DOCSLIB.ORG

Usage, Rules, and Style

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Usage, Rules, and Style USAGE, RULES, AND STYLE BY JACK LYNCH, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, NEWARK , NEW JERSEY Web: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/links.html Email: <[email protected]> The Above, The Following. Lists are common in some sorts of writing, introduced by the following and referred to by the above. But you can often make a sentence clearer and punchier with simple pronouns: instead of the above topics, try these topics — the context makes your subject clear. Action Verbs. Action verbs, as the name reveals, express actions; contrast them with verbs of being. Think of the difference between "I study" (action verb, even if it's not the most exciting action) and "I am a student" (verb of being). It's often wise to cut down on verbs of being, replacing them (whenever possible) with action verbs; that'll make your writing punchier. Whatever you do, though, don't confuse action verbs with the active voice, which is the opposite of the passive voice. Sentences with verbs of being (such as am, is, are, were) aren't necessarily passive sentences, even if they're often weak ones. Affect versus Effect. Affect with an a is usually a verb; effect with an e is (usually) a noun. When you affect something, you have an effect on it. The usual adjective is effective. If the usuals leave you curious, here's the rest of the story: affective as an adjective means "relating to or arousing an emotional reaction"; effect as a verb means "to bring about" or "to accomplish," as in "to effect a change." All of. "All of the ——" can usually be rewritten as "All the ——," "All ——," or "Every ——." Also. Avoid beginning sentences with also. There's nothing wrong with it, but it tends to make your writing inelegant. Among versus Between. The simple rule will rarely fail you: use between for two things, among for more than two. And/or. And/or is sometimes necessary in legal documents, but just clutters other writing. One word or the other will almost always do just as well. Anticipate. 287 To anticipate something is to get ready for it or to do something in advance; this is not the same as expect. If you expect changes, you think they'll be coming soon; if you anticipate changes, you're preparing to deal with them. Blake certainly didn't expect Modernist poetry, but in some ways he anticipated it by doing similar things a century earlier. Anticipate is often improperly used (in a love affair with the longer word) where expect is better. Apostrophe. The most common way to form a possessive in English is with apostrophe and s: "a hard day's night." After a plural noun ending in s, put just an apostrophe: "two hours' work" (i.e., "the work of two hours"). If a plural doesn't end in s — children, men, people — plain old apostrophe-s: "children's," "men's," "people's." It's never "mens'" or "childrens'." There's also the opposite case: when a singular noun ends in s. That's a little trickier. Most style guides prefer s's: James's house. Plain old s-apostrophe (as in James' house) is common in journalism, but most other publishers prefer James's. It's a matter of house style. Note that, with the exception of the little-used one, the possessives of pronouns never get apostrophes: theirs, not their's; hers, not her's; its, not it's. See It's versus Its. Apostrophes are sometimes used to make acronyms or other abbreviations plural (another matter of a local house style). My preference: don't use apostrophes to make abbreviations plural — not "They took their SAT's," but "They took their SATs." The only exception is when having no apostrophe might be confusing: "Two As" is ambiguous (it might be read as the word as); make it "Two A's." Never use apostrophes as quotation marks to set off words or phrases (unless you need a quotation within a quotation). To refer to a decade, don't use an apostrophe before the s. Refer to the 1960s or the '60s (the apostrophe indicates that "19" has been omitted), not the 1960's or (worse) the '60's. See also Microsoft Word for tips on distinguishing apostrophes from single quotation marks. Assure, Ensure, Insure. While ensure and insure aren't quite so clear cut, assure is very different from both. You assure a person that things will go right by making him confident. Never use assure in the sense of "Assure that the wording is correct"; you can only assure somebody that it's correct. Ensure and insure are sometimes used interchangeably, but it may be better to keep them separate. Insuring is the business of an insurance company, i.e., setting aside resources in case of a loss. Ensure means make sure, as in "Ensure that this is done by Monday." As to Whether. Plain old whether often does the trick. See Wasted Words. As versus Like. In formal writing, avoid using like as a conjunction. In other words, something can be like something else (there it's a preposition), but avoid "It tastes good like a cigarette should" — it should be "as a cigarette 288 should." Quickie test: there should be no verb in the phrase right after like. Even in phrases such as "It looks like it's going to rain" or "It sounds like the motor's broken," as if is usually more appropriate than like — again, at least in formal writing. I trust I needn't comment on the barbarous, slack-jawed habit of using like as a verbal crutch: "It was just, like, y'know, like, really weird, like." (Actual sentence overheard on the New York City subway: "He was just like — and I was all like, whatever." There's a swell taxonomy of what likes are like in Maggie Balistreri's charming Evasion-English Dictionary.) It's bad enough in speech: I encourage people to try to go an entire day without saying "like," and few can manage. If you use it in writing, though, you should be afflicted with plagues and boils. Shame on you. As Yet. Consider using yet. See Wasted Words. At This Point, At the Present Time, At This Point in Time. Never, never, never, never. Basically. Almost always useless. Qualifiers such as basically, essentially, and totally rarely add anything to a sentence; they're the written equivalent of "Um." See Wasted Words, and read it twice. Basis. Often an unnecessarily long way of saying something. "On a daily basis," for instance, could just as easily be "daily," which can be both an adjective and an adverb. Instead of "The magazine is published on a monthly basis," use "The magazine is published monthly." Being That. A dreadfully overused idiom (probably coming from "it being the case that"), favored by those who want to sound more impressive. Avoid it. Use because, since, or something similarly direct. Bluntness. Writing is too often wimpy. Don't be afraid to be blunt. Instead of "There appear to be indications that the product heretofore referred to may be lacking substantial qualitative consummation, suggesting it may be incommensurate with the standards previously established by this department," try "It's bad" or "It doesn't work." Of course you should be sensitive to your reader's feelings — there's no need to be vicious or crude, and saying "It sucks" won't win you many friends — but don't go too far in the opposite direction. Call 'em as you see 'em. But at the Beginning. Contrary to what your high school English teacher told you, there is no reason not to begin a sentence with but or and; in fact, these words often make a sentence more forceful and graceful. They are almost always better than beginning with however or additionally. Beginning with but or and does make your writing less formal; — but worse things could happen to most writing than becoming less formal. Capable. 289 The phrase is capable of ——ing can usually be better rendered as is able to ——, or even turned into an active verb with can ——. Centralized. Use central whenever possible. Citation. The importance of accurate citation cannot be overstated: a paper without proper citations is open to charges of plagiary. It's not simply a matter of having the minimum of five footnotes in your research paper to keep the teacher happy, and it's not simply a matter of avoiding honor-code trouble. Careful citation shows your reader that you've done your homework, and allows him or her to check up on you. It amounts to laying your intellectual cards on the table. Cite your source for every direct quotation and every borrowed idea. Two standards are common in English papers: that of the MLA Style Guide and that of The Chicago Manual of Style. Either will do. The MLA style calls for a list of "Works Cited" at the end of a paper in standard bibliographical form, alphabetical by author: Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Edited by Herbert Davis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965. Citations in the text of the paper would then include the author's name (with a year or abbreviated title if more than one work is cited) and page number; for instance: ". the most pernicious race of odious little vermin" (Swift 120). The Chicago style gives a full citation in a footnote (or endnote) on the first quotation in this form: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Open Research Online Oro.Open.Ac.Uk
    Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs “You can just give those documents to myself’: Untriggered reflexive pronouns in 21st century spoken British English Book Section How to cite: Paterson, Laura (2018). “You can just give those documents to myself’: Untriggered reflexive pronouns in 21st century spoken British English. In: Brezina, Vaclav; Love, Robbie and Aijmer, Karin eds. Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech. Sociolinguistic Studies of the Spoken (BNC2014). Abingdon: Routledge. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2018 Routledge Version: Accepted Manuscript Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: https://www.routledge.com/Corpus-Approaches-to-Contemporary-British-Speech-Sociolinguistic-Studies/Brezina-Love-Aijmer/p/book/9781138287273 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk You can just give those documents to myself’: Untriggered reflexive pronouns in 21st century spoken British English Laura L. Paterson, The Open University, UK 1. Introduction Reflexive pronouns, such as myself, herself, yourselves, share a real-world referent with other components of the clause (or local domain) in which they occur. As such, they require a coreferent noun phrase (NP) to fulfil their syntactic criteria. In the sentence ‘The cat washes herself’, the NP the cat and the reflexive pronoun herself correspond to the same entity and share a syntactic bond. However, despite formal syntactic constraints, reflexive pronouns are used without coreferent NPs in (some varieties of) English (Parker, Riley and Meyer 1990).
