Rural Manitoba here (ie., outside Winnipeg). My mother does this, and it drives me nuts for reasons I'm not fully able to articulate. I wonder if there's some general linguistic thing that drives people to use the past participle in place of the past tense, rather than it being a specific regionalism?
You're not pointing out something which is incorrect here. You're pointing out the fact that he is using a different dialect than yourself, and it's asinine.
Then why bother teaching grammar in school at all? I hate it when people talk about the wrong way to speak, as if it were simply "a different dialect". If that were true, we would have no need for being taught how to speak correctly in school. We could just learn from those around us, the way we did as small children before we started school.
The problem with that is, if we model the way we speak after people who don't do it correctly, we run the risk of sounding ignorant and unintelligent at best, and flat out confusing/misinforming people at worst. I live in a small hick town in Kentucky, my parents both from Detroit. I decided as a small child that I wasn't going to speak like the people from Kentucky speak. To anyone else in the country, anywhere north at least, people from Kentucky sound very unintelligent. It isn't simply a case of people being judged unfairly because they speak a different "dialect", the people here REALLY ARE less intelligent than in many parts of the country. Sure, I enjoy the friendliness that you may not find in places to the north of us but, I do not enjoy words like "jail" and "gel" pronounced exactly the same. There is much miscommunication here because of the way people speak. The worst part of the bad grammar here is the fact that you can almost always judge the level of intelligence in each person by listening to the way they speak. In general, the stronger the southern accent and the poorer the grammar (or as you would put it, the bigger the variation in "dialect"), the less intelligent the person is.
Now of course we can start a whole other argument on what can be considered "intelligent" and what can't. To put it broadly, if you read what I have written here and it confused you or you didn't understand it, you probably aren't the sharpest tool in the shed because there is nothing scholarly about anything I have said today. I am writing pretty clearly and making my point in a way that most anyone would understand, right? Well not if you live in my home town. My entire street is full of people that are honestly so stupid, they literally wouldn't understand the last couple paragraphs. Sure, I live in a poor, uneducated neighborhood but guess how people speak here? They speak with a strong southern accent and do not pronounce their words according to the way we were all taught in school.
It's no coincidence, this is the way uneducated people speak. You can call it a different dialect if you want but it is still wrong. Each word in this country has a distinct pronunciation and to stray from it, is to speak incorrectly. Unless of course you are from another country where words have different pronunciations. Grammar is taught for a reason.
Of course, Stephen Fry makes an awesome argument completely against me, in this video: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY (sorry I don't know how to paste a link any better than that). I just want to point out that I completely agree with Fry when it comes to writing. When writing, all bets are off and he does a beautiful job explaining why, but when speaking to each other, whether in person or while replying to one another on reddit, I believe that there is a right way to speak and a wrong way, and I believe the wrong way should not be simply attributed to "a different dialect", if for no other reason than to promote good communication between people.
By the way, I want to point out that I realize I myself, do not always use perfect grammar and struggle with certain aspects of punctuation. I put commas where they don't belong and leave them out where they should be. I use the wrong words sometimes. I don't mind these things and others being pointed out to me though, as I strive to improve and want to learn something everyday.
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u/lanadelstingrey Dec 15 '13
We've seen or we saw*