Here is something for all grammatically correct DUers:

[ohiosmith]

On his 74th birthday, a man got a gift certificate from his wife.

The certificate paid for a visit to a medicine man living
on a nearby reservation who was rumored to have a wonderful cure for
erectile dysfunction.

After being persuaded, he drove to the reservation, handed his ticket
to the medicine man and wondered what he was in for.

The old man handed a potion to him, and with a grip on his
shoulder, warned, "This is a powerful medicine. You take only a
teaspoonful and then say '1-2-3.' "

When you do, you will become more manly than you have ever
been in your life and you can perform as long as you want."

The  man was encouraged.  As he walked away, he turned and
asked, "How do I stop the medicine from working?"
"Your partner must say '1-2-3-4,'" he responded,
"but when she does, the medicine will not work again until
the next full moon."

He was very eager to see if it worked so he went home,
showered, shaved, took a spoonful of the medicine and then invited his wife
to join him in the bedroom.

When she came in, he took off his clothes and said,
"1-2-3!"  Immediately, he was the manliest of men.

His wife was excited and began throwing off her clothes
and then she asked "What was the 1-2-3 for?"

And  that, boys and girls, is why we should never end
our sentences with a preposition, because we
could end up with a dangling participle.

[RebelOne]

1. As a former copy editor,

I find that hilarious. That dangling participle was justified.

[LiberalAndProud]

2. Why can I not recommend? Why oh why oh why?

:rofl:

[UTUSN]

3. Bwah-ha-HAH !1 Thanks!1 & here I thought I was entering a thread

where I would post a reference to Ambrose BIERCE's "Write It Right" and gripe about how scholarly Enlish deviated from "prescriptive" into "descriptive" grammar.

[RandomThoughts]

4. 123 is the sum of my date of birth.

November 26 1967.
11 + 26 = 37
37 + 19 + 67 = 123

Not sure what that story is about. :D

[dimbear]

5. Here's another little known fact. It is impossible to end a sentence with a preposition.

Why, you ask? Because if it comes at the end of a sentence, it is a postposition. Students of the German language will forcibly agree.

[Lionel Mandrake]

6. That's reassuring.

My English teacher said that a preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with.

Actually, I just made that up.

But you're right, these last words can't be prepositions.

Some German verbs have separable prefixes, which often end up at the end of sentences. The prefixes may look like prepositions or adverbs, but they aren't.

Similarly, some English verbs have particles, whose main purpose is to prevent foreigners from learning English as a second language. For example, the following are classified by Linguists as particle verbs: "take in", "take out", "take over", "take up", "take down". Try explaining to an ESL class the meanings of "take me out to dinner", "take out the garbage", and "take out the sniper". The particles may or may not find their way to the end of a sentence.

There is at least one honest-to-god postpositional in English: "ago", as in "I flunked English five years ago". It functions just like a preposition, except that it follows its object.

Latin has a couple of postpositionals I know of, "gratia" and "causa" (which mean the same thing).

The phrase "Ars gratia artis" in the MGM logo is bad Latin. Syntactically correct would be "Ars artis gratia".
Semantically correct would be "Ars pecuniae gratia". ;-)

[dimbear]

7. One of my favorite classic movies is "The Black Cat" with Lugosi and Karloff.

Karloff leads a Black Mass in Latin, and he says the most amazingly goofy things. It sounds good but is just random tags. Might have been all he knew how to pronounce.......

Here's a real German sentence with postposition:

Er wanderte den Bach entlang.

He wandered the brook along. :)

[Lionel Mandrake]

8. In "The Exorcist",

a demon possessing a little girl has a conversation with a priest, partially in Latin. It's actually good Latin.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:28CEnwABhfEJ:www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DGqZcMeX0tZE+latin+exorcist+%22linda+blair%22&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com

[dimbear]

9. It's only fair to note the suspicion that has always dogged people

who could read or speak foreign languages. A lovely example is Child's ballad "Lady Gay."

Child #79

There was a lady and a lady gay
Of children she had three
She sent them away to the North Country
For to learn their grammarie

To learn their grammarie=to be educated in sorcery.

Grammar, glamour, cantraps and incantations. All the same. :)

Another fascinating side of this topic is the fabulous magic talismans which could translate all foreign tongues. Useful devices, it seems to me. Something like the Urrim and Thummim that Joseph Smith found so invaluable. Doctor John Dee had a similar stone, IIRC. :)

[Lionel Mandrake]

10. That makes sense.

In Genesis, God punishes the builders of the Tower of Babel by introducing multiple languages, so they can't understand each other. People who understand a foreign language are defying God and must be sorcerers. (Saints like Patrick, Cyril, and Methodius presumably are exceptions to the general rule.)

[dimbear]

11. Agreed. When I tried to pick up Greek I found it

devilishly difficult. No problem here believing those who could learn it are sorcerers. :)

[Lionel Mandrake]

12. I assume you mean ancient Greek.

It's not too bad until you get to verbs. Then watch out. The conjugation of a single verb goes on for page after page.

If you do succeed in learning all those endings, you had better do a lot of reading, or you will forget everything (as I did) and have to start all over again.