    [Show full text]
  • A Feasibility Study of Hypercorrection in The
    I IS PRESTIGIOUS: A FEASIBILITY STUDY OF HYPERCORRECTION IN THE ACCUSATIVE CASE IN AMERICAN ENGLISH A RESEARCH PAPER SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS BY BENJAMIN D. BISHOP GUILHERME DUARTE GARCIA - ADVISOR BALL STATE UNIVERSITY MUNCIE, INDIANA MAY 2020 1 I IS PRESTIGIOUS Page 2 Contents 1 Abstract 4 2 Introduction 4 2.1 Linguistic Viruses . 4 2.2 Hypercorrection . 5 2.3 Identity in L1 English Hypercorrection . 7 2.4 Instructional Implications . 9 2.5 Objective . 10 3 Methods 12 4 Experiment 1 13 4.1 Methodology, Experiment 1 . 13 4.2 Results, Experiment 1 . 15 4.3 Discussion, Experiment 1 . 17 4.3.1 Hypercorrection and grouping . 17 4.3.2 Hypercorrection and time in residence . 18 4.3.3 Hypercorrection and age . 19 4.3.4 Hypercorrection and degree . 19 4.4 Overall Discussion . 19 5 Experiment 2 20 5.1 Methodology Experiment 2 . 20 5.2 Results, Experiment 2 . 21 5.3 Discussion, Experiment 2 . 23 5.3.1 Positional Import . 23 5.3.2 Education . 24 5.3.3 Age . 24 I IS PRESTIGIOUS Page 3 6 General Discussion 25 6.1 Degree and hypercorrection in culture . 25 6.2 Age and hypercorrection in culture . 26 6.3 The linguistic virus' structure . 27 6.3.1 The Linguistic Virus' Internal Structure . 27 6.3.2 The Linguistic Virus' External Placement . 28 6.3.3 The Linguistic Virus' Virulence . 28 6.4 Implications for instruction . 28 7 Conclusions 29 8 Implications for Future Research 30 I IS PRESTIGIOUS Page 4 1 Abstract Hypercorrection is an overgeneralization of a prestige semantic struc- ture (Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagereka, 2004).
    [Show full text]
  • LEXICAL and SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION in QATARI ARABIC by Darwish Ghuloom Hussein Yousef Al-Amadidhi Thesis Submitted for the De
    LEXICAL AND SOCIOLINGUISTICVARIATION IN QATARI ARABIC by Darwish Ghuloom Hussein Yousef Al-amadidhi Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Edinburgh 1985 Dedication To my parents and my wife with love and gratitude Abstract This thesis embodies the result of an investigation into two linguistic variables: the (d3) and the (Q) in QD. The basic issue tackled is this: are variations observed in these variables rule governed? If so, are they linguistic or non-linguistic? A close examination of the data has shown that the variables are governed to a great extent by the class of lexical item containing the variaoles. Moreover they have demonstrated co-variation with paralinguistic factors such as social group membership, age, level of education and style. The social motivation for change and variation are highlighted. Such processes occur as a result of status-ranking of local social dialects and as a result of the tendency of the younger people to modify their speech in the direction of the superimposed variety, which is learnt at school. The impact of the process of modernization on linguistic change is also examined. Acknowledgement I would like to thank the University of Qatar for providing me with the full scholarship which made it possible for me to continue my post graduate studies and complete this work. I must also- express my deep appreciation and thanks to the Cultural Attache's Office (Embassy of Qatar) in London for the help they offered during my stay in Britain-. This thesis would perhaps not have been completed without the interest, encouragement, patience and perspicacious criticism of my supervisor, Professor James R.
