It's all to do with the syllable.

Have you ever wondered why Bukit Timah Expressway is abbreviated to BKE and not BTE? The Land Transport Authority gives the following explanation: 

Interestingly, the acronym for expressways is derived from the first letter of the first two syllables followed by the first letter of the last word.

         You may click here to access the official webpage.

But nobody who has given the matter a thought has any need for an explanation. It's obvious to all of us. What is not so obvious is WHY they came up with such a strange system in the first place. 

Why would anyone attach so much importance to the syllable and ignore the whole word?

Death and bucket-kicking Part 1

'Death' and other words relating to death and dying are generally considered inauspicious and are not acceptable in speech or writing particularly during the 15 days of the Chinese New Year which begins tomorrow (which means I only have two and a half hours to work on this if I want to keep to tradition). However inauspicious the word may be to Chinese people, the Chinese language is straightforward in its description of death. It's simply 死 with no euphemisms to soften the blow of its inauspiciousness. 

The English language, however, is very different. If you include Old English and Middle English words, for the verb alone, English has more than 120 words for 'to die' if you accept the OED as accurate.

The language of death is very large in its scope and cannot be adequately covered in a few blog posts. Since time is of the essence and I have slightly more than two hours left before the stroke of midnight, I will begin by taking a quick look at a few words in this first Part of 'Death and bucket-kicking'. I can put my old undergrad books to good use by taking photos of some of the quotations and posting them on this blog post, especially quotations that include a few letters not found on my keyboard. I'm afraid I can only cope with Middle English from the late medieval period and if I do make references to anything before that period, which I probably won't, I'll merely be repeating what the OED has to say.  

You misunderstand me! I'm not in love with Ho Ching!

Recently, I received an email from a blog reader who made quite a ridiculous remark. He asked me why I had written no posts on Ho Ching's grammar. He asked me if I was in love with her! 

Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 3 (or Hell hath no fury like a woman who's told she's a grammar ignoramus)

Nothing amuses me more than to be chased by a Mother Goose with a rolling pin. And that's precisely what happened to me this morning when I woke up to see countless notifications from Quora. Veronica Curlette who is touted in her own website as 'Your On-Line English Language Teacher' posted on Quora, in reply to a question, her own analysis of a sentence that is so outrageously laughable that  I felt compelled to post a little article about it on my blog:  Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions.  That was on 4 November this year and I immediately posted the link on Quora so that Veronica could read it and realise how inadequate she is in dealing with questions on English grammar, a subject which I am persuaded she is pathetically ignorant of. After a few days, she replied on Quora and at first, I thought she was being dishonest because if she had some knowledge of grammar, she would most certainly have seen how wrong she was after reading that first article I posted. But I was wrong. She's not dishonest. She just has no knowledge of grammar.

I wrote a second article on this blog: Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2.  I wrote something brief on her Quora thread and gave a link but she must have removed my post because there is a note that says the comment was deleted. I then posted again on Quora and simply gave the link to my second article and urged her to read it. 

I thought that was the end of the matter but this morning, I was surprised to see that Veronica was hopping mad and she posted a few angry comments on her Quora thread. I don't want to write anything on her Quora thread that is more than a sentence or two because she will probably remove my post as she has already done. But from her angry posts, two things became abundantly clear to me:

1.  She really has no knowledge of English grammar - I'm speaking truthfully and I'm not taunting her, and

2.  She doesn't understand my earlier two blog posts but she can't be faulted since she has no knowledge of English grammar. I write my blog posts with the assumption that my readers are familiar with grammar. As I have always said, my blog is not a teaching blog.

Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2

In my last blog post, Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions, I wrote about the ludicrous errors made by Veronica Curlette, a Canadian English language teacher, in her online post on Quora. I posted a link to my blog post on her Quora post in the hope that she could see how inadequate her knowledge of English grammar really is. I have met many people who think that they understand English grammar just because they speak the language. They mistake their ability to speak a language for a knowledge of its grammar. Many people do not understand that there may be a huge chasm separating the two. I had hoped that Veronica will realise her own linguistic deficiency and will stop making incorrect pronouncements on English grammar. But her brief reply a few days ago on Quora tells me that she has not learnt the value of saying nothing when she knows nothing. This is what she writes in reply to me: 

Pronouns aren't conjunctions

If you have been following my blog, you will probably remember blog posts I have written of the common confusion between a conjunct and a conjunction (see A Conjunct is Not a Conjunction) or between an adverb and an adjective (see Adverbs Aren't Adjectives) but I would never have thought it was possible for anyone to mistake a pronoun for a conjunction.
NOTE: My blog post An Adverb is Not a Preposition is different - it's about linguists who are attempting to change the definitions of an adverb and a preposition. They are not confused, they are just being contrary.

In this quora question, one Veronica Curlette whose profile says she's a teacher of English in Canada for more than 25 years seems unable to distinguish a pronoun from a conjunction. Here's the quora question in bold, followed by the answer Veronica gives:

Progressing with the progressive

Too many people these days acquire their knowledge from the internet but the quality of such knowledge is dubious. It's true that you can learn a lot from the internet - I am the grateful recipient of life-saving knowledge from the web. Recently, I climbed up the roof of my house with the wrong ladder and I couldn't climb down. After that experience, I went on YouTube to arm myself with information on ladder safety and the many different kinds of ladders and I have just ordered (through the internet again) my new ladder which will be delivered tomorrow. That is the kind of knowledge you can gain from the internet. 

I don't normally read Quora but yesterday, I received an email from Quora on a subject that was of interest to me. So I clicked on it and I was brought to a whole new world that I never thought existed. It was a world of the blind leading the blind. Someone asked in Quora the question 'Why is it correct to say "I am having a party tomorrow" but incorrect to say "I am having class tomorrow"?'

An adverb is not a preposition.

When I wrote Puzzling prepositions? Why grammarians should stop being contrary four years ago, I did not fully understand the extent of Bas Aarts and Geoffrey Pullum's linguistic perversity. But since then, I've had the benefit of reading Bas Aarts's book and I've also leafed through Pullum's grammar. Something else happened recently that rekindled my interest in this subject.

A Conjunct is not a Conjunction

In answer to a teacher's question what a conjunction is, a young child replies with some confidence that it is the sign you see at a road junction. That is what I read a long time ago in a newspaper and I can't now remember if it's a true story or just a joke but I am fairly certain that if you direct this same question to the general public, quite a few people will not be able to define a conjunction correctly. I get a lot of emails sent through this blog but because there are so many of them, I usually make no reply although I skim through as many emails as I can. Recently, I read some of the older ones and I noticed that curiously, quite a few of my readers have questions that relate in some way to the conjunction.

One reader is confused why in a list of what appeared to him to be correct sentences,  he was told that the only correct sentence was

Adverbs aren't adjectives

I have often wondered why so many people have apparently insurmountable difficulties in getting their parts of speech right. And some go into hypercorrection mode and commit hilarious blunders.

This morning, the Straits Times published a report about a commotion at a bubble tea cafe. It was just hours before all bubble tea cafes were required by law to close owing to the deadly pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China and has now spread to the entire world. There was a long queue of customers when an argument took place between a delivery man and the cashier at the bubble tea cafe. Here's the news report.

Should English grammar be taught again after 60 years?

Yesterday morning, I saw this on Channel News Asia:

Goh Chok Tong v. Tan Cheng Bock - Is MSN reporting fair?

I am the last person to take an interest in politics but there are times when the gross injustice of what I see on the news repulses me and compels me to say something in defence of an innocent party who is wronged. This was precisely how I felt when I read this article which appeared on MSN two days ago: Tan Cheng Bock maintains a dignified silence despite Goh Chok Tong’s persistent digs.

