Ann K. Brodsky writes for Tablet about “What I learned from teaching English grammar and punctuation to Hasidic adults”:
A makhloykes, for the uninitiated, is Yiddish for “argument” or “dispute”; its modern Hebrew counterpart is makhloket, although the latter seems to lack some of the “oomph” of its European mate. Think of the scene from Fiddler on the Roof: “Horse!” “Mule!” “No, it was a horse!” “I tell you it was a mule!” […]
One would think that makhloykes, so redolent of mamaloshn, and the Oxford comma, with its British pedigree, would never meet in the same paragraph, let alone in a class of Hasidim. But I had a chance to witness these two words—and worlds—collide.
A few years ago, I volunteered to teach basic English to a group of adult Hasidim. This was a self-selected group, members of an organization established to support Hasidic Jews who feel disenfranchised yet wish to maintain their Orthodox observance. […] Despite having been a language teacher for several decades, including many years devoted to English as a second language, I didn’t know where to begin. My students didn’t fit neatly into any category. They were, theoretically, native English speakers, but many—particularly the men—could write on a third-grade level at best. Yet they weren’t traditional ESL students either, having grown up in the United States, albeit in cloistered communities like Monroe, New York (which Hasidim pronounce MUN-roe, with the accent on the first syllable. Who knew?). […]
After several weeks, many students had made astounding progress, becoming real experts in syntax and basic punctuation. One young man, whom I’ll call Yanky, was the class’s undisputed comma champion: He had mastered how to use commas in a series, how to set off appositives, how to correct run-ons and comma splices. If there was a comma to be found (or deleted), Yanky was your man. Naturally, he knew that the last comma in a series—that fiendish squiggle, the Oxford comma—is optional, subject to debate.
About halfway through the course, reviewing for the midterm, I asked if the punctuation in the following sentence was correct: “I enjoy learning the rules of capitalization, grammar, and punctuation.” (Remember, the last comma can either stay or go.)
My students were on to me; they seemed to know this was a trick question. No one ventured an answer. The tension mounted. Finally, Yanky’s voice rang out: “It’s a makhloykes!”
I doubt Strunk and White could have said it any better.
(Cue Leo Rosten references…)
I only recently became aware that Modern Hebrew texts, in general, never use the Oxford comma. That is true for newspaper articles as well as dissertations. I had to learn a separate punctuation instinct for that language.
Interesting! I wonder if anyone’s done a cross-linguistic study?
Russian also doesn’t use Oxford comma if the last term on the list is connected by “and” or “or”.
Isn’t that the Oxford comma by definition?
i suspect the standardizers’ view of what yiddish comma-practice should be is in here*, but i doubt it has much relation to what anyone actually does (and certainly if it describes hasidic usage, it’s purely by coincidence). but if i have time (and am near my copy), i’ll take a look and report back.
.
* available for a time as part of a “schaechter trifecta” book bundle, which says something about translinguistic non-rhoticity.
Isn’t that the Oxford comma by definition?
Close, but it doesn’t mention nor as a conjunction that is often involved: “Neither X, Y, nor Z.” (The advisability of “neither … nor” with more than two items is an issue from which I, um, … prescind.)
You’re prescinding in the matter of a multiple clause? C’mon.
@Noetica
—
J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue i. x. sig. Ciiiv [cited OED]
She is nother fishe nor fleshe nor good red hearyng.
—
Commas optional (or supplied, or not supplied by printer), but no constraint on number of nor’s.
—
Shakespeare, AYLI, IV, 1
I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is
emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is
ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects…
—
This is a tour de force of nor’s and clausal extension. Punctuation but not spelling is as in the First Folio.
Sure, Paddy. Each of those bubkes has more than one nor unlike the pattern I gave; and not one of them is relevant to use of the serial comma. Any more than either of these two includes a serial comma:
• X and Y and Z.
• X, and Y, and Z.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time; …
@Noetica
I did not include this one, because spoken by a Clown:
—
he that cannot make a leg, put off’s cap, kiss his hand and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap
AWTEW, II,2
—
וואָס אַ בושה
Speaking of both English teaching and Leo Rosten, don’t forget
H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N !