    [Show full text]
  • MIXED CODES, BILINGUALISM, and LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requi
    BILINGUAL NAVAJO: MIXED CODES, BILINGUALISM, AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Charlotte C. Schaengold, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Brian Joseph, Advisor Professor Donald Winford ________________________ Professor Keith Johnson Advisor Linguistics Graduate Program ABSTRACT Many American Indian Languages today are spoken by fewer than one hundred people, yet Navajo is still spoken by over 100,000 people and has maintained regional as well as formal and informal dialects. However, the language is changing. While the Navajo population is gradually shifting from Navajo toward English, the “tip” in the shift has not yet occurred, and enormous efforts are being made in Navajoland to slow the language’s decline. One symptom in this process of shift is the fact that many young people on the Reservation now speak a non-standard variety of Navajo called “Bilingual Navajo.” This non-standard variety of Navajo is the linguistic result of the contact between speakers of English and speakers of Navajo. Similar to Michif, as described by Bakker and Papen (1988, 1994, 1997) and Media Lengua, as described by Muysken (1994, 1997, 2000), Bilingual Navajo has the structure of an American Indian language with parts of its lexicon from a European language. “Bilingual mixed languages” are defined by Winford (2003) as languages created in a bilingual speech community with the grammar of one language and the lexicon of another. My intention is to place Bilingual Navajo into the historical and theoretical framework of the bilingual mixed language, and to explain how ii this language can be used in the Navajo speech community to help maintain the Navajo language.
    [Show full text]
  • Yiddish and Relation to the German Dialects Bryan Witmore University of South Carolina
    University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 6-30-2016 Yiddish and Relation To The German Dialects Bryan Witmore University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Witmore, B.(2016). Yiddish and Relation To The German Dialects. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ etd/3522 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. YIDDISH AND ITS RELATION TO THE GERMAN DIALECTS by Bryan Witmore Bachelor of Arts University of South Carolina, 2006 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts in German College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2016 Accepted by: Kurt Goblirsch, Director of Thesis Lara Ducate, Reader Lacy Ford, Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Copyright by Bryan Witmore, 2016 All Rights Reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis project was made possible in large part by the German program at the University of South Carolina. The technical assistance that propelled this project was contributed by the staff at the Ted Mimms Foreign Language Learning Center. My family was decisive in keeping me physically functional and emotionally buoyant through the writing process. Many thanks to you all. iii ABSTRACT In an attempt to balance the complex, multi-component nature of Yiddish with its more homogenous speech community – Ashekenazic Jews –Yiddishists have proposed definitions for the Yiddish language that cannot be considered linguistic in nature.
    [Show full text]
  • Phonological Variation and Change in Immigrant Speech : a Sociolinguistic Study of a 1967 Arab-Israeli War Immigrant Speech Community in Damascus, Syria
    Durham E-Theses Phonological variation and change in immigrant speech : A sociolinguistic study of a 1967 Arab-Israeli war immigrant speech community in Damascus, Syria. Jassem, Zaidan Ali How to cite: Jassem, Zaidan Ali (1987) Phonological variation and change in immigrant speech : A sociolinguistic study of a 1967 Arab-Israeli war immigrant speech community in Damascus, Syria., Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1682/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. PHONOLOGICAL VARIATION AND CHANGE IN IMMIGRANT SPEECH A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF A 1967 ARAB-ISRAELI WAR IMMIGRANT SPEECH COMMUNITY IN DAMASCUS, SYRIA. by Zaidan Ali Jassem (B.