When a linguist writes ungrammatically.

I must make it clear that I generally do not care much about grammar and correctness. People who know me well will readily testify that such 'correctness' and I are worlds apart and  never the twain shall meet but when a teacher of linguistics at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) writes an article in the local newspaper about Singlish, you will doubtless accept that I can't be faulted if I expect her to write grammatical sentences which are clear and unambiguous. That is the least anyone should expect of a teacher of linguistics.

When a friend on Facebook referred me to an article in the Straits Times written by one Tan Ying Ying,  Associate Professor of Linguistics at NTU, I read it immediately because I could see that unlike Singlish bashers (and there are many, particularly language ignoramuses such as that disgraceful Speak Good English Movement), she accorded some respect to Singlish and regarded Singlish as a colloquial form of a Singaporean language and I totally agree with her there. But I was disappointed to see that her article did not do justice to the weighty subject of her discussion because it was fraught with errors of all kinds, some of which I am prepared to attribute to an oversight on her part but others of which I cannot help but suspect to be errors which are more serious than mere carelessness.

Oh! It's that exceedingly exasperating 'escalate' again!

This afternoon, I used for the first time the messaging service of a telephone company to ask for its technician to check my telephone line. A time was fixed and when I asked if I could take it as confirmed, this was the reply I received:

THE SPEAK GOOD ENGLISH MOVEMENT FINALLY LISTENS TO ME. BUT IT'S TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE.

I posted this article on 17 February 2019 and as it is my invariable practice whenever I criticise the Speak Good English Movement on my blog, I went to the SGEM's Facebook page and posted a link to this blog and I also posted an unequivocal statement that the SGEM was once again wrong. I do this all the time: whenever I post something against the SGEM, I inform it of what I have done on its Facebook page or on its website.  

The next day, I discovered that the SGEM had removed the video along with what I had posted from its Facebook page.

Ungrammatical Grammarly

One thing I usually have to do on this blog is to remove any comment which is nothing more than an ad for the person posting the comment. There is an app called Grammarly that advertises itself as a great grammar checker. I usually don't bother to see how bad such apps are; I just know they are rotten. And I know people who pay for such an app are foolish and gullible. Recently, Grammarly posted a comment on one of my blog posts - LTA's Illiterate Poster - and it's nothing more than an advertisement for the Grammarly app. But what's really shocking is Grammarly can't even ensure that the grammar in its advertisement for its grammar checker is correct. This is what it posted in the comment section of my blog post:

SMU - 20 years of language errors

The Singapore Management University (SMU) recently published an advertisement and as I read it, I could not help but recall what it wrote 20 years ago in its inaugural congratulatory ad at the turn of the millennium. This ad, published in the Straits Times on 1 August 2000, was to congratulate its very first batch of graduates.

Why the Speak Good English Movement harms Singapore

Many of my friends tell me to ignore ignoramuses such as the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) and the people associated with it. They think I'm wasting my time but I totally disagree. I truly believe the SGEM and other grammar ignoramuses who love to criticise others when they themselves have no knowledge of grammar are causing harm to Singapore in many different ways. Recently, at a dinner, my fears proved not to be unfounded. Someone at the dinner asked me if I was the writer of this blog. He liked some of my blog posts criticising the SGEM. He told me that a group of women writers in Singapore compiled their writings into a book but everything just fizzled out because of the negative blog review of one Ludwig Tan, a committee member of the SGEM who criticised a very small grammatical error in the book and blew it up. He thanked me for 'being instrumental in shutting down Ludwig Tan's obnoxious blog'.

He was a total stranger to me and there were many other people at the dinner I had to talk to and so I didn't have the chance to speak more to him but what he said puzzled me throughout that evening. I know that Ludwig Tan used to have a language blog that was not only hypercritical of Singaporeans but also highly erroneous in its treatment of the English language and I have had some occasions to expose his errors in this blog. And although I would be delighted if indeed my just criticisms were the reason for the shutting down of his 'obnoxious' blog in which he used to write his scathing but unjustified excoriation of the language of Singaporeans, there can be many reasons why someone removes his blog from the internet and the reason that would warm the cockles of my heart may not be the only reason or even one of the reasons.

