Basic quizeroo on the English language

[throatybeard]

This isn't directed at anyone in particular. Here are some questions about basic facts of the English language, most of which will probably surprise you. You know all of these because you use the language everyday. But you may not have metalinguistic knowledge about what you've already mastered as a native speaker.

1) How many vowels does English have?
2) How many tenses does the English main verb have?
3) Roughly how many different ways do American speakers pronounce the /t/ phoneme?
4) How many cases does English have?
5) What grammatical category (part of speech) is the bolded word in the following sentence?:

Throaty hung the phone up.

[DukeUsul]

This isn't directed at anyone in particular. Here are some questions about basic facts of the English language, most of which will probably surprise you. You know all of these because you use the language everyday. But you may not have metalinguistic knowledge about what you've already mastered as a native speaker.

1) How many vowels does English have?
2) How many tenses does the English main verb have?
3) Roughly how many different ways do American speakers pronounce the /t/ phoneme?
4) How many cases does English have?
5) What grammatical category (part of speech) is the bolded word in the following sentence?:

Throaty hung the phone up.

Here are some guesses from a physics/computer science geek.

1) Five and a half? Maybe six? I think I'd want to count Y in some way.
2) Six sounds like a good number.
3) I'd guess close to ten.
4) Six?
5) Up would seem to me to be a part of the verb "to hang up." Like anrufen in German. Rufe mich an, bitte.

I'm just indulging you here throaty. These are the kind of elitist antics up with which I will not put.

[CameronBornAndBred]

This isn't directed at anyone in particular. Here are some questions about basic facts of the English language, most of which will probably surprise you. You know all of these because you use the language everyday. But you may not have metalinguistic knowledge about what you've already mastered as a native speaker.

1) How many vowels does English have?
2) How many tenses does the English main verb have?
3) Roughly how many different ways do American speakers pronounce the /t/ phoneme?
4) How many cases does English have?
5) What grammatical category (part of speech) is the bolded word in the following sentence?:

Throaty hung the phone up.

2) Six sounds like a good number.

I don't see how there can be any number other than 3. I'm sure I'm wrong and am looking forward to the answer, but it seems to me you can only have past, present and future. Those three cover every time frame possibility.

[DukeUsul]

This isn't directed at anyone in particular. Here are some questions about basic facts of the English language, most of which will probably surprise you. You know all of these because you use the language everyday. But you may not have metalinguistic knowledge about what you've already mastered as a native speaker.

1) How many vowels does English have?
2) How many tenses does the English main verb have?
3) Roughly how many different ways do American speakers pronounce the /t/ phoneme?
4) How many cases does English have?
5) What grammatical category (part of speech) is the bolded word in the following sentence?:

Throaty hung the phone up.

Here are some guesses from a physics/computer science geek.

1) Five and a half? Maybe six? I think I'd want to count Y in some way.
2) Six sounds like a good number.
3) I'd guess close to ten.
4) Six?
5) Up would seem to me to be a part of the verb "to hang up." Like anrufen in German. Rufe mich an, bitte.

I'm just indulging you here throaty. These are the kind of elitist antics up with which I will not put.

Hmm probably wrong on the cases. I was thinking Latin there for a minute. Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative. That's six. Crap, probably need to include locative. Seven. I'm even wrong there.

[DukeUsul]

This isn't directed at anyone in particular. Here are some questions about basic facts of the English language, most of which will probably surprise you. You know all of these because you use the language everyday. But you may not have metalinguistic knowledge about what you've already mastered as a native speaker.

1) How many vowels does English have?
2) How many tenses does the English main verb have?
3) Roughly how many different ways do American speakers pronounce the /t/ phoneme?
4) How many cases does English have?
5) What grammatical category (part of speech) is the bolded word in the following sentence?:

Throaty hung the phone up.

2) Six sounds like a good number.

I don't see how there can be any number other than 3. I'm sure I'm wrong and am looking forward to the answer, but it seems to me you can only have past, present and future. Those three cover every time frame possibility.

Yeah, but then you have past perfect, future perfect.... is there a present perfect? That's why I said six.

[CameronBornAndBred]

Hmm probably wrong on the cases. I was thinking Latin there for a minute. Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative. That's six. Crap, probably need to include locative. Seven. I'm even wrong there.

Hell, I was thinking upper and lower.