    [Show full text]
  • Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages
    Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages UNCORRECTED PROOFS © JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY 1st proofs UNCORRECTED PROOFS © JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY 1st proofs Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages Gerrit J. Dimmendaal University of Cologne John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia UNCORRECTED PROOFS © JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY 1st proofs TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American 8 National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dimmendaal, Gerrit Jan. Historical linguistics and the comparative study of African languages / Gerrit J. Dimmendaal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. African languages--Grammar, Comparative. 2. Historical linguistics. I. Title. PL8008.D56 2011 496--dc22 2011002759 isbn 978 90 272 1178 1 (Hb; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 1179 8 (Pb; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8722 9 (Eb) © 2011 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company • P.O. Box 36224 • 1020 me Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O. Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA UNCORRECTED PROOFS © JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY 1st proofs Table of contents Preface ix Figures xiii Maps xv Tables
    [Show full text]
  • Contact-Induced Phonological Change in Yiddish
    <LINK "lou-r24"> <TARGET "lou" DOCINFO AUTHOR "Mark L. Louden" TITLE "Contact-induced phonological change in Yiddish" SUBJECT "Diachronica XVII:1" KEYWORDS "" SIZE HEIGHT "220" WIDTH "150" VOFFSET "4"> © Diachronica XVII:1.85–110 (2000). CONTACT-INDUCED PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE IN YIDDISH ANOTHER LOOK AT WEINREICH’S RIDDLES* Mark L. Louden University of Wisconsin-Madison Introduction With the publication in 1953 of his groundbreaking book, Languages in Contact, Uriel Weinreich significantly elevated the status of externally induced change within historical linguistics by rigorously adducing general predictive principles based on solid social, psychological, and linguistic data. Before 1953, contact linguistics had languished, in no small measure due to the priority given to system-internal factors in explanatory accounts of language change by the Young Grammarians and their European and American structuralist successors. As Weinreich and others pointed out, virtually all languages are affected by contact to some degree, meaning that externally induced change is far from exceptional. On the other hand, relative to system-internal change, change resulting from contact typically involves a greater number of variables, e.g. historical, cultural, psychological, a fact which poses a challenge for formulating accurate accounts of how specific changes no longer in progress may have proceeded. Precisely ten years after Languages in Contact, Weinreich took up one particular set of challenges emerging from the history of Yiddish which he collectively termed “four riddles in bilingual dialectology” (U. Weinreich 1963). At the time, Weinreich had begun working on a project dedicated to investigating the extent to which the history of Ashkenazic Jewish contact University of Wisconsin-Madison (wimadisonwi/1) IP: 128.104.46.196 On: Thu, 09 Jan 2020 02:12:43 with coterritorial non-Jewish populations in Eastern Europe might be reconstructed on the basis of (mainly) linguistic evidence.
    [Show full text]
  • English Syntactic Errors by Arabic Speaking Learners: Reviewed. PUB DATE 1996-01-00 NOTE 27P
    DOCUMENT RESUME ED 423 660 FL 024 725 AUTHOR Noor, Hashim H. TITLE English Syntactic Errors by Arabic Speaking Learners: Reviewed. PUB DATE 1996-01-00 NOTE 27p. PUB TYPE Information Analyses (070) EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Adverbs; *Arabic; Conjunctions; Determiners (Languages); *English (Second Language); *Error Patterns; *Interference (Language); Language Patterns; Prepositions; Second Language Learning; Sentence Structure; *Syntax; Uncommonly Taught Languages; Verbs IDENTIFIERS Relative Clauses ABSTRACT Based on a review of research, the most common syntactic errors made by native Arabic-speaking learners of English as a second language are discussed. Seven categories of error are distinguished and described: verbal errors (use of tense, phase, aspect, voice, verb formation, concord, finite/non-finite verbs); relative clauses (interlingual and intralingual errors, structural misrepresentation, simplification); adverbial clauses (comparison, purpose, redalt, concession, manner); sentence structure; articles (definite and indefinite); prepositions (deletion, substitution, redundancy); and conj%:nctions. It is concluded that most common source of error is the influence of the native language, and that in processing English syntactic structures, Arabic speakers adopt certain strategies similar to those of first-language learners, including simplification and overgeneralization. Contains 52 references. (MSE) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS
    [Show full text]
  • Speakin' and Spokin' in Jamaica: Conflict and Consensus in Sociolinguistics
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by University of Essex Research Repository This paper appeared in Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 12-15, 1993, eds. Joshua Guenter, Barbara Kaiser, Cheryl Zoll, pp 280-290. Speakin' and Spokin' in Jamaica: Conflict and Consensus in Sociolinguistics by Peter L. Patrick (Georgetown University) and Bonnie McElhinny (Stanford University) 1. Introduction: Language as Commodity Given the material and social rewards attached to speaking standard language, why do some speakers prefer non-standard varieties? One explanation sees the standard as a commodity (Gal 1989). Although the supply of symbolic resources is not limited in the same ways that material ones are-- one can easily imagine all speakers in a community using the standard-- access to standard language is controlled by institutions like schools (Bourdieu 1977), so that some speakers are not permitted to learn the standard even if they want to speak it. This control enhances the value of elite varieties, which become defined as standard. Since speakers may claim to value one variety yet behave as if they value another, responses vary when access to the standard is limited. Speakers may all agree that the standard is valuable and aspire to speak it-- this has come to be called the consensus model of a speech community. Conflict models, on the other hand, have been used to describe an array of cases in which non-elite speakers value their own variety more than the standard (Rickford 1986a, b). The choice between consensus and conflict models of the speech community reflects the analyst's orientation to different models of the social world.
