A few unrelated questions

[conuly]

(Some of which I may have asked before, in which case, forgive me.)

1. People often do say that the English subjunctive is in decline. However, literally nobody I've ever heard say this has provided any sort of evidence. Is there any data on this other than "yeah, feels that way to me"?

1a. I've also heard that the subjunctive, or at least some forms of the subjunctive, is more common in USA English than UK English, from somewhat more authoritative sources but with roughly the same amount of evidence.

2. I got into it with somebody on the subject of "flammable/inflammable". I am aware that there are signs that warn about inflammable materials, and also signs warning about flammable materials. Is it actually the case that anybody has ever been confused and thought they were being warned that something could not catch on fire? Or is that just an urban legend / just-so story to explain why the two words mean the same thing and can be found on the same sorts of signs?

3. Not a language question! I've recently found one of the Myth Adventures books in my house. Gosh, I haven't re-read these in 20 years. Worth a re-read, or oh god no, save it for the recycle bin?

*****************************

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Tomatoes randomly mated with another plant 9 million years ago. The result? Potatoes.

Trucks and Tuks: Decorated Vehicles of South Asia – in pictures

Don’t Be Cruel: Photos of a Roma performer fighting discrimination, one Elvis song at a time

He died in the Empress of Ireland shipwreck. A century later, his belongings found his family

Three September 11 victims' remains identified by new genetic techniques after nearly 24 years

Hungry goat herds help fight fires in Spain's Catalonia

Feel sticky this summer? That's because it's been record muggy East of the Rockies (No shit!)

Israel protesters intensify pressure against plan to expand Gaza war

Pets end up in LA shelters after owners detained in immigration raids

Comments

[dine]

I remember reading a bunch of the Myth books a million years ago; no any negative connotations, but there's a faint sense that I might not find them as amusing now as I did then. so, I'd likely just donate it - but you can give it a whirl, and donate if it's a DNF

[james]

Yeah, this - there's nothing really offensive about them, as a much older adult, but the humor is a lot to be desired. I loved it as a kid, but when I tried re-reading them some time ago, the humor got kind of annoying and boring.

[conuly]

Sigh, I guess I'll stick them in the "memories only" category.

[kengr]

I remember back in the 60s when the switch from inflammable to flammable took place. And apparently, yes people *were* reading "inflammable" as "won't burn". *sigh*

[conuly]

So you can cite that? You have a news article or any hard evidence? Or did you just hear this the way people hear about children with improabably terrible names?

[kengr]

It was on the TV news, and possibly in newspapers/magazines. I was still in grade school at the time.

[conuly]

Okay. Do you remember what newspaper you might have read this in? If they have searchable archives then I should be able to find evidence of somebody misunderstanding a warning sign.

[steorra]

This article has some citations and quotations on flammable/inflammable, including newspaper quotations from around 1900 of people using "inflammable" to mean "non-flammable": https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fla3.htm

[conuly]

So it looks like the signs were changed for clarity but not because anybody ever looked at one and sincerely misunderstood it.

[highlyeccentric]

Answer: the english subjunctive has been in decline since, oh, at LEAST 1400 and I'm being conservative. There is a LOT of information about the medieval and early modern decline of the subjunctive.

I could produce cites.

If however you are encountering anyone pearl clutching about the decline of the English Subjunctive, you should be suspicious, because not only has it not been a key component of English for half a millenium at LEAST, the French had to go and invent the conditional because they didn't want to use THEIR subjunctive in everyday contexts.

I regret to take this stance, because I do love the subjunctive. If you are encountering ME bemoaning the loss of the subjunctive, I have, of course, only the purest motives.

But I also love the "do..." phrasing, which is unique to english and uniquely punchy.

[hudebnik]

I've been told that the use of the "do" helper verb, particularly in turning a declaration into a question, is inherited from Welsh. I've studied some Welsh, and it does have a common helper verb "dw" but it's used almost everywhere, not only in questions.

German has a verb "tun" that sounds like a cognate for "do", but is much more narrowly applied: IIRC it's used as a "real" verb but not so much as a helper.

[highlyeccentric]

My take on the "do" structure is, I have to admit, at least 50% that which I learned from Nick Reimer, at USyd,and one may note that he is not a linguist. I think I recall him mentioning the possible Welsh origin, but not being convinced.

