Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “Outrightly,” “Faithfuls,” “Graduands”: Q and A on Nigerian English and Learner Errors

Dear Farooq Kperogi,

Your elaborate response to my rant says a lot.  More about you than about me.  For a rant to exert and pique you this much, and as an "an enthusiastic student of the language," to condescendingly pour vitriol on me through your response shows it was not a rant.

Like we all do, we read what we want to read and relate to what aligns with the innermost base instinct.  Did you read my wholesome praise that, "You are a brilliant student of the language of English.?"  So why should you dredge up my asking you in the past for illumination on the language?

The admission that you are not a gatekeeper is enough vindication of my position.  All your other vituperations are uncalled for or relevant so I will not comment on them.  The rules of the language are not hard and fast.  When I first arrived in England in 1987, I heard common and widespread usages like, "two pound," "you was the one," and so many similar acceptable usages that defy my own rigid rules of English language training in Nigeria.

You accept that you and other erudite scholars of the language agree that the rules of the language are NOT fixed in time, space and class of users!  Why then should we accept your take on "outrightly" if we understand it one way, that is different to your own "gatekeeping" way?  My dear friend, please learn to take yourself a little tad less seriously and relax.  Please take things easy because not all public exchanges should be attended by your amateur psycho-analysis and presumptuousness.

My very dear friend, have a great day.


Cheers.



IBK



_________________________
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide (IBK)
(+2348061276622)
ibk2005@gmail.com

On 24 October 2016 at 22:06, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
IBK,

First, this is hypocritical ranting. You have had reason in the past to send me an email or two requesting to know the correct usage of words and expressions. If you don't care about grammar or "gate-keeping," why did you bother to ask me to tell you if certain expressions were correct or not? Is it because your settled certainties have been exploded b y my latest offering that you're getting ticked off?  

I have pointed out several times here that English evolves naturally, that no authority regulates its use, etc. Several people have said that before me. So you are not saying anything new. But it's also true that English grammar isn't anarchic. Like other languages, its grammar and usage traditions are elaborately rule-governed. There are usage norms that stand people out, that serve as social markers. From the way you write and speak English people can tell your level of education, your social status, your regional identity, your professional affiliation, the depth of your immersion in the language, etc. This is true of all languages. Everyone has a choice to come across as educated, regional, slangy, informal, uneducated, colloquial, etc.

I am not a gate-keeper of the English language. I am not even an expert of the language. I, too, make my own mistakes. I am only an enthusiastic student of the language. All I do is analyze usage patterns, call attention to the consensus of experts on usage norms, highlight dialectal peculiarities, answer questions from readers, etc. And there is nothing revolutionary or newfangled about that. Several other people do it. Is that too much for you to understand?

If reading my grammar writing heightens your insecurities and hurts your fragile ego, you know you can save yourself this needless torment by not reading me. There is a delete button for a reason. You can even block my email address so my posts don't come into your inbox at all. It's that simple.

Take care,

Farooq Kperogi

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Social Science Building 
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Twitter: @farooqkperog
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will


On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk2005@gmail.com> wrote:
My brother Farooq Kperogi,

You are a brilliant student of the language of English.  However, your attempt at being a gate-keeper will not work.  You always forget that the only reason English is the ascendant language is its ability to import from other languages and enrich itself through usage.

If you want a language you wish to cage and guard, please fall in love with the language of French and join the French Academy.  There, you every year determine what is French and what is not, and what usage is fixed in granite with you fellow academy members.

When we learnt GNS 101 in 1978 at the University of Ife we were taught and bout registers of English and usage and it was also obvious that English evolves through time and place and nobody, not you or any coven determines its usage.  That right belong to us who speak it.  That is why when a devotee of Michael Jackson like my daughter who is also a language buff says "I'm bad," she means she is good.

Try as you may, sorry you will not cage English and by the way to borrow a phrase from the Jewish scriptures, "who made you a judge (of English language) over us.

Cheers.

IBK 



_________________________
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide (IBK)

On 23 October 2016 at 19:28, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:

My "Politics  of Grammar" column in today's Daily Trust on Sunday


By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.


Over the past few days, I was dragged into many online arguments about the grammatical correctness of certain popular Nigerian English expressions. My responses to these conversations form the core of today's column.


 Is the word "outrightly" an illegitimate word even though some online dictionaries have an entry for it? Why don't native English speakers use "faithfuls" as the plural form of "faithful" even when some online dictionaries have an entry for it? How about "graduand"? Is that a real word?


"Outrightly" is bad grammar

The use of "outrightly" as an adverb is nonstandard. In standard usage "outright" is both an adverb and an adjective. 


In a December 31, 2009 article titled "Adverbial and Adjectival Abuse in Nigerian English," I wrote: "Chief among these are the words 'outrightly' and 'downrightly.' They are probably not strictly Nigerian inventions, but native speakers of the English language don't say 'downrightly' or 'outrightly.' These adverbs don't take the 'ly' form. So where a Nigerian would say 'Yar'adua's handlers are outrightly lying to us,' a Standard English speaker would say 'Yar'adua's handlers are lying to us outright.' Where Nigerian speakers would say 'he is downrightly hypocritical,' a Standard English speaker would say 'he is downright hypocritical.' So, although these words are adverbs of manner, they don't usually admit of the 'ly' suffix."


People who were told "outrightly" wasn't Standard English pointed out that online dictionaries, including Oxforddictionaries.com, have an entry for the word. There are two things wrong with this. First, the printed editions of all Oxford dictionaries don't recognize "outrightly" as a word.