    [Show full text]
  • An Investigation of English Spelling Problems of Arabic-Speaking Students
    Portland State University PDXScholar Dissertations and Theses Dissertations and Theses 1991 An investigation of English spelling problems of Arabic-speaking students Deborah Georgette Keim Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds Part of the Applied Linguistics Commons, and the Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Keim, Deborah Georgette, "An investigation of English spelling problems of Arabic-speaking students" (1991). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 4172. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.6056 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Deborah Georgette Keim for the Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages presented June 19, 1991. Title: An Investigation of English Spelling Problems of Arabic­ speaking Students. APPROVED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE THE.5IS COMMITTEE: Jeanette DeCarrico, Chair Marjorie Terdal Kimberley BroJn Ray Mariels In this two-part study, English spelling errors of Arabic­ speaking students are investigated. Specifically, an empirical study is done to document and investigate exactly what kinds of English 2 spelling errors Arabic-speaking students actually make. Then these data are analyzed. and spelling error patterns are discovered. Next. a study is done to determine if the presence of spelling errors in written work has a significant negative effect on readers' evaluations of this writing.
    [Show full text]
  • 7.8 Post-Yiddish Ashkenazic Speech This Spurred Conscious and Serious Attempts at Orthographic Reform (Schaechter 303 1999: 4)
    302 Sociolinguistics 7.8 Post-Yiddish Ashkenazic speech This spurred conscious and serious attempts at orthographic reform (Schaechter 303 1999: 4). The major breakthrough came in the lexicographic work of Lifshits their own (such as the newspaper Der Forverts, founded 1897) have recently switched to StY orthography. (1867, 1869, 1876). The impact of Lifshits was significant in setting the di­ rection of future orthographic reform. Among Lifshits' specific innovations. Schaechter (1999: 4) cites: the roje diacritic on IfI !l to distinguish it from Ip/e; 7.7.5 Romanization systems syllabic" I (vs. daytshmerish ~S) -ell, e.g., "O'il himl 'sky'; svarabhakti vowel, e.g.,I!l'JS)rt1s)i~:::l badeif-;}-nis 'need' (cf. StG 8ediirf-~-nis); suffixes lS), 1S)~ (vs. The orthography debates also included calls for romanization _ the writing daytshmerish spelling,., T~; cf. StG -ich, -lich); dropping ofsilent S) in, e.g., lib, of Yiddish in Latin letters (for internal use within the Yiddish speech commu­ fil (vs. daytshmerish :::ls)'~, ~S)'~ cf. StG Lieb, vie/); use of' to indicate palatal­ nity). Serious early calls for romanization came from prominent figures: Nathan ized consonants s)i~'" /I' ad,,1 'any,' Ql)i~'" /I'arnml 'noise'; word-final t:l (tes) Birnbaum (in his early years), the convener of the 1908 TShernovits conference; replacing daytshmerish it thus: t:l~il 'hand; arm,' t:lJ'" 'wind,' t:l~s)J 'money' (cf. Ludwig Zamenhof; Zaretski; Zhitlovski; Yofe; and others (Schaechter 1999: StG Hand, Wind, Geld). 16). The earliest such voice was likely Dr. Philip Mansch (1888-1890). Over­ In general, the history of StY orthography involves an ongoing process to whelmingly, however, there was a strong negative reaction to romanization, free itself from daytshmerish orthography.
    [Show full text]