I’m a Descriptive Grammarian rather than a Prescriptive Grammarian

Watch your language! This is a family friendly blog! Ha ha ha. I kid, I kid. Nice comment. It’s kind of fun to know that other people deal with this stuff. Sounds like the “it’s obsolete as a strict rule” crowd has another member.

The linguist in me wants me to remind you that language is always changing and maybe it was more common to say /thee/ before words starting with a vowel sound but perhaps the pronunication is just leveling out to a more common /thuh/ sound using the “shwa” phonetic sound (which I can’t type with this Japanese keyboard but represents the /uh/ sound in IPA..International Phonetic Alphabet). But because it still sounds fine to say /thee/, I would say it is still in the process of switching and it might be some time before /thee/ disappears (except as a word used for emphasis), if ever. Of course, this is just my theory…don’t actually know if it’s disappearing. The only definite fact for me here is that language changes and is always changing.

Can you tell I am I’m a Descriptive Grammarian rather than a Prescriptive Grammarian, or what? =P

Alex, about the and thee, many Japanese get taught that thee is used when the noun starts with a vowel. I should find a survey on that, but casually chatting with cow-orkers I find most of them were taught that way, and believe it to be a rule that native speakers follow. I remember that Tony Laslow talked about it in one of the ダーリンは外国人 books – ダーリンの頭ん中に, IIRC.

I’m just put out that it’s happening in America too. The students who can’t speak the language, not the teachers who know it academically, obviously. Sad.

I think the ‘who’ versus ‘whom’ rule is antiquated, at least colloquially. It’s one of those questions that my Japanese adult students loved to ask about. Another one was ‘the’ pronouned ‘thuh’ or ‘thee’. In actual use it doesn’t matter, except that we use ‘thee’ to emphasize something as being number one, sort of like spoken italics. “Catch-22 is not just a book, it’s the book!” (Here, I’d pronounce it as ‘thee’, wouldn’t you?)

I’ve found that having training in teaching English often doesn’t mean a whole lot if the teacher hasn’t gone through second-language acquisition themselves (especially teachers in Japan). I think the JET program should make learning Japanese mandatory, not optional, as should all of the 英会話. I’ve recognized so many peculiarities in English after struggling through difficult concepts in Japanese. I think to myself, “Why do they say it like that in Japanese? Wait a minute, why do we say it like that in English?”

Example off the top of my head:
レポートを書かないといけない。 (To my Western brain sounded initially like, “I won’t write a report can’t go,” and then became, “I can’t not write a report.”)

“I have to write a report.” After acquiring the pattern in Japanese, I look at this in English now as, “I am in possession of the act of writing a report.” The ‘have’ probably throws off a lot of beginning students of English.

Of course, there are some very talented English teachers who didn’t need to study a second language, but overall, I have this impression that an English teacher in Japan (even a university professor) who hasn’t studied a foreign language themselves is a bad English teacher. (My bias is showing)

I said “set” for number 3 because I assumed that it was meant to be in past tense. (“Put” was, so I left “set” in the same tense.)

And 5 could be phrased in any of those ways. I just chose something I felt would be more common in a school setting. Either way, I think we all know that you don’t ask “to” someone. Yikes.