The Serbian Pravopis also prohibits the Oxford comma. Here’s the quote:
Zapeta u sintagmama s naporednim članovima kada su oni u nabrajanju.
(1) Između pretposlednjeg nabrojanog člana i veznika iza kojeg dolazi poslednji član — zapeta se ne piše:
Gajili su breskve, kruške, jabuke i šljive. — Obećali su mu dobru platu, unapređenje i stan.
I’ve never seen an Oxford comma outside of English. The fake exceptions, and they’re rare, are for special emphasis: “A, B, and C, not ‘or'”.
Back in 2007 (buy in a recently resurrected thread), David Marjanović said that, “English has the worst orthography of any language that (exclusively) uses an alphabet or syllabary.” However, that “exclusively” is not quite true. Written English has a few special symbols,* such as ampersand characters (not just the usual “&” on the keyboard, but also the so-called “epsilon ampersand”;** and why the heck is there no Unicode for that character?), which may have started out as ligatures but are now separate entities representing whole words, and which can have peculiarly interacting orthographic conventions of their own. In particular, when an ampersand is used in place of a spelled out “and,” the standard advice about whether to use an Oxford comma is reversed: most commonly, the comma before “&” is omitted, but it is easy to find examples where it does appear.
* The ampersand is by no means unique. There are also currency symbols, for example. While the cents sign in “50¢” might simply be interpreted as an abbreviation, that cannot be the case for the more commonly appearing dollar sign. A written “$1 million” is conventionally read in words as “one million dollars,” with the dollar sign and the word it replaces appearing in different locations!
** “So-called,” because while an epsilon glyph was used in creating that image for Wikipedia, historically the character originated as a ligature with a script E, not a Greek epsilon. That particular image was apparently made and misleadingly titled by one “Richard J. Barbalace,” (presumably the macher I went to college with), but I don’t know if he invented the term “epsilon ampersand.”
Does the so-called “Oxford comma” really have a “British pedigree” beyond the extent to which the English language as a whole does? If you go back into the 19th century or whatever, is there a real Br v. Am difference in the frequency of the usage? Or is this a more recent thing where OUP’s stylebook just had a different preference from several influential American stylebooks?
The Chicago Manual of Style is pretty influential. My impression is that American books generally do use the serial comma. It’s newspapers and magazines that don’t. And newspapers have historically been concerned about use of space and narrow columns.
Then there’s calligrapher Edward Johnston’s book, Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering. It looks perverse, but what he calls lettering is treated separately from the first two subjects.
The other oddity in the OP is that, with a large enough historical perspective at least, there is nothing at all inconsistent with being a native speaker of English and being illiterate or at least having trouble generating “correct” written prose at above a “third-grade” level. Literacy isn’t some sort of natural consequence of basic native-speaker fluency; it’s a separate-if-related skill that only arises in certain social/economic/cultural circumstances. (In fact, there are unto this present day plenty of products of the NYC K-12 public schools who cannot reliably produce better-than-third-grade written standard-English prose …)
What’s not clear to me is whether in a purely aural/oral sense these students had any deficits in their English fluency (compared to normal Gentile-Americans without particular elite educational credentials) as a result of having grown up in a fairly insular (trying to use a neutral word here – if that one doesn’t seem neutral, please substitute your preferred alternative) subculture where another language is widely spoken for community-internal purposes. Or if there’s anything distinctive in their oral English that creates certain barriers to full literacy in standard English — for example, comma usage is related to (if not identical to), prosodic things where momentary pauses in complex sentences give the hearer cues as to how to parse the sentence, but it would not surprise me if the patterns of pause-insertion-and-omission are not completely uniform across all varieties of AmEng.
The other oddity in the OP is that, with a large enough historical perspective at least, there is nothing at all inconsistent with being a native speaker of English and being illiterate or at least having trouble generating “correct” written prose at above a “third-grade” level.
That’s not an “oddity in the OP,” that’s you applying an inappropriate measuring stick. You might as well call all historical writing odd, because with a large enough historical perspective it’s all just a meaningless blip in the story of the universe. The author is writing as “having been a language teacher for several decades, including many years devoted to English as a second language,” and from that perspective — which I’m pretty sure is more relevant here than species aeternitatis — it seems unusual. And I submit that most readers of the article would feel the same way.
