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To boldly go where no man has gone before

od nornen, 06. oktober 2015

Sporočila: 20

Jezik: English

nornen (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 03:56:09

Some say that split infinitives are bad styles, others even say that they are grammatical errors.

Is that so? And why is that so? In English adverbs can go before or after finite verb forms, so why isn't this true for infinitives?

Dear native speaker, are split infinitives grammatical errors in your opinion? Are they bad style? What is your reaction if you find a split infinitive either in speech or in writing?

Aleksachjo (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 04:12:58

nornen:Some say that split infinitives are bad styles, others even say that they are grammatical errors.

Is that so? And why is that so? In English adverbs can go before or after finite verb forms, so why isn't this true for infinitives?

Dear native speaker, are split infinitives grammatical errors in your opinion? Are they bad style? What is your reaction if you find a split infinitive either in speech or in writing?
The ballyhooing about split infinitives comes from the 19th century when prescriptive grammarians tried to force English to be more like Latin.

In Latin, like French and Esperanto you cannot split the infinitive.

Kuragxe iri kie neneniu homo antauxe iris.

You can't split the infinitive:

Ir-kuragxe-i .... just doesn't work.

This is the same reason why prescriptive grammarians have got their knickers in a wad about ending a sentence with prepositions--Latin didn't and English shouldn't either.

This was famously lampooned by Winston Churchill who mocked the stilted and wordy habit of avoiding dangling prepositions when he quipped: "That is a situation up with which I shall not put."

Of course, the standard way of expressing that idea doesn't dangle the preposition:

I will not put up with that situation.

But he made his point.

It was also lampooned by one of the Designing Women (from the 80s sitcom) whose well intentioned question: "Where are you from?" was met with an icy response: "I'm from a place where people don't end sentences with preposition." To which the rightly offended Designing Woman replied, "Oh how terribly ungrammatic of me. Let me rephrase that. "Where are you from, bit::?"

Tempodivalse (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 04:36:21

I don't use split infinitives, mostly out of habit, but I don't find them grammatically objectionable. The old prescription "don't split infinitives" has been ignored for many decades now (perhaps as far back as the early 20th century).

Presumably the point of not splitting infinitives is to make sentences easier to digest - you don't have to go searching for the word the "to" attaches to. Given English syntax's general murkiness, however, this prescription seems little more helpful than rearranging deckchairs on the Costa Concordia.

Miland (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 07:55:50

Thanks to Star Trek boldly going where no man has gone before, we may now be stuck with the split infinitive as a permanent part of Anglophone culture, and hence the language.

sudanglo (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 08:37:06

There's a difference in emphasis between to boldly go and to go boldly.

The first makes the going the most important thing, the second emphasises the manner of going.

Compare do not go gently into the night (I have 'corrected' the poet's grammar, he said gentle) with do not gently go ...

Sometimes you don't have a choice over the position of the adverb - it is better to never die would be normal it is better to die never sounds strange, or poetic (= not normal prose usage)

Vestitor (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 10:07:01

In truth all (or most) of the constructions in English using those old verbs are now split. Compare German or Dutch which still still has constructions where the separable verbs can work either as a unit word or separated.
The business of split infinitives being 'bad' is doubtless a hangover due to style having lagged behind the change in separable verbs.

If you compare a close language like Dutch you see that a word like opdweilen 'to mop up' works in two main ways:

Ik moet alles opdweilen = I have to mop (up) everything up.

Ik dweil alles op = I'll mop (up) everything up.

The second Dutch sentence is a construction of the sort that the 'split infinitive' gang would call 'bad grammar'.

Since people stopped using words like 'whence, wherefrom..' etc in English, the replacement constructions are just as clunky whichever way they are constructed; with: 'from where do you come..' being no better than 'where do you come from..' . In my opinion.

dbob (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 11:19:54

Although William Shatner avoids the split infinitive, while giving us the true meaning of “where no man has gone before”, this blogger makes a few interesting approaches as to how we could translate that sentence without loosing its punchiness:

1) iri aŭdace kien neniu iris antaŭe (literally: to go boldly where no one has gone before)

2) aŭdace iri kien neniu iris antaŭe (literally: boldly (to) go where no one has gone before)

3) aŭdaciri kien neniu antaŭe iris (literally: boldy-go where no one before has gone)

jefusan (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 17:54:10

sudanglo:Compare do not go gently into the night (I have corrected the poet's grammar, he erroneously said gentle) with do not gently go ...
I doubt you're implying that Dylan Thomas made an error in choosing gentle over gently. It's a very deliberate choice, not just for the sound of the word and the meter of the line, but because it modifies his father rather than the action. (Or, perhaps, because the non-standard usage sounds more folksy and colloquial.) A parallel construction might be "Do not go sick into the nursery." You wouldn't say "go sickly," though it would be more standard to say something like "Do not go into the nursery (while) sick."

His father, for whom the poem was written, was actually an English teacher.

Vestitor (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 18:22:20

btw it's '..into that good night.'

RiotNrrd (Prikaži profil) 06. oktober 2015 23:21:18

I will happily split infinitives without thinking twice about it.

There really are no English "rules". There are guidelines, and there are people who mistake guidelines for rules.

Of course, violating some of these guidelines will make you sound like a yokel or worse, which is why people try to classify them as rules; it's just easier that way. But splitting infinitives isn't one of these, in any event.

It's like the singular they. It's been in wide use since the fifteen hundreds. Get used to it, it's time has come. Like, centuries ago. But I've heard at least one teacher tell me it's wrong.

But you know what? They were wrong.

On the other hand, ain't ain't makin' a comeback, even though, as every gleeful third grader has noted, it's in the dictionary*.

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* Third grade teachers haven't heard about the "no rules" theory. Well... they have. Probably a lot, actually. They just aren't putting up with any of that nonsense now sit down.

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