When I told a gym buddy I was studying Greek, he started talking to me in MODERN Greek. Of course I couldn't understand a word of it.

Not that I ever learned to pronounce the ancient language, either. It had tones. The accents were introduced in Hellenistic times to indicate pitch levels, not loudness. Classics scholars know all this, but most of them do not teach it, because that would make elementary Greek classes even more difficult.

[dimbear]

13. Correct. Koine.

In a rare moment of self realization, I admitted that the only "languages" I knew were really only dialects of Latin. Greek would have been an exception. In this case it proved the rule to the breaking point.

I understand that there are even two different "Modern Greek" languages, one the official media language and another the spoken language, quite distinct. It's like Newyawkese squared.

[Lionel Mandrake]

14. English is not a dialect of Latin.

I don't know squat about modern Greek, except that it uses the same old alphabet with fewer diacritical marks for accents.

In Athens, about half the signs are in Greek, and the rest are in English! It seems that English (a dialect of German?) is becoming the planetary language.

I once tried to learn Mandarin. Another time I tried to learn Cantonese. Both attempts were dismal failures, but I learned that not all languages have cases and tenses like those of Indo-European languages.

Someone once said that a language is a dialect backed up by an army.

[dimbear]

15. English is a Germanic language, richtig, but..........

while English has German structure, it has that heavy overlay of French and Latin vocabularies. If we counted words and assigned them to the Germanic or Latinate families, I'm guessing the Latinates would win out.

I blame William the Conqueror for that, and the status seekers of another age. Note that if words are synonyms, one from German one from French, the French word is classier. (Usually.) Normans. Pooh.

The rather bizarre way German verbs wander around is also due to status seeking, I understand. The German status seekers actually imitated Latin structure to sound 'educated.' English retains the ancient unadulterated verb order of ancient German, er, Saxon I guess it is.

Tip of the hat for your attempts to pick up Chinese. :)

English certainly does get around. Due credit to the big blockbuster: India.

[Lionel Mandrake]

16. English has a very rich vocabulary,

having absorbed many words from Latin and French (as you pointed out) especially after 1066.

About wandering verbs: Latin is basically an SOV language, whereas English, German, and French are SVO (meaning that the verb usually goes between the subject and object). The tendency to pile up verbs at the end of a German sentence could very well be from imitation of Latin.

Word order is relatively free in Latin, because it is more highly inflected than the other languages we are talking about. English is the least highly inflected and depends most upon word order.

The cases in English have mostly disappeared except for pronouns. Vestiges of the genitive case include the "s" sounds in English and German possessives.

French and other Romance languages have gone their merry way for hundreds of years - so much so that they can not really be considered dialects of Latin. Here are some basic distinctions:

1. French has only two genders; Classical Latin had three.
2. French has definite and indefinite articles; Classical Latin had no articles.

There must be some interesting history behind these distinctions. My guess would be that

1. The masculine gender absorbed the neuter (masc. & neut. declensions having always been closer to each other than to fem.); and
2. Some demonstratives developed into articles.

I can't back up either of these guesses with a convincing argument.

[dimbear]

17. The distinction between language and dialect isn't so clear to me.

Of course there are formal definitions, but as a practical matter it's not clear at all. Here's an example. I was reading a book of Spanish detective stories, its title was "Spanish Detective Stories" or something like that and I was doing fine until I stumbled into a hard one. Now there are many (very many) dialects of Spanish that are tough sledding, and challenging because their vocabularies don't occur in most dictionaries. I soldiered on, it got easier, and later I realized it was actually Portuguese. I couldn't tell you beforehand ten words of Portuguese, but I could read it anyway.

Is Portuguese a dialect then, if it's no more different from Castilian than some of the other Spanish city dialects? I don't know.

Another point. An educated Japanese reader can pick up a Chinese newspaper and read it, with some difficulty. Not necessarily recognize any Chinese word, just read the characters. Get the gist without knowing any word. What does that imply? I don't know, again. :)

Just my strange mind.

[Lionel Mandrake]

18. People argue endlessly about dialect vs. language.

I don't know of any generally agreed-upon principles by which to distinguish dialects from languages. Therefore, I try to use common sense on a case by case basis. A few examples follow:

Chinese characters were adopted by the Japanese for a completely different spoken language. China has many spoken dialects (or are they separate languages?) that are mutually unintelligible, but they can read each others' newspapers (more or less).

Portuguese is generally considered a different language from Spanish; certainly they sound different when spoken. It's interesting that you found you could read a Portuguese detective story. I wonder if you could read Italian just as easily.

I have had similar experiences with Dutch and German. Written Dutch looks to me like mostly German with an admixture of English. I can sort of make it out. I think that Plattdeutsch is closer to Dutch than it is to Hochdeutsch (as a spoken language). I think that Yiddish is just a dialect of German, not a separate language. They are mutually intelligible, although Yiddish has a lot of Hebrew loan-words which most Germans wouldn't understand.

Serbo-Croation is one spoken language with two writing systems (just the opposite of Chinese). The Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet, which goes along with their Eastern Orthodox religion. The Croats use the Latin alphabet, which goes along with Roman Catholicism.