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But, aren't there a number of style manuals that serve as standards?
PastorVon started a sentence with a conjunction!  So?! And Churchhill ended one with a preposition.
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But, aren't there a number of style manuals that serve as standards?
There are. They don't always agree on specifics. Different publishers choose different manuals. The Pookwife is a copy editor. She uses style manuals all the time. Government departments (which is whom she usually does work for) have standard style manuals.
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But, aren't there a number of style manuals that serve as standards?
PastorVon started a sentence with a conjunction! So?! And Churchhill ended one with a preposition. A) It wasn't a preposition; it was the particle of a phrasal verb. 2) He was being facetious and Þ) It probably wasn't even Churchill.
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So?! And Churchhill ended one with a preposition. A) It wasn't a preposition; it was the particle of a phrasal verb. 2) He was being facetious and Þ) It probably wasn't even Churchill. Are you saying it was a biographer or urban myth that puts the clause "up with which I will not put" in Churchill's mouth? (which is presumably the one in question). And wasn't the whole point that he was deliberately NOT ending the sentence with the preposition "with" but with the verb 'put' in order to show that not only is it quite appropriate to end a sentence with a proposition, it is sometimes in fact silly not to end the sentence with it?
Last edited by The Pook; 01/22/09 01:18 AM.
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So?! And Churchhill ended one with a preposition. A) It wasn't a preposition; it was the particle of a phrasal verb. 2) He was being facetious and Þ) It probably wasn't even Churchill. Are you saying it was a biographer or urban myth that puts the clause "up with which I will not put" in Churchill's mouth? (which is presumably the one in question). I got it in my memory that I read somewhere that it wasn't Churchill that said it, that it was just another misattribution, not unlike all those Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde so-called quotes, but I can't find anything ot back me up. And wasn't the whole point that he was deliberately NOT ending the sentence with the preposition "with" but with the verb 'put' in order to show that not only is it quite appropriate to end a sentence with a proposition, it is sometimes in fact silly not to end the sentence with it? What I said about being facetious. As far as their not being prepositions, I also seem to remember reading somewhere that there is a substantial body of linguists who believe that the modern prepositions derived from what amounted to particles of phrasal verbs. Of course, if you have enough case markers for your nouns you don't really need prepositions.
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As far as their not being prepositions, I also seem to remember reading somewhere that there is a substantial body of linguists who believe that the modern prepositions derived from what amounted to particles of phrasal verbs.
Many of the prepositions / verbal particles in Modern English derive from propositions in Old English (via Middle English). Some are from adjectives and adverbs: e.g., near and next are the comparative and superlative forms of the archaic adjective nigh. There is an extensive literature on prepositions / verbal particles in Old to Modern English, and if anybody is interested you can contact me at zmjezhd at-sign gmail dot com (who doesn't care who knows), and we can discuss it ...
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I'm counting OE as modern. I'm talking back to PIE or earlier. It's all very theoretical in my Junk Drawer Memory. And five, six cases isn't near enough to obviate prepositions. You'd need probably twenty or more.
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And five, six cases isn't near enough to obviate prepositions. You'd need probably twenty or more.
Yes, I don't think there are any languages which have been studied on this planet which don't have prepositions. The number of cases in PIE has not been determined, IIRC, or their number has not been agreed upon. There are languages which do not have grammatical cases.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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There are languages which do not have grammatical cases. I think at this point we need to define just what we mean by case. Is it the relationship of a noun to the other elements of as sentence or is it the visible or auditory mark that indicates that difference?
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Boy! [That's an expletive, I believe.] It doesn't take much to send this group on a variety of tangents. It's all very interesting whether Churchhill did or did not end a sentence with a presposition. None of the tangents answers my question. The question was "So?" I.E. "So what if I (pastor von) began a sentence with a conjunction?"
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