[CameronBornAndBred]

Yeah, but then you have past perfect, future perfect.... is there a present perfect? That's why I said six.

This is why I paint.

[DukeUsul]

Actually, I think this is a trick question. We all know throaty is a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. So the real answer to all of these is "as many as I want."

[windsor]

I write software....technical syntax is much easier - and you often only need the first 4 letters of any word.

I won't even attempt to answer since (as stated in another thread) I never learned formal english grammar of any kind...the price for coming of age when creativity was prized above correctness. I use what 'sounds' right and usual manage to not appear too stupid. ;)

[wilson]

This isn't directed at anyone in particular. Here are some questions about basic facts of the English language, most of which will probably surprise you. You know all of these because you use the language everyday. But you may not have metalinguistic knowledge about what you've already mastered as a native speaker.

1) How many vowels does English have?
2) How many tenses does the English main verb have?
3) Roughly how many different ways do American speakers pronounce the /t/ phoneme?
4) How many cases does English have?
5) What grammatical category (part of speech) is the bolded word in the following sentence?:

Throaty hung the phone up.

1) I was always taught six, but it's probably more like eight to ten; a number of words imported from Welsh, for example, use the W as a vowel.
2) More than most people think. French, for example, has eighteen. I'm fairly certain English has about the same number.
3) about half a dozen
4) three, if I'm not mistaken, often with multiple forms under each heading
5) My guess would be adverb, as it modifies the verb "hung," though as bjornolf noted, it may just be part of a compound verb.

[throatybeard]

Put Wilson and USUL together and you have some good answers barking up some good trees, especially Wilson's answer about /t/. But everyone's befuddled on tense.

1) Spelling will just lead you astray. Forget spelling. English has about 16 vowels, including the diphthongs, depending on whether you have the cot/caught merger. (If these sound the same to you, you have the merger, which is widespread in parts of New England, a band stretching across OH/IN/IL, and all over the American West. I have it too even though I'm Southern; recent study has found the merger in some Appalachian-ish places)

Sorry I don't have international phonetic alphabet fonts at my disposal--I'll approximate.

Five in the front [i, I, eI, epsilon, ae] as in <beet, bit, bait, bet, bat>, and five more or less in the back [u, upsilon, oU, open o, a] as in <boot, book, boat, bought, hot>. In the central part of the mouth, what they called schwa in school is really two different vowels that we call schwa as in sofa and wedge as in butter. They're close to each other, but distinct. That brings us to twelve.

Then we have three diphthongs, two-part vowel sounds with a nucleus and and an offglide: [aI, aU, and oi] as in <bite, about, boy>. [ei] and and [oU] are sometimes categorized as diphthongs, since in most American Englishes they have a bit of an offglide--[e] goes up towards [iota] for most folks and [o] up towards [upsilon]. Finally, there's a non-phonemic* high, central, lax vowel that you get in one of the three forms of plural -s, as in grasses. Although, some people have something closer to epsilon or schwa there.

So you have 16, if your [a] and your [open o] are distinct. I have a friend who likes to teach the cot/
caught merger as cock/caulk. I haven't summoned the sack to do that myself.

* - meaning that it doesn't create any changes in semantic meaning

2) The English main verb has only two tenses, past and non-past. The verb inflects (that is, changes form) for past tense with a suffix called the t/d preterite, what they called the -ed suffix in grade school. It comes in three different forms, [t], [d], and [some vowel plus d]. That vowel is usually that 16th, high central lax vowel, but some folks have something closer to [iota] or [schwa]. Since English doesn't have a real infinitive, non-past tense is just the verb stem.

All of our other tense are secondary tenses, that is, they have to be made with a mess of auxiliary verbs. The English main verb doesn't even have a future tense--it needs help from will or sometimes shall in order to do future.

3) Wilson's exactly right, there are six allophones of /t/. These are all sounds that are distinct, but American English speakers would all hear and categorize them cognitively as plain old [t], The six are aspirated [t], unlreleased [t], dentalized [t], glottal stop, alveolar flap, and null. With null the sound just drops out. It would take a while to explain all six of those sounds, so I'll spare you unless someone's really interested.

