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| A British trading post was established in 1819 |
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My response
After the discussion in class this morning exploring what makes grammar or a word use correct, seeing this in the BBC News was too perfect not to respond to. Harbeck's article not only addresses concerns about correctness and what makes language use good or not, but it also reminded me of other things.
As I am sure you already know, there is not one standard version of English, but several. The two big ones are the British version and the American version, and the differences persist in the academic versions of these languages. The most obvious difference in spelling. My habit, for example, is to spell the word centre as c-e-n-t-r-e, which conflicts with AUA's preferred American spelling, c-e-n-t-e-r. One detail Harbeck tells us is that the spelling of Singlish has not been standardised, but then, neither had the spelling of any standard version of English until relatively recently. Shakespeare often spells exactly the same word differently in the same piece of work! And a glance at a typical entry in the massive and massively scholarly Oxford English Dictionary (OED) shows that before around 1800, English was very flexible about spelling. For example, have a look at the variety of spellings in the Forms section for the English word academic in the OED entry.
Since the OED requires a subscription to access, I've copied this entry into the MS Word document that you can view. With more than 600,000 entries, the OED is a great dictionary, but this example also shows you why I do not recommend it to students. The much smaller Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary or the free Oxford Dictionaries online that we have already used are much more useful dictionaries for most purposes. But the OED is fun, and I thought you might like to see a typical entry.
Moving on from spelling, a small detail that sometimes annoys me is the way my students use commas and full stops with "quotation marks." But this is probably also in part a result of the conflicting American and British standards of English. I also get annoyed when I see academic work that starts sentences with the word so, although using but or and to do the same no longer annoys in most cases, and I even do it myself sometimes. Oxford Dictionaries online also has a very useful grammar section, for example their notes on the use of "quotation marks."
All of these variations in language use might have reasons for against their use, but as your discussion clarified so well this morning, those reasons depend on the context and the purposes of the language users: one version is no more correct than any other, nor is one version more good than another. But of course, language use is still incorrect if it does not follow the rules used, usually unconsciously, by its native speakers. If tried to speak Singlish, I would fail. In fact, I can't even manage the version of informal language that my young nieces and nephews use: I don't know some of the vocabulary, so would use it incorrectly, and some of their grammar structures really do seem wrong to me, even though I know that they are perfectly correct for that group of native speakers.
And when I just checked, I saw that bogan has now made it into Oxford Dictionaries online - but if it appears in your academic writing this term, I will likely mark it in green.
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Reference
I didn't refer to it in my blog post, but the BBC News story also includes a YouTube clip of an excerpt from the Singlish version of the animated film Frozen. That was fun - except for a few bits, it sounded more like Chinese than English to me.
ReplyDeleteHaha I tried my best to listen to the Singlish version of the film Frozen, but I failed the first time. You are quite right, it sounds too Chinese to be called English. On my second try when I watched it while reading subtitles, it makes a bit more sense. There are still too many Chinese jargon in it.
ReplyDeleteIf the video is really Singlish, then I think it's a hybrid of English and Chinese which can be neither understood by English native speakers nor by Manderin native speakers.
Chinese speakers won't understand it, for it is English; neither will those of English for too many Chinese words are in conversation.
In my opinion, the language style is considered correct when the most influential group used it and deems it as correct. If Singapore turned out to be the most influential group in the world surpassing both US and UK, Singlish would be the new norm of English language and British and American English would be deemed as obsolete language and impractical. I don't think that's possible.
For me, I think that people are following the majority and there is a unknown factor affecting us on making a decsion. And, this may be good and bad. I think that following other people is ok but it has to be on some extend because the follower may be wrong. Since today(9/21/16) is our third class, I haven't seen any unanimous answer that is wrong.
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