Not (I hasten to add) that there’s anything wrong with providing historical perspective, but it’s not a matter of something being amiss with the original essay. Every essay and book is written from some perspective or other, and that’s a feature, not a bug. You have a different one: that’s great too!
I’m sure I meant “as opposed to Japanese” (which has the worst orthography at least this side of Pahlavi).
Why would there be? It’s just an ampersand in another font (specifically, American handwriting as far as I’ve noticed).
Should the handwritten apostrophe that looks like a plus sign with a line joining the left and bottom arms also have its own Unicode point? It seems like these are parallel to the two different forms of lowercase g. The variations are handled by the font.
I’ve never seen an Oxford comma outside of English
Of course, the question does not really arise in languages where you can’t omit the word for “and” in a series. (There are a good many of these outside SAE; often the “and” word is derived from or even indistinguishable from “with”, and can’t be used to link clauses, unless the clauses are nominalised first. Kusaal is, inevitably, an example …)
@Languagehat “Interesting! I wonder if anyone’s done a cross-linguistic study?”
Bulgarian, as taught in schools, explicitly does not have a comma before the last item.
J.W. Brewer, I am not big on historical perspective, but I think a collection of people semi-literate in their L1 language and literate in their other L1 (Yiddish) and highly literate in their L1.5 language (Hebrew) seems to be reasonably unusual.
Maybe if one looks at diglossia with an effort to teach people writing their colloquial language, there can be a parallel.
@David Marjanović + Keith Ivey: I guess my internal perception is that those two types of ampersands are different characters, rather than the same character in different writing styles. Perhaps this is strictly a personal idiosyncrasy, and I certainly cannot offer a dispositive argument for it. However, I think it is notable that there is yet another character that I would also consider an “ampersand” in the relevant sense—meaning that it can represent the same word, and when it does indeed represent “and” (although that is not its only function), it (like &) is not typically preceded by an Oxford comma. However, it has a completely different origin, and no one would consider it a typeface variation of &.
Now, the Unicode standard—that is the mother of makhloykos.
i would only call “&” an ampersand, not the other “and” glyphs (“+”; italic “et” ligature; “E” with a line through it; “E” with extended and crossed middle arm). and only the ones with a very clear “E” core feel like the same character to me.
it (like &) is not typically preceded by an Oxford comma
When serving as a substitute for and the ampersand is generally restricted to fixed proprietary terms, names of firms, and the like. If it is errantly used like that in normal text, there is no reason to exempt it from the prevailing protocol for serial comma.
Best also, I say, to treat etc. in accord with the prevailing protocol. If this (which I would invariably recommend):
then this:
And before but? No reason to treat that differently either:
Of course, whether you’d actually say or write such things is one question; how you’d punctuate them is another.
I found this interesting discussion of the artistic variety in “and” symbols, as well as insight into how some people categorize and think of them.
Interesting indeed; thanks for that!
For LH readers who are interested, the blog Balashon has an accessible treatment of the etymology of Hebrew maḥălōqeṯ מַחֲלֹקֶת here. Some Semitic cognates under *ḫlḳ here.
Does the so-called “Oxford comma” really have a “British pedigree” beyond the extent to which the English language as a whole does? If you go back into the 19th century or whatever, is there a real Br v. Am difference in the frequency of the usage?
No, but that’s because (as far as I can tell from reading lots of both British and American books printed in the 19C and early 20C) the Oxford comma was universal at that time, and the Cambridge comma (which has nothing to do with Cambridge, of course) is a modern British innovation in line with the (modern and British) tendency to omit a good many commas. (FWIW, the comma-lite style is leaking into AmE as well: you often see “John and his wife Ann” even when John has only one wife.)
(Sorry, sorry, too many parentheses in this comment. (Sorry.))
FWIW, the comma-lite style is leaking into AmE as well: you often see “John and his wife Ann” even when John has only one wife.