4) English has only three cases, and they're now limited to the pronoun. The adjective and noun have lost case. The three are nominative (I), genitive (my) and the dative and accusative have collapsed together into a single object case (me). The noun itself doesn't really have case. That is, the possessive -s is not really a relic of the genitive case in Old English and early Middle English. Again, I'll spare you the details about why that is. English once had your basic four cases, plus an instrumental case in the adjective. Latin, as USUL points out, had seven. Although what they taught me was that the vocative and locative weren't used nearly as much as the other five; I'm not sure how accurate that is.

(Case is an inflection on nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, indicating the grammatical role of the noun in a sentence).

5) USUL is going in the right direction--English sometimes acts like German. That little guy is neither a preposition nor an adverb; he's called a verb particle. Unlike prepostions, they're movable (Throaty hung up the phone / Throaty hung the phone up). Verb particles create a phrasal verb, and they change the semantic meaning of the verb. Turn and turn off mean different things. The words we most commonly use as verb particles are up, down, on, off, and around.

[bjornolf]

5) My guess would be adverb, as it modifies the verb "hung," though as bjornolf noted, it may just be part of a compound verb.

Um, I think you mean DukeUsul. This is my first post in this thread. ;)

[bjornolf]

Hmm probably wrong on the cases. I was thinking Latin there for a minute. Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative. That's six. Crap, probably need to include locative. Seven. I'm even wrong there.

Hell, I was thinking upper and lower.

That was my first thought too. ;)

[knights68]

1) How many vowels does English have?

Oh just for kicks, I thought I'd give this a go....

"English" has two vowels.... "E" and "i"

2) How many tenses does the English main verb have?

Perhaps people failing constantly to use verbs and the like correctly would make any word quite tense!

3) Roughly how many different ways do American speakers pronounce the /t/ phoneme?

I am not sure what a "phoneme" is, is that something you get from Ronco?

4) How many cases does English have?

English has a case? You mean like upper and lower case, or are we talking brief or book?

5) What grammatical category (part of speech) is the bolded word in the following sentence?:

Throaty hung the phone up.

Is the question, "What is "up with "up"?

[DukeUsul]

Latin, as USUL points out, had seven. Although what they taught me was that the vocative and locative weren't used nearly as much as the other five; I'm not sure how accurate that is.

My late Latin teacher Mrs. Paternoster (shit you not) is responsible for nearly all of my grammar knowledge. It's sad that I probably know more about Latin grammar than English. It's doubly sad that I learned more about English grammar in a Latin class than in all of my English classes combined. Heck, I learned a lot about grammar in German classes too.

My dad always gave me crap on taking Latin and German instead of something useful like Spanish. I think I'll encourage my daughter to take Latin and German so she has a better understanding of her own language.

I think you are right about vocative and locative in Latin. Based on my four years in high school and two intermediate Latin classes at Duke, my anecdotal evidence would agree that those two are much less common.

[OZZIE4DUKE]

Put Wilson and USUL together and you have some good answers barking up some good trees, especially Wilson's answer about /t/. But everyone's befuddled on tense.

1) Spelling will just lead you astray. Forget spelling. English has about 16 vowels, including the diphthongs, depending on whether you have the cot/caught merger. (If these sound the same to you, you have the merger, which is widespread in parts of New England, a band stretching across OH/IN/IL, and all over the American West. I have it too even though I'm Southern; recent study has found the merger in some Appalachian-ish places)

Sorry I don't have international phonetic alphabet fonts at my disposal--I'll approximate.

Five in the front [i, I, eI, epsilon, ae] as in <beet, bit, bait, bet, bat>, and five more or less in the back [u, upsilon, oU, open o, a] as in <boot, book, boat, bought, hot>. In the central part of the mouth, what they called schwa in school is really two different vowels that we call schwa as in sofa and wedge as in butter. They're close to each other, but distinct. That brings us to twelve.

Then we have three diphthongs, two-part vowel sounds with a nucleus and and an offglide: [aI, aU, and oi] as in <bite, about, boy>. [ei] and and [oU] are sometimes categorized as diphthongs, since in most American Englishes they have a bit of an offglide--[e] goes up towards [iota] for most folks and [o] up towards [upsilon]. Finally, there's a non-phonemic* high, central, lax vowel that you get in one of the three forms of plural -s, as in grasses. Although, some people have something closer to epsilon or schwa there.

So you have 16, if your [a] and your [open o] are distinct. I have a friend who likes to teach the cot/
caught merger as cock/caulk. I haven't summoned the sack to do that myself.