I later worked in a European English lang/lit dept which had both premodern lit types and hist-ling types many of whom were native German speakers, and while "tun" was used as COMPARISON in teaching, it was not posed as an origin.

As an A1-2 lvl student of German (online) I had teachers asking me if I was a native francophone, and I believe that a key factor in that was that I NEVER default to "tun". While French being my L2 helps, I also had early modernists drill into me that the English "do" is _weird_, was weird in Shakespeares day and got weirder. There are two French words which might translate to make/do but I reckon I throw "tun" in LESS than an average francophone might if I was trying to get the same idea across. I would, in fact, be MORE likely to grope for the subjunctive which I have not yet mastered.

[hudebnik]

I don't think I've ever defaulted to "tun" either -- I didn't even see it until a second or third semester of German, so I would default to "machen", by analogy with Spanish "hacer".

I studied French in second grade, Spanish in high school, and German in grad school (I had picked up a smattering of it, but needed more in order to pass a reading test required for my graduate program. One of my math teachers handed me a textbook written in German, and said "pick a chapter, produce a written translation, and come back when you're done. By the end of the year, please.") While taking German, I often found myself floundering for a vocabulary word and coming out with a Spanish word in German word-order.

[conuly]

I've heard the suggested Celtic-influence-hypothesis for do-support - which is always at *least* 50% the creole hypothesis. The creole hypothesis is not as robustly supported as its various boosters might claim, but I'll grant that it's possible that this is something we borrowed from one Celtic language or another through normal language contact.

[conuly]

Not that I don't love the idea of looking at your citations from Middle and Early Modern English, I think people mean (or think they mean?) that the subjunctive has declined since... idk, the mid-1800s?

[malada]

George Carlin said it decades ago (not a direct quoote), "We things that are flammable, inflammable and non-inflammable. That's confusing - it should either flam or not flam."

[conuly]

That's a bunch of flimflam if you ask me.

Padron my uses of the subjunctive in this reply

[cactuswatcher]

Were I to use my experience with other languages, I'd have to say that the uses of the subjunctive in English have dramatically declined over centuries. But I know of no evidence that any of the current uses are in decline. Compared to Spanish or German, it would seem that the uses of the English subjunctive are almost gone. Compared to the situation in Russian though, English subjunctive is quite healthy. The uniquely subjunctive verb forms are long gone in English. But the usages are still noticeable. In other words if you were fluent in Old English you'd notice a difference. Most of the difference since, say 1800, would be purely stylistic not a noticeable difference in what would be acceptable, as with the use of 'who' instead of 'whom' as the direct object of verbs.

[thewayne]

I really enjoyed the first few Myth books, but they got really tiresome for me after a while. It's been over two decades since I read any of them, though I wouldn't mind re-reading the earliest ones.

[redbird]

I don't have any citations handy, in part because I'm away from home, but my impression is that people weren't misunderstanding a warning like "Danger: contents are inflammable." Rather, they were seeing labels like "This material is inflammable" and thinking that was meant as rassurance, not a warning.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of this came from a well-meaning and/or cynical person thinking "my idiot brother in law doesn't know what this means and almost burned down the garage, other people might not either."

I use a medication that is shipped in a cooler, with a prominent label of the standard "NO" red circile and slash, ans a penguin in the middle. We're pretty sure they mean "do not freeze" rather than "keep this away from penguins," but it does remind me that there are a lot of picture road signs that only make sense if you aldeady know what they're talking about, like a picture of a thermometer and some wavy lines to mean "warning: bridge freezes before road."

[foms]

Maybe, something about how liability law works. Might it have some effect on general usage coming from pressure to avoid cost from misinterpretation? I have the impression that what we consider reasonable and what a given legal interpretation considers reasonable could be at odds.

For some reason, I thought of this, from Guys and Dolls:
Sky Masterson:
When I was a young man about to go out into the world, my father says to me a very valuable thing. He says to me like this: "Son,” the old guy says, “I am sorry that I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but not having any potatoes to give you I am now going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you stand there you are going to wind up with an earful of cider.” Now, Nathan, I do not claim that you have been clocking Mindy's cheesecake—

[gatheringrivers]

*I* enjoyed Myth Adventures, but I like that sort of thing. :)

I am aware that there are signs that warn about inflammable materials, and also signs warning about flammable materials.

I was NOT aware that there were signs warning about NON-flammable materials!