Sure, and why not? Unlike the serial comma, a comma or two in such a case will often contribute nothing, and inclusion can dilute or muddy the effect of other commas nearby. I frequently excise commas like this also:
• In 2001, the world’s attention was drawn to other urgencies.
Hyphen-lite is a characteristic of contemporary US practice, as we see from tracking successive editions of CMOS for example.
Dash-confusion-and-lack-of-common-purpose? Ubiquitous.
a comma or two in such a case will often contribute nothing
What it should contribute is that Ann is non-restrictive, but here the normal restrictive/non-restrictive opposition has been lost. “My sister, Sara,” means I have only one sister; “my brother James” is distinct from “my brother Anthony”.
As for hyphens, there is a general progression from “base ball” (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, written 1798-99) to “base-ball” to “baseball” that is exactly paralleled in British practice, though specific words will of course move at different rates.
“My sister, Sara,” means I have only one sister; “my brother James” is distinct from “my brother Anthony”.
That’s the well-echoed current “wisdom”. But it’s not a deeply traditional one. There are no commas around John in presentations of this folk lyric:
Nor of course are there pauses around the word when it is sung. Is John the singer’s only son? We don’t know; but if he is, we don’t actually expect commas and pauses do we?
Isaac had two sons: Jacob and Esau. Consider these verses in The New English Bible (which coruscates, demurely, with Oxbridgean propriety):
It would be inflexible and tin-eared to “improve” these with added commas:
Some might want that. Do you? Consider also an extra comma before Esau, here: “They have been sent as a gift to my lord, Esau.” There are very many similar instances where such a comma is absent:
As for hyphens, there is a general progression from “base ball” (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, written 1798-99) to “base-ball” to “baseball” that is exactly paralleled in British practice, though specific words will of course move at different rates.
That’s for the formation of new words. What I had in mind is the trend, in CMOS as a leading US authority, for fewer hyphens in compounding that does not establish new words. Among its current principles:
Sounds sensible; but there’s no appeal to consistency, and something approaching a default avoidance of hyphens. This is less common in UK sources, which give greater weight to consistency with hyphenation. (But then, I’m squarely with those who argue that consistency is itself a significant aid to comprehension: with hyphenation, and with use of the serial comma.)
An accident happened to my brother Jim,
When somebody threw a tomato at him.
Tomatoes are soft and don’t hurt the skin,
But this one was specially packed in a tin.
I am still lost when it comes to consistent and acceptable compound formation in English. My natural tendency is to fuse, when in doubt. But then, my spellchecker (ha!) consistently shames me to write book case for bookcase, and I shudder at recalling poor English copy written by Germans, with terrifying chimeras like diningroomtable.
A din-in-groom-table is clearly a table with a bridegroom who is suffering gastric distress.
Too much cake and champagne will do that.
Correction: I should say, a Diningroomtable.
Yes;
optional.
Same in actual speech (making the possibly unjustified assumption that the comma is supposed to reflect some prosodic feature, as opposed to being a purely abstract sign to the reader about how they are supposed to interpret the sentence, like Capital Letters.)
If I say “my sister, Sara” (as I might, actually having one) with a falling intonation on “sister”, it would have an implicature that I have no sister Jemima (say); but if I say it with a level intonation there is no such implicature, and I will thank you for not drawing any unwarranted conclusions about my other siblings or lack thereof.
I say “implicature” advisedly, however; I might in fact say “my sister, Sara” even if I do indeed have a sister Jemima, and write the comma too: for example, if I had been talking about Sara already, but suspected that her name might have slipped your mind (it is an exotic one.)
Possibly others might pronounce this with a dash, but here in Wales we pronounce the dash and the comma identically and are too poor to afford your fancy English punctuation.
I might in fact say “my sister, Sara” even if I do indeed have a sister Jemima, and write the comma too: for example, if I had been talking about Sara already, but suspected that her name might have slipped your mind
Quite right, percipient polymath David. Even if my cat had had serial owners, and I had at least two sons, grandfathers, aunts, and lemurs, I might do the introductions at a party with these pauses and these commas:
Consistency is indeed a desideratum, but with commas it is hard to be hard and fast. The “possibly unjustified assumption that the comma is supposed to reflect some prosodic feature” turns out, I say, to be justified after all. Commas are the slipperiest points, with several competing determinants for deployment or omission.