At the time when I first discovered Ludwig Tan's highly critical blog, I was really surprised that someone who purports to teach the English language could make so many ridiculous language mistakes. I wanted to explain in this blog why everything Tan said was wrong and why his sometimes harsh criticisms of Singaporeans were not just unwarranted but blatantly wrong. The people he criticised were linguistically correct and it was he who was wrong. But because Tan's mistakes were numerous and almost every blog post of his was riddled with shocking errors that I would not even have expected children to make, I could not address the mountain of errors in his blog. What I did was to screen-save many of his outrageous posts so that I could address them in the future.

When I got home, I looked up my album of screenshots to see if I could find any post by Ludwig Tan that criticised the writings of women writers in Singapore. What small grammatical error could he have chosen to slam?  Was Tan correct in the first place? If the many language mistakes Tan makes are symptomatic of his innate inability to get his language right, there is a high chance he was grammatically wrong in his criticism of the Singaporean women writers.

Sure enough, I found precisely what the person was talking about at the dinner.

The endless mistakes of the Speak Good English Movement

You may be forgiven for thinking that I have a personal vendetta against Singapore's Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) when I honestly have none. You may think that way because this blog has more than a hundred posts that highlight the ludicrous language mistakes made by the SGEM. But the fact is the SGEM is unbelievably ignorant of even the most elementary rules of English grammar and I can't help picking on it when everything it says or publishes is erroneous. I just went to its Facebook page and I saw this:

'Do you say "the photos you sent me" or "the photos you sent to me"? Let's learn and improve our English with Kai Ying and Robin!'  

I was naturally curious what nonsensical error the SGEM might come up with this time and I clicked on the link which brought me to a video that the SGEM produced, complete with real actors. It's a cringe-inducing video which is just what I expected of the SGEM. The video pokes fun at how an uneducated Singaporean speaks which is of course in poor taste. Although the SGEM loves to make fun of the the way an uneducated Singaporean speaks, it is itself hopelessly unable to get its own grammar right. I forced myself to continue watching the video and I waited for the SGEM to make a pronouncement on grammar. As I have shown in countless articles in this blog, the SGEM is totally incapable of getting its grammar right. I knew that all I had to do was to wait for it to condemn a sentence as grammatically unacceptable and the SGEM would most certainly be in error and expose its own ignorance of English grammar rules.  I didn't have long to wait.

This is what the SGEM says:

Should Singapore Schools Teach English Grammar?

Most people are not aware that English grammar is not taught in Singapore schools. Neither is it taught in any other school all over the world except those in Britain which recently re-introduced grammar in their curriculum because of the prudent educational policy of the Tory government. However, parents in Britain have staged huge protests against this. They don't want their kids to be taught grammar.

Many people don't realise that most English-speaking people are grammar illiterates. This has everything to do with the history of English teaching. In the 1960s, educators came up with the novel idea that English grammar was too difficult for children and it would take away their interest in creative writing. This idea soon spread to schools in all other parts of the world and children were taught how to communicate effectively and correctly in English but grammar itself was left out. However, it became clear a few years ago to educators in Britain that this was a huge mistake. We now have a whole generation of people who may be English-speaking but have no knowledge of English grammar at all. The government in the UK took the decision, even though it's an unpopular one, to re-introduce English grammar in all schools and make it essential for all 11-year-olds to sit an examination that tests their knowledge of grammar.

It was in this context that Nick Gibb, the UK education minister embarrassed himself when a BBC presenter asked him if 'after' in the sentence 'I went to the cinema after I'd eaten my dinner' was a preposition or a subordinating conjunction.