Musings on Language #2

[CurlyKitGirl]

So can I:

P: That's wrong, you can't say things like that.
D: Can, too!
P: No, you can't, you nincompoop!
D: Can and will, poopy-head!
P: But it's wrong and stupid and not English!
D: It's how the English speakers speak English. Blockhead.
P: Then they're speaking it wrong! *storms out of room*

You missed a bit.

D: Are not!
P: Are too!
D: Are not!
P: Are not!
D: HA! You've broken one of your own prescribed rules. Nyah nyah nyah. You can't speak no proper English no more can you?
P: MUMMY, THE DESCRIPTIVISTS ARE BEING MEAN TO ME AGAIN!!
M: Well if you insist on clinging to the foolish belief that all rules attached to a language remain inviolate for all of time then you'd better get used to it!
P: *cries*
D: *laughs*
M: *reads her book on on existentialism and how it was affected by French linguistic theorists* Amateurs.

[Greenish]

I knew a turkish man once who had stopped going home, because he couldn't figure out what anyone was saying anymore, there was so much new slang and idioms from when he was a child, once that didn't even make sense, and places where they had taken another languages idioms and just translated them literally.

Mmn. Funnily enough, the oldest document with a scrap of written Finnish ("Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho somen gelen Emÿna daÿda"*, according to wikipedia) is still intelligible to modern readers.

The slang changes fast, yeah, but that's pretty much the definition. I remember being confused when being "kusessa" changed from being in trouble to having a crush practically overnight, but usually it's not that hard to get up to speed, at least enough to understand and be understood.


*"I'd like to speak Finnish, but I can't."

[Goosefeather]

*"I'd like to speak Finnish, but I can't."

No-one needs fifteen cases. It's just greedy

[Greenish]

No-one needs fifteen cases. It's just greedy

Instructive or comitative aren't used much, outside writing. Exessive I can't say I've ever heard nor seen used.

Anyway, without the cases, you couldn't say "to the house" or "in the house" or "as the house" etc. at all in Finnish. That'd be rather inconvenient.

[Edit]: And knowing whether your neighbour just said that he shot a bear or that he shot at a bear can be vital.

[Vella_Malachite]

JUST FOUND THIS THREAD OMG LINGUISTICS ARGLFLARGL.
*cough*. You can guess what I'm majoring in, can't you?

Re: Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism: I'm generally a descriptivist, myself - I believe that language is there to be understood, and if language is still understood, then it has served its purpose. Slang is not un-English (or un-[insert language]), it is non-standard, and fits perfectly well into the vocabularies of English speakers. Similarly, languages will change over time, and while I can chuckle at the rules people in the past insisted ought never to change, someone in 100 years is going to do the same for my views about the use of 'which' and 'that'.

However.

This doesn't mean, for me, that all variations on language are acceptable everywhere. Just because I approve of having different acceptable varieties of a language doesn't mean I disapprove of having a central 'standard' variety of it. For one, it makes it easier for non-native speakers to learn the language without having to complicate it with too many variations.
But the part that's really going to get me thwacked over the head is that I approve of regulating the use of language in certain situations. At its most basic level, if I talked in gamer slang to my grandmother, she would be terribly confused, and language has not served its purpose. But more, at university, I am expected to write in 'standard' English for academic purposes, and I don't think that restriction is necessarily a bad thing. Not necessarily for linguistic reasons (although it does make the body of work more homogenous and easier to understand, on some levels), but for social reasons. Standard English is for formal situations, and people who write standard English are seen as taking their subject seriously, which, for a ridiculous profession like academia (guess what job I'm aiming for...?) is sort of necessary as a self-defense mechanism.

Tl;dr (can't blame you): descriptivism is a fine point of view, which I wholeheartedly agree with, but having socially defined rules in place as to which form of the language is used where is a useful social tool for defining situations.

[Riverdance]

Mmn. Funnily enough, the oldest document with a scrap of written Finnish ("Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho somen gelen Emÿna daÿda"*, according to wikipedia) is still intelligible to modern readers.

*"I'd like to speak Finnish, but I can't."

An old Finnish dialect is what the elvish language (quenya I believe) was based on. I've heard (from a native swedish speaker) that finnish sounds like one is gargling a potato.

Something I think is cool about language is how all the romance languages have the same structure, so once you've learned one all you have to do to learn another is relearn the words (not that that's easy).

