Grammar Nazis of Your Conlangs

[storyteller232]

So i saw this funny linguistic themed cartoon on Facebook that I laughed entirely to hard at, but it got me thinking and posed a fun question. What grammatical errors would the Grammar Nazis who spoke your conlangs rip their hair out over? Unfortunately my conlang is no where near the point where i could really consdier this question myself yet.

Egyptian Grammar Nazis.jpg (51.13 KiB) Viewed 16130 times

[Vijay]

Maybe trying to use conjunctions (e.g. the cub ate duck and venison) where parallelism (e.g. the cub ate duck, ate venison) is an option

[bbbosborne]

affix order -- big formality issue for one of my languages. or the tiny, minor rules about adverbs and conditionals

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

Using the definite article together with certain possessive determiners, e.g. dē miess brútē (litt. "the my brother") instead of just miess brútē ("my brother").

Using oss instead of solls in comparisons of equality, e.g. ef kra oss instead of ef kra solls ("as big as").

[mèþru]

Can we please not use the term Nazi to mean strict about something in general

[WeepingElf]

Can we please not use the term Nazi to mean strict about something in general

Thats what I wanted to post, too! Seconded. Such overuse of the word "Nazi" is impious to the millions of people who suffered from the deeds of the actual Nazis.

[zompist]

Neat question! I have a few of these in Verdurian— e.g. pronoun hopping, tag questions, constituent dislocation. (Search for these in the grammar if you want examples.) Plus slang, of course.

There are things that go the other way, too— genteelisms that no self-respecting working person would use, notably the imitation of the Caďinor dynamic tenses with the inceptive prefix za-, producing non-transparent derivations like crešir 'grow' > zacrešir 'mature'.

[xxx]

Can we please not use the term Nazi to mean strict about something in general

Thats what I wanted to post, too! Seconded. Such overuse of the word "Nazi" is impious to the millions of people who suffered from the deeds of the actual Nazis.

Semantics nazis here...

[KathTheDragon]

I feel like you completely missed their point.

[Curlyjimsam]

"Golden Age" Viksen of a couple of hundred years ago had some extremely strong prescriptivist trends, affecting syntax in particular. For one thing, "simple" or "naturalistic" styles were preferred over the elaborate constructions of previous centuries, but at the same time the principle of "one form : one meaning" meant that many syntactic variants were decried as non-standard. There was held to be a single "most correct" way of ordering words to express a given logical thought, and anything else was inferior. This particularly restricted variations in word order to express pragmatic subtleties, and the use of variant structures. For example, there were two ways in ordinary speech of forming a purpose clause: with an initial complementiser sud, or with a complementiser yi with sud as a postverbal adverb. The yi ... sud option became preferred and the first (much older) variant became stigmatised. Some writers got around these restrictions in syntax through great elaborations of lexicon, though many saw this too as opposed to the principles of simplicity.

Matters today are a little more relaxed, but the legacy of that earlier time is still felt quite strongly.

[xxx]

in a priori conlang (in philosophical sense...) any speaker is a grammar Nazi, but whose favorite replica would not be "you should not say" but "what do you want to say"...

[Ares Land]

in a priori conlang (in philosophical sense...) any speaker is a grammar Nazi, but whose favorite replica would not be "you should not say" but "what do you want to say"...

That's not a conlang, that's 5th century BC Attic greek!

For Tarandim, a few ideas:
- moving place and time adverbials before the verb.
- using active personal prefixes on deponent verbs.
- using the benefactive where the malefactive would be required.

There'd be hypercorrection as well. Presumably scholars would borrow noun classes from Kangrim, or use OVS word order; neither would have occured in ordinary speech.

All of these are due to attemps to bring Tarandim (the everyday koine) closer to Kangrim (the priestly and epic language).

(An interesting thought that occured to me.
English-speaking language purists are bothered when the language doesn't work like Latin. Like the 'not ending sentences with a preposition' rule.
In French, we're bothered by English borrowings. And calques. Well, that and difficult spellings).

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

The French are bothered by difficult spellings?

[Ares Land]

The French are bothered by difficult spellings?

Sorry, that was poorly phrased. We're not bothered by difficult spellings, we're bothered when people get them wrong.

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

Ah, that makes more sense.

[xxx]

The French are bothered by difficult spellings?

the French are so when they doubt the spelling in an official letter that they have to write, the learners are all the time ...

[Hallow XIII]

Native speakers of french are, as a rule, universally incapable of spelling their native language. I've never met a single French speaker I couldn't correct on it, and the reason why is quite readily apparent if you look at the way spoken French is rendered into writing on the internet. Learners, having less phonemic awareness, are more readily able to learn spellings that approach logographs.

[Ares Land]

Native speakers of french are, as a rule, universally incapable of spelling their native language. I've never met a single French speaker I couldn't correct on it, and the reason why is quite readily apparent if you look at the way spoken French is rendered into writing on the internet. Learners, having less phonemic awareness, are more readily able to learn spellings that approach logographs.

Hey! I resent that :p

More seriously, the same thing applies to English. ZBB regulars should be painfully aware by now of how unidiomatic my English can be, my spoken English is even worse - I sound like Depardieu - but I don't think I ever made a spelling mistake in English!

We have some truly vicious shibboleths in French though, like gente féminine / gent féminine, au temps pour moi/ autant pour moi. I wonder if English-speaking French learners are taught these. (Bonus points: for one of the two examples I gave, the "correct" spelling is, I believe, completely wrong).

Anyway, sorry for the off topic comments.
(Also, nothing personal, Hallow. IIRC you're Swiss, which means you speak French better than we do.)

[Ryusenshi]

More seriously, the same thing applies to English. ZBB regulars should be painfully aware by now of how unidiomatic my English can be, my spoken English is even worse - I sound like Depardieu - but I don't think I ever made a spelling mistake in English!

I used to be like that. Then, I studied English phonetics, to try to get rid of my stupid accent. An interesting side effect is that I started to make spelling mistakes! Like, the other day I caught myself typing *munkey instead of monkey. Previously, I would have done the opposite mistake (pronouncing monkey to rhyme with donkey).

[xxx]

Learners, having less phonemic awareness, are more readily able to learn spellings that approach logographs.

that may be why French speaking foreigners are so easily recognized for such ...