* - meaning that it doesn't create any changes in semantic meaning

2) The English main verb has only two tenses, past and non-past. The verb inflects (that is, changes form) for past tense with a suffix called the t/d preterite, what they called the -ed suffix in grade school. It comes in three different forms, [t], [d], and [some vowel plus d]. That vowel is usually that 16th, high central lax vowel, but some folks have something closer to [iota] or [schwa]. Since English doesn't have a real infinitive, non-past tense is just the verb stem.

All of our other tense are secondary tenses, that is, they have to be made with a mess of auxiliary verbs. The English main verb doesn't even have a future tense--it needs help from will or sometimes shall in order to do future.

3) Wilson's exactly right, there are six allophones of /t/. These are all sounds that are distinct, but American English speakers would all hear and categorize them cognitively as plain old [t], The six are aspirated [t], unlreleased [t], dentalized [t], glottal stop, alveolar flap, and null. With null the sound just drops out. It would take a while to explain all six of those sounds, so I'll spare you unless someone's really interested.

4) English has only three cases, and they're now limited to the pronoun. The adjective and noun have lost case. The three are nominative (I), genitive (my) and the dative and accusative have collapsed together into a single object case (me). The noun itself doesn't really have case. That is, the possessive -s is not really a relic of the genitive case in Old English and early Middle English. Again, I'll spare you the details about why that is. English once had your basic four cases, plus an instrumental case in the adjective. Latin, as USUL points out, had seven. Although what they taught me was that the vocative and locative weren't used nearly as much as the other five; I'm not sure how accurate that is.

(Case is an inflection on nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, indicating the grammatical role of the noun in a sentence).

5) USUL is going in the right direction--English sometimes acts like German. That little guy is neither a preposition nor an adverb; he's called a verb particle. Unlike prepostions, they're movable (Throaty hung up the phone / Throaty hung the phone up). Verb particles create a phrasal verb, and they change the semantic meaning of the verb. Turn and turn off mean different things. The words we most commonly use as verb particles are up, down, on, off, and around.

It's all Greek to me...

Too many people around here pronounce pin and pen the same. And then there are those who swear there is no difference between Mary, marry and merry (which is pronounced the same as Merry, a DBR poster and friend). For years, my wife has asked me to "pull the door to". My standard response has always been "to what?" She no longer says it

[CameronBornAndBred]

My wife says "smell of this" instead of "smell this". She also eats "dinner" at lunch. Damn mountain folk!

[DevilAlumna]

My wife says "smell of this" instead of "smell this". She also eats "dinner" at lunch. Damn mountain folk!

In order to "smell of this," wouldn't you need to rub "this" (whatever it may be) all over your body? ;)


Thanks, Throaty - interesting lessons here.

What's the reason/phoneme/explanation why some people pronounce "whale" and "wail" the same way? I tend to say "whale" with more of an 'h' sound to it (hard to explain in writing), but my husband mocks me mercilessly for it.

[CameronBornAndBred]

In order to "smell of this," wouldn't you need to rub "this"

Yeah, well....I...am.....not...........touchi........nevermind..digging deeper hole; I wonder if there are any spare shovels around here.

[ArkieDukie]

This isn't directed at anyone in particular. Here are some questions about basic facts of the English language, most of which will probably surprise you. You know all of these because you use the language everyday. But you may not have metalinguistic knowledge about what you've already mastered as a native speaker.

1) How many vowels does English have?
2) How many tenses does the English main verb have?
3) Roughly how many different ways do American speakers pronounce the /t/ phoneme?
4) How many cases does English have?
5) What grammatical category (part of speech) is the bolded word in the following sentence?:

Throaty hung the phone up.

I'll give it a try!
1. 5 for sure, but y sometimes counts as well.
2. Half a billion. I learned most of them in French class. Can't remember the exact number. 6-9?
3. 3 at least. I've learned about something called a stopped t (as in football) in choir, which means that you close your mouth before the sound finishes iirc. There's also the regular t (not stopped, as in words like table), and the sound you get with 'th'. Strangely, singing has made me more aware of vowel and consonant sounds and how we pronounce them. I did have phonics in first grade, but that was a long time ago. I'm sure there's something I'm missing here.
4. two?
5. "up" belongs with "hung". Is it an adverb? This is one of those sentences that I'd probably re-write as "Throaty hung up the phone." I debate word placement in sentences as I'm writing - again, thanks to French class. Please recall that I am a scientist.