[Greenish]

I've heard (from a native swedish speaker) that finnish sounds like one is gargling a potato.

Are you sure he wasn't talking about Danish? Because Danish sounds like you're speaking Swedish with a hot potato in your mouth.

[Aedilred]

Something I think is cool about language is how all the romance languages have the same structure, so once you've learned one all you have to do to learn another is relearn the words (not that that's easy).

Up to a point. It certainly helps understanding if you know one already (especially Latin). They're still all a bit different in terms of structure, though. If French is relatively permissive, Spanish is rather more uptight in grammatical terms. Catalan is, I guess, the strange middle sister who's jealous that French and Spanish got all the boys and has spent so long being bullied by each of them in turn that she's picked up the worst habits of both. Italian looks a lot like her mother (but the similarities don't go as deep as you might think) and Romanian's been off living with those Slavonic boys for so long that most people forget she's even part of the same family.

(I don't know anything about Portuguese).

[SaintRidley]

Ooooh fun!
TO AMAZON!

By Henry Hitchings right?

It's cheap too.

That's the one. I'm currently hanging around the chapters on Victorian-era attempts to wrangle our language into some semblance of perfectly corsetted form, but we all know Albion is crafty like a fox and more than willing to add some new words to her hoard for use in an emergency.

The chapter is, funny enough, called "Fish-Knives and Fist-****s," both being words coined during the Victorian era.

[Eldan]

An old Finnish dialect is what the elvish language (quenya I believe) was based on. I've heard (from a native swedish speaker) that finnish sounds like one is gargling a potato.

I know quite a few German speakers who call American* "Speaking with a Sock in your Mouth".


*Movie American. How Americans speak in German movies. A strange kinda southern-ish accent.

[Eldan]

An old Finnish dialect is what the elvish language (quenya I believe) was based on. I've heard (from a native swedish speaker) that finnish sounds like one is gargling a potato.

I know quite a few German speakers who call American* "Speaking with a Sock in your Mouth".


*Movie American. How Americans speak in German movies. A strange kinda southern-ish accent.

[Goosefeather]

Up to a point. If French is relatively permissive, Spanish is rather more uptight in grammatical terms.

How do you figure that one? French is still obsessed with her subject pronouns, and she's downright OCD when it comes to agreements on the past participle (PDOs, reflexives, and être verbs in general). Spanish happily ignores the first whenever she feels like it, and as for making her past participles agree, well, she'll just stare at you blankly unless you make it clear to her that they are functioning as adjectives.

And French tends to keep her sentences a bit tidier than Spanish, who will far more happily invert her subjects and objects around the verb (lo que dije yo, lo que yo dije, lo que dije - vs. ce que j'ai dit).

French isn't quite as addicted to the subjunctive as her sister is, however, but she's doing nowhere near as well as English, who is practically going cold turkey these days. And even when he does fall off the wagon, it's through unthinking habit, not because he enjoys it.

Edit: I wonder what it signifies that we seem to have characterised English as male, but the Romance languages as female!

[Thufir]

I'm at that age when the shifts in common uses of language are starting to bother and start me off on 'you kids today' rants. Which I find funny. The way, for example, that using an apostrophe to denote a plural ("I have a lot of book's.") is starting to become accepted enough that I'm seeing it in official corporate memoranda and advertisements.

RAGE.

Doesn't mean I can't go Old Lady on it and say that if one doesn't know how to write a proper plural and are a native English speaker they ought to go back to primary and learn it over!

I still boggle at the fact my GCSE English class had to be taught how to correctly use apostrophes.

'Course, "[t]he problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
So maybe English is just a disease ridden doxy from Southwark while other languages are the chaste daughters of many a noble.

Except that they're the ones we took all those words from.
Wait, but then if all languages are female, with whom did English get so impure and acquire all those words?
I suppose one could envision all languages having a male and female avatar, with both still being the same entity, just with two bodies.
I may be overthinking this.

I feel obliged to defend the honour of my sexy beloved manslut English here. Yes, okay, the gentleman has been around the world, yes his fingers smell of all the various partners he's been with, yes when you kiss him you're kissing all those other tongues too.

But it's only because he is so famous and so very very sexy that his reputation makes all the tabloids. I believe Swahili, Hindi, and Farsi, for example, are equally slutty. I believe several languages across Canada -- which are no longer widely spoken enough for me to name without consulting external references -- are the bastard love children of pioneer colonist and wise country wife.