(So am I forgiven yet? Coffee in Yemen, Wednesday week?)
It is always difficult to forgive someone who has correctly pointed out that one is wrong, but as the humans say, Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum.
I shall be there, and as a token of good faith, I will bring the equipment myself.
polymath
Alas, merely sesquidoct.
“Too clever by half”?
David E:
Clementia divina, et aurea est eruditorum humilitas. Mens illa ab angelis optimis informata est. I’ll bring a crate of dashes I’ve been squirreling away for you during the pandemic. Ens and even a few ems – all pronounceable, as you would wish, with a light Welsh lilt.
I hope to see the eng-dash invented within my lifetime.
You only get it in a package with Engsoc, so be careful what you wish for.
“Ingsoc”
Newspeak has rationalized spelling.
If Eng gets a dash, there should be one for Chang too, but I suppose they’ll always have to be used in conjunction.
Made me laugh!
@Brett: Good to know – I read “1984” in German translation and just mentally ported Engsoz to English.
And interesting that the spelling reform didn’t go the full way to Ingsosh or so, but I guess asking questions like that could land one in the basement of Minilove.
I don’t think it was/would be pronounced Ingsosh — compare “soccer.”
which does lead one to ask why not Ingsok? (i suppose Iŋsok would be too much to ask)
The eŋ͡m-dash also needs to be provided. Its absence heretofore is clearly due to colonialist attitudes and reactionary Eurocentricism.
Indeed. Ingsok. Unfortunately Eastasian sabotage, abetted by Emmanuel Goldstein, has led to a temporary shortfall in production of k’s.
The shortage will be divided among the peasants, compeer!
And for Australia, an enh-dash and an eny-dash.
abetted by Emmanuel Goldstein
Another pronunciation puzzler. Nowadays I would automatically pronounce it à l’allemande unless I caught myself in time. I bet that would be taken as pretentious in the US.
Anyway, the Goldstein excerpts were the only part of 1984 that grabbed me. In the last few years I discovered very similar ideas in an earlier writer. Was it Wells (The Shape of Things to Come) or Butler?
@Hans: Rationalized Newspeak for the Ministry of Love is “Miniluv” (capital letters to be fully eliminated later). However, I should clarify that rationalized spelling was not really a goal in Orwellian Newspeak, merely a means toward the ultimate end of making communication glib amd thoughtless. The goal of the spelling changes was to make the words as easy to read, write and say as possible, with minimum thought involved. (Orwell, of course, believed that political language really was tending in that direction, something he and other thinkers of the time viewed as new and very dangerous. Tolkien, the linguist, subtlety mocked this viewpoint in the appendices of The Return of the King, noting that Sauron had created the Black Speech with the same essential goal as the Party’s Newspeak, but it had been a failure, and a lack of vocabulary had not prevented like likes of Shagrat and Gorbag from discussion resistance to their master.)
Is that what happened in Wales?
Actually (apart from the odd detail), yes, it is what happened in Wales.
Middle Welsh writes k before front vowels; the current convention is a consequence of the printers of the Welsh Bible not having enough k’s to manage Welsh according to the existing conventions, tooled up as they were for English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_orthography
There are no commas around John in presentations of this folk lyric
That does not signify: transcribed lyrics are not prose, and frequently lack even terminal punctuation, nemmind commas.
Some might want that. Do you?
I am not speaking of my personal taste, but of standard American practice. I would leave the Esau commas out, but would expect American publishers to put them back in[,] maugre my teeth.
my spellchecker (ha!) consistently shames me to writebook case for bookcase
The spoken form ˈbookcase marks a compound, as distinct from ˈbook ˈcase, which marks a phrase, But whether something is written open (like the first), closed (like the second), or hyphenated is not predictable from whether it is a compound, which this is, or a phrase. You simply have to choose a dictionary as authority and stick to it, and expect the convention to change over time. It’s possible that base ball was a phrase in Jane’s time, but I suspect it was already a compound then.
but if I say it with a level intonation there is no such implicature, and I will thank you for not drawing any unwarranted conclusions about my other siblings or lack thereof.
