Comment on Linguistics
BenLeMan@lemmy.world 3 months ago
And still I maintain that “alot” is not a word.
I’ve noticed a tendency of people to combine words that are frequently seen together: “alot”, “aswell”, “noone”, etc.
Some of these catch on, like “nevertheless” and “whatsoever”. Maybe eventually “alot” and “noone” will become standard English, too.
The way alot, aswell and noone are combining is expected given how many other words we don’t bat an eye at went the same way. “another” is the perfect example, it’s just “an other” combined.
It’s sort of the reverse of what happened to words like apron and newt.
The division and bracketing of phrases changes over time.
“An apron” is the modern usage of the word “napron”, and a newt was originally called an eute. The grammatical need for “a” and/or “an” resulted in the root word being rebracketed and changed.
it’s all just made up. you can see old writings without spacing. or punctuation. you can’t even define what’s really a word universally. people just decided what’s what and standardized it at one point just for some consistency. that doesn’t mean things won’t change; they most definitely will.
Apart/a part is another one.
“Apart” and “a part” are opposites, though. If you’re a part of something, you can’t be apart from it.
Yes, and increasing number of people are using the former to mean latter.
I recall “noone” being taught as acceptable by my english teacher back in 2004. That being said, she’s also said some things that ended up being very wrong
Whenever someone says “Noone wanted this” I always picture a big Irishman who has a deep appreciation for stuff Internet people are against.
I always imagine Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits whenever someone does that.
“Noone thinks I have a lovely daughter.” Yes, Mrs. Brown. Noone does.
Ampersand is another good example. “&” was considered the last letter of the alphabet for a while. Schoolchildren would recite the alphabet and finish it with the phrase “and, per se and” (“and, meaning and”).
The words got mashed together over time and the word “ampersand” was born.
“Per se” means “in itself”, so it’s a shorter way of saying “also the word ‘and’ itself”.
No body writes noone as one word because there’s a similar word written that way.
I think spellings and punctuation are still valid. Mostly. Ignore variations between English and Americanese.
In not the Americans’ fault that the English decided to butcher their own language after the US kicked them out
The spelling differences are actually mostly due to Noah Webster standarsing what he saw as pure Anglo-Saxon English without corruption by French princelings.
Hah, that makes sense.
England and all its former colonies (except the American ones) agree on the language, and the only odd one out - the United States feels it is unique among former colonies and its parent nation as the sole owner of the most correct version of English.
Seems likely /s
I know this is all a joke, but Canada doesn’t share the UK’s… proclivities with language
Frankly this wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for “another”
Which some who use alot consider as two words.
I feel like that sort of misses the point. That really has to do with how we transcribe verbal speech into written. “A lot” is absolutely a phrase, I don’t imagine you’d disagree with that.
That has to do with the definition of what a word even is. “Alot” is clearly made up of two separate units, but so is “anyway”. I think a lot of people don’t like this one because it’s simply unnecessary. You need “anyway” to show that the two words are not stressed separately, but treated as one unit, whereas with “a lot” this is already obvious (“a” is almost never stressed).
Also has to do with English spelling just being bad, generally.
Pulptastic@midwest.social 3 months ago
My favorite reference to “alot”
BenLeMan@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Mine, too! I hope Allie is doing well these days.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
She made a reddit comment a couple months ago
old.reddit.com/user/OtherTubemonster/
Zoot@reddthat.com 3 months ago
God i love alot