Second, lexicography (i.e., writing of dictionaries) isn't always synonymous with grammar; dictionaries merely notate the lexical components of a language and don't necessarily make judgments on usage and correctness. With the rise and popularity of web-based corpus linguistics, if enough people use a word it will have an entry in most online dictionaries. But the fact that a word has an entry in an online dictionary doesn't necessarily mean it's "correct."


You sometimes have to go beyond the dictionary to figure out if the word is standard, nonstandard, regional, formal, informal, colloquial, slang, uneducated, etc. (OK, I admit that learners' dictionaries like the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and others have usage notes on some words and expressions. Incidentally, even the online edition of the Oxford Learner's Dictionary doesn't recognize "outrightly" as a legitimate English word). 


The use of "outrightly" as an adverb started life as learner's error. It arose from the notion that the adverbial form of the word "right" is "rightly." This morphological logic was extended to all words that have or end with "right." Thus, "outrightly" and "downrightly" were born. The reasoning is perfectly sensible and logical. It's just that grammar, especially English grammar, isn't always sensible and logical.


 The superfluous addition of the "ly" morpheme to "outright" and "downright" has emerged as one of the features of non-native English usage. You won't find an educated native English speaker write or say "outrightly." The Corpus of Global Web-Based English shows that "outrightly" appears disproportionately in Nigerian English.


 It's OK to say or write "outrightly" when you communicate with Nigerians. But if you are communicating with educated native English speakers and don't want to stand out, avoid it. Always remember that "outright" is both an adjective (used immediately before a noun, as in, "That's an outright lie") and an adverb of manner (used after a verb in a sentence, as in, "Lai Mohammed lied outright.") 


"Faithful" Has No Plural

People also got into an argument about the expression "Muslim faithfuls." Someone pointed out that it was solecistic and another person defended its correctness by pointing out that an online dictionary has an entry for it.


Well, I once wrote the following in response to a reader's question challenging me that "faithfuls" is a legitimate plural of "faithful" because an online dictionary says so:


"The standard plural for 'faithful' when it is used as a noun to mean staunch followers of or believers in a faith, ideology, or creed, is 'the faithful,' not 'faithfuls.' It should be 'millions of the Christian faithful,' 'millions of the Muslim faithful,' 'thousands of the party faithful at the PDP convention,' etc. I have never heard any educated native English speaker say 'faithfuls.' In fact, there appears a wiggly red underline beneath the word when you type it on Microsoft Word, indicating that it's not recognized as an English word. Plus, the world's most prestigious English dictionary—the Oxford English Dictionary—says the plural of 'faithful' is 'the faithful.' It does not list 'faithfuls' as an alternative plural form for 'faithful.'


 "I am aware that the online edition of Merriam-Webster Dictionary says that when 'faithful' is used outside religious contexts, it can be pluralized to 'faithfuls.' It gives the expression 'party faithfuls' as an example. That means while it does not recognize the pluralization of 'faithful' in reference to religions as legitimate, it tolerates its pluralization elsewhere.


"However, when I searched the British National Corpus, the definitive record of contemporary spoken and written British English, I found only two records for 'party faithfuls,' but found thousands of records for 'the party faithful.' The Corpus of Contemporary American English— which has been described as 'the first large, genre-balanced corpus of any language, which has been designed and constructed from the ground up as a "monitor corpus", and which can be used to accurately track and study recent changes in the language'— did not return a single record for 'party faithfuls,' but had thousands of matches for "the party faithful.'


"What this tells me is that 'faithfuls' as a plural of 'faithful' is rare or non-standard in British English and completely absent in American English. I would never advise you to use 'faithfuls' in careful writing or in polite company. It would make you sound illiterate." (This was first published in my February 24, 2013 column titled, "Q and A on Nigerian and American English Expressions—and More"


There are many more examples of popular words in Nigerian and other non-native English varieties that have entries in online dictionaries but that are never used by educated native English speakers. "Academician" is another example.



"So what is the difference between an 'academician' and an 'academic'? Well, an 'academic' is someone who teaches or conducts research in a higher educational institution, typically in a university. In British and Nigerian English, academics are also called 'lecturers.' In American English, they are called 'professors.'


"An 'academician,' on the other hand, is a person who works with or is honored with membership into an academy, that is, an institution devoted to the study and advancement of a specialized area of learning such as the arts, sciences, literature, medicine, music, engineering, etc. Examples of academies are the Nigerian Academy of Letters, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, etc.


"Not all academics are academicians and not all academicians are academics. In other words, you can teach in a university, polytechnic, college of education, etc. and never be made a member of an academy, and you can become a member of an academy without ever being a teacher or a researcher at a higher educational institution. Note that while most academicians are also academics, most academics are never academicians.


"A little note on pragmatics is in order here. Although many [online] dictionaries have entries that say 'academician' and 'academic' can be synonymous, this isn't really the case in actual usage, at least among educated native English speakers. It is considered illiterate usage in British and American English to call higher education teachers and researchers 'academicians'; they are properly called 'academics.' Many dictionaries merely capture the entire range of a word's usage without discriminating socially prestigious usage from uneducated or archaic usage."


Is "Graduand" a Nigerianism?

No, it's not. Someone wondered why Nigerian newspapers use the word "graduand" even though the word doesn't have an entry in many print dictionaries. Well, it's because it's a Briticism. That means it is unique to British English and the heirs of its linguistic heritage, such as Nigerian English. It means someone who hasn't graduated but is about to graduate. It is entirely unknown in American English.

Related Articles:

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Social Science Building 
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Twitter: @farooqkperog
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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