I believe you, but intonation is one of the great divides in the Common Speech.
but suspected that her name might have slipped your mind (it is an exotic one.)
If you count Ireland and its diaspora as exotic places, then I suppose so. (My paternal aunt was named Honoria, informally Nonnie, which is closer to an exotic name, although the adjective still strikes me as peculiar in that context.)
Nowadays I would automatically pronounce it à l’allemande unless I caught myself in time.
Which, Emmanuel or Goldstein (or both)? I would make it em-MAN-yu-el GOLD-stine (unless he were an American, in which case GOLD-steen). Orwell seems to have been remarkably clueless about the U.S., even though it’s clearly supposed to be the dominant part of Oceania (hence the name “Airstrip One” for England/Britain/the UK): not only would the Party not be named the English Socialist Party by Americans, but if they did so for some unfathomable reason, they would indeed call it Ingsoash. “Oceanian Socialist Party” would be possible, though I think “Oceanian Communist Party”, oh-see-EE, would be more probable.
A few of his essays on America, or on his fantasies about America, are to be found here. Quite amusing to this American ear is this:
lack of vocabulary had not prevented like likes of Shagrat and Gorbag from discussion resistance to their master
In the Common Speech. The Black Speech failed not because of any Newspeak properties it may have had (the Ring-inscription is Old High Nasty) but for the same reasons that auxlangs and language planning in general fail.
(My paternal aunt was named Honoria, informally Nonnie, which is closer to an exotic name, although the adjective still strikes me as peculiar in that context.)
Back in 2013 you said “Margaret (Nonnie; she may have been Margaret Honoria).”
lack of vocabulary had not prevented like likes of Shagrat and Gorbag from discussion resistance to their master
Just as Gene Wolfe’s Ascians routinely transcend the limits of an imposed language intended to limit thought to approved channels:
https://languagehat.com/solving-linear-a/#comment-3835736
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascian_language
I think that the most terrifying (and happily false) notion of a language imposing strict limits on thought is Chomsky’s idea that human language in in all significant respects built-in genetically. It would follow that there are hard limits on how human beings can think, and we would never actually be able to communicate with Martians. (This may be true, but not for that reason. Wittgenstein’s lion is quite a different thing: we can’t communicate with him because we do not have enough common points of reference in how we experience life.)
@John Cowan: It’s not entirely clear what language the orcs are speaking, but from the description in “The Choices of Master Samwise,” it is evident that it is not Westron.
However, some orcs living far from Mordor (for example, the goblins of the Misty Mountains in The Hobbit) did actually speak Westron natively, and many others (such as the disparate collection who captured Merry and Pippin) used it as a lingua franca.
JC: Conan Doyle, in the voice of Sherlock Holmes (I don’t remember where), fantasized about a political union of the United States and the United Kingdom; he must have imagined both as equal, benign English-speaking empires. I imagine that by Orwell’s time such fantasies were obsolete, especially to the likes of Orwell himself.
@Y: I initially thought that quote was from The Valley of Fear, but it was actually “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”:
Conan Doyle may not have known much about America, but he at least recognized that the center of gravity of English-language culture was shifting rapidly toward the New World, and there are a lot of American characters in his stories.
I’ve never seen an Oxford comma outside of English.
See now Mark Cohen on “the Chinese serial comma or dùnhào 顿号 [、].”
That’s not an Oxford comma, that’s the \-shaped comma used in lists as opposed to the /-shaped comma used to separate clauses.
(…in current mainland Chinese. In Japanese it’s the only comma.)
I don’t even know most of the 20 or so ways to say “and” in Mandarin, but I don’t think there’s even an opportunity for an Oxford comma: you don’t put any “and” into lists. It’s just “A、B、C”.
in Mandarin, … you don’t put any “and” into lists. It’s just “A、B、C”.
With a following wind, there’ll be an example (photo) appearing on LLog soon. GTranslate correctly changed the second to an “and”, but didn’t do so well with the words. Whereas whoever translated the sign managed an impressively idiomatic rendering for a tucked-away eatery.
If I were to be punctilious, those were separate clauses, so the separator should have been a semicolon.