The door is open . . . and the coffee's hot

Comments are now closed for this session of the Open Door. Please refer your questions and comments to the most recent Open Door post.

In this session we discussed:

• The Great Vowel Shift
• The phrase "if not the best"
• "pre-pre-emptive"
• "whether or not"
• The subjunctive mood

Comments

[johnnyamerca]

Why did the Great Vowel, well, Shift? and is it apt to shift ever again?

[Sam Ryan]

If you are informed of the existence of a pre-emptive strike on your country and decide to pre-empt that strike, are you making a "pre-pre-emptive strike?" Or an anti-pre-emptive strike?

[Chris E]

A common English phrase which strikes me as perfectly ambiguous when written, even from context, is "if not." Somtimes it means "even perhaps," as when I praise something as "great, if not the greatest." But sometimes it means "though not," where the same phrase, "great, if not the greatest," indicates that the writer is confident something is not the greatest. It's maddening in headlines. Do you think the phrase should preferentially be used or read one way or the other?

[gail]

Sam: I think you'd be guilty of creating an ugly neologism either way. As far as I can tell, anti-preemptive is only used to mean "against" or "opposed to" a preemptive strike, and pre-preemptive sounds un-English. We just don't start doubling and tripling our prefixes that way. I can imagine someone who was really determined to keep it all in one word saying "ante-preemptive." I've seen the term "ante-preschool" used by British writers to distinguish between the preschool year (age four) and the previous, antepreschool year (age three).

[gail]

Johnnyamerica: you're asking one of the most-asked questions in English linguistics and the truth is that no one knows. Not only is the cause of the GVS an unsolved mystery, but the nature of the shift or shifts that occurred is also a mystery. Many scholars are now questioning whether there ever was a GVS or whether there were in fact a series of minor shifts that occurred for a variety of reasons. I doubt that anything like the GVS would occur again because the historical and social background of these precise changes would have to come into place again in the same configuration. You can bet on the fact that there will continue to be changes in pronunciation to the extent that the English spoken a thousand years from now may well be impossible for English-speaking people of today to understand.

[Jezebel Whitehall]

Here's a minor debate we've been having for some time not: Is it more grammatically correct to say "I don't know whether or not he will call me" or is it more correct to say "I don't know whether he will call me or not"?

Obviously, the best answer is to just say "I don't know if he will call me", but if one did want to throw the 'or not' in there? The first way, it seems to interrupt the sentance, and the second, it seems almost like an afterthough, dissconnected. What says you?

[gail]

Chris, I would prefer to use "though not" for the negative value and "if not" for the positive value to avoid confusion and I would certainly advise headline writers to do this since there is so little context for readers to work from in so little text, but it really is a matter of stylistic choice.

[gail]

Jezebel, That's completely a matter of stylistic choice. There is no grammatical difference between the choices. Professional writers have been known to do it both ways:

Shaw: "whether they murder it or not"
Updike: "never knew whether or not to insert the names"

(Examples from Webster's Usage Guide.)

You can leave out "or not" at any time except when "whether or not" is used as the subject of a sentence, but even then it doesn't matter whether you split it up or not.

[msadesign]

SUBJUNCTIVE!

You know, I studied Greek, and Latin, in college. Perhaps my degree in classics has created a sort of 'mood-sensitivity'!

When I hear educated English speakers use the past tense used for subjunctive mood, as in wish statements, for example, it makes me crazy.

Sure, I know a language is a living thing, and I know that a language gains vivacity from user-driven changes.

Still. Is the subjunctive dead in modern English?

Michael Spencer

[gail]

I wouldn't say that the subjunctive is dead. It has been frozen into certain idiomatic phrases such as "Be that as it may" and "Would that it were true" so it is likely to survive indefinitely in that form. But it is also alive in other, more flexible usages as well. This website

http://www.ceafinney.com/subjunctive/excerpts.html

is devoted to the preservation of the subjunctive and has a number of good examples of its use in everyday speech. The subjunctive is certainly a weakened form but I wouldn't say that it is dying.

I'll put up a post on the subjunctive some time soon to flesh this out.