The Logic Off Topic list

>hi dennis.
>
>you're not really suggesting that the meaning of "i got plenty of
>nothing" is obscure??

I am not suggesting anything, I am telling you flat out that a non 
native English speaker, from say Japan, would not know what what to 
make of that sentence.  Furthermore he would try to apply the correct 
grammatical rules to the problem of figuring out what the speaker 
meant and would be lead to the wrong conclusion.  Communication would 
thus fail because someone was not following the rules. I know this 
from eighteen years of direct observation of non native English 
speakers trying to deal with the nuances of the language.

I figure the point of language is to facilitate communication, 
slashing it up into separate dialects does more to divide people by 
putting up barriers to communication than it does to unite them.

>to claim its meaning is cloudy for "proper" english speakers is saying
>no more than a phrase in sanskrit is difficult for them.

It is cloudy.  By failing to use the word "have" or failing to use 
the contraction "I've" the speaker is putting the sentence in the 
past tense when trying to describe a current condition.  What happens 
when he really *does* want to indicate the past tense?


>except that they don't make baseless assumptions about sanskrit.
>various english dialects have been studied widely and they have no more
>or less advantages than BBC english.

Have they been "studied", or have they been "rationalized" by 
revisionist scholars with social agendas?

Anyway your assertion that they have no more or less advantages than 
"BBC" English" is easy to debunk.  In the case of your example to use 
proper English and say "I have nothing." puts the whole idea across 
in three words without any ambiguity whatsoever, even to a non native 
speaker, whereas saying it the other way expands the sentence to five 
words and robs it of it's clarity by denying the listener means to 
determine whether the speaker is referring to an event in the past or 
a current condition.

If you are riding on a Jet airliner do you want the pilot talking to 
the Tokyo air traffic controller over a staticky radio to say "Hey 
y'all ah reckon ah bess be comin to lite here directly as dem tanks 
out der in dem wing got a whole lot o' nuttin in em"  or perhaps 
would you prefer that he say "we need to land, we are low on fuel"?

If you are laying in an operating room with a bunch of surgeons 
sticking knives in your guts do you want one of them to start using 
rhyming slang?


>and their speakers use them as clearly and consistently and
>unambiguously.

It may work fine until concepts start get complicated or until they 
have to talk to someone outside their isolated group then things 
start to fall apart.  It is not a coincidence that more affluent 
groups within society have a better command of the language. 
Language is a tool and the better you use it the better it will serve 
you.

What is more arrogant: the idea that a language can be empirically 
correct or the idea that a small group of people's ignorance of the 
rules of grammar and the faulty constructions result are an 
improvement on 1000 years of linguistic evolution.

>the kind of grammar you have in mind appears to be limited and dated.

You have it backwards.  Dialects come and go they die of their own 
limitations or get morphed into something something unrecognizable by 
each successive generation of speakers or they move between 
populations and get distorted in ways the originators can no longer 
understand.  Proper grammar on the other hand is very nearly timeless 
and the very fact that it changes very little and very slowly is what 
makes it so powerful and useful.

Trying to write up a complex document using dialect is a lot like 
trying to build a building on a log jam in a river.  You might get 
away with it if all you want is a temporary light shack but if try 
anything bigger and heavier you will be in trouble and whatever size 
you make it you can count on it being useless pretty soon.


>	"You just demonstrated the fault with your argument.  You had to
>	remove "guitar" and replace it with the color which can easily be
>	singular before it would make sense in your example."
>
>replaced with the colour because "Chris" and "Marty" can also easily be
>singular.

No you replaced it because it did not work the other way.


>that doesn't make it "red.......and white".
>"red and white" is a singular item.
>
>	"I hate to break this to you professor but "here" has no separate
>	singular or plural form unless you happen to be talking about some
>	other dimension."
>
>"here" doesn't need two separate forms for the argument.
>it is behaving as a singular item - as evidenced by "comes".

There is no singular or plural form of "here".  You talk as if there 
is.  "Here come two ants.", "Here comes one ant." the word "come" is 
conjugated the word "here" is not.