a sentence far more than English does. Moreover, this is just how you decline 1st declension feminine nouns in Latin – there are 5 groups of nouns, most of which have several genders, and there are all kinds of identical and similar forms across the groups, meaning that you really have to know your word endings to understand what is going on.

This is just a short demonstration of morphology at work, and barely begins to touch on the subject. However, if you’re thinking of learning another language (especially if it’s a Romance language), then it’s useful to see what you’re going to be up against. Learning your nouns and verbs in all their forms early on in your studying – especially the irregular ones – will put you in a much better position once your vocabulary expands and you start learning more complicated constructions and idioms, which sometimes combine several forms to create different or subtler meanings.

Sorry for all the technical talk – I hope this was useful to some!

I recently stumbled upon LangLadder, a super useful extension for the Firefox web browser which has an array of features to help intermediate and advanced level language learners reinforce your vocabulary while you browse the web. By merging the learning experience with how many people spend the bulk of their free time (statistics have shown that the average person spends around 2 hours a day on the internet), it creates a fun way to practice your target language in context. By browsing foreign language sites, you can add words you don’t know to a vocabulary list that pops up in your sidebar, which gives you definitions as you go using Google Translate. You can later test yourself with the plugin’s built-in flashcard system, which tracks your progress as you improve.

You can learn more about how LangLadder works from its creator, Erik Larson, by watching this video:

I love when technology can legitimately aid your language studies – this is a simple yet great idea for those who want to sharpen up their skills. Check out langladder.com to download the plugin, and for more information. It works on both PC and Mac; all you’ll need is the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Jetpack plugin, plus the LangLadder add-on.