Languages, when they're not locked in their cabinets or boudoirs, like to get it on. English, bless his flanks, cannot be blamed for it above his peers!

Much as I love that you did this, I don't really feel it to be necessary. In the context of language, this promiscuity is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. It adds to the charm of English (Not that it needed any more, since it was already charming enough to bed every other language it came across).

I can't help now imagining Byron as some kind of representative avatar for the English language, condensed and personified

YES. I love this idea.

Me, I'm just a nutter who's always loved this sort of thing. And made a slight study of it.
That and the making of dictionaries. No. Really.

It's true!
What was that amusing Johnson quote, again? Was he disparaging the French or something?

I would say that I'm not even very fluent in English even though it's my first language and my first and best field of academic study. I don't know everything about it, and never will.

I question your definition of 'fluent'.

I can give a brief history of prescriptivism in English if anyone wants!
Well, I actually can, but no one wants it so.

Why wouldn't we want that? I'd be interested.

There is no such thing as an "American accent". That's like when we say that someone has a "British accent". The English they speak in California is as different from the English I speak in South Carolina by at least as much as the English spoken in England, and the accents of anyone from a northern city is as incomprehensible as Scottish or Welsh English.

Yes there is. In fact, there are a lot of such things as an American accent, just as there are many such things as British accents. All accents associated with regions of America are American accents, and all accents associated with areas of Britain are British accents. The fact there are many subdivisions does not invalidate the blanket category, particularly since to someone from elsewhere, that is how it comes across. I hear an American accent, I can identify it as an American accent. I know there are different types of American accent, but I can't identify which is which, and if I hear one in isolation, all I get is 'American accent'. I imagine this would be similar for an american hearing British accents. No, they're not all the same, but there is enough commonality between them that someone from far enough away can group them together.
Hell, even within England it can happen - Curly swore at the UK Meetup last weekend that Qwaz and Archonic Energy sounded the same. They don't. They both have London accents, but from different parts of London, they definitely don't sound the same. There are definitely lots of different accents in London, so should we say there is no such thing as a London accent? No. No we should not. That would be ridiculous. It is perfectly reasonable to say someone has a London accent, and that that person has a British accent; and other people have American accents.

That ended up a lot longer than I intended...

Re: Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism: I'm generally a descriptivist, myself - I believe that language is there to be understood, and if language is still understood, then it has served its purpose. Slang is not un-English (or un-[insert language]), it is non-standard, and fits perfectly well into the vocabularies of English speakers. Similarly, languages will change over time, and while I can chuckle at the rules people in the past insisted ought never to change, someone in 100 years is going to do the same for my views about the use of 'which' and 'that'.

However.

This doesn't mean, for me, that all variations on language are acceptable everywhere. Just because I approve of having different acceptable varieties of a language doesn't mean I disapprove of having a central 'standard' variety of it. For one, it makes it easier for non-native speakers to learn the language without having to complicate it with too many variations.
But the part that's really going to get me thwacked over the head is that I approve of regulating the use of language in certain situations. At its most basic level, if I talked in gamer slang to my grandmother, she would be terribly confused, and language has not served its purpose. But more, at university, I am expected to write in 'standard' English for academic purposes, and I don't think that restriction is necessarily a bad thing. Not necessarily for linguistic reasons (although it does make the body of work more homogenous and easier to understand, on some levels), but for social reasons. Standard English is for formal situations, and people who write standard English are seen as taking their subject seriously, which, for a ridiculous profession like academia (guess what job I'm aiming for...?) is sort of necessary as a self-defense mechanism.

Tl;dr (can't blame you): descriptivism is a fine point of view, which I wholeheartedly agree with, but having socially defined rules in place as to which form of the language is used where is a useful social tool for defining situations.

That... describes some of my views much better than I've ever been able to. Thank you.

[SaintRidley]

Edit: I wonder what it signifies that we seem to have characterised English as male, but the Romance languages as female!

You might have, but I'm firmly in the "English is a lady*" camp.


*She's a bit rough and tumble and certainly doesn't have any inhibitions regarding belching and scratching herself in front of the other languages. And sure, she's omnisexual and has hit at least second base with every other language (French being her last long-term lover who wasn't already dead--by the way, way to go Latin on making English a necrophile on top of it all) but she's still a lady.

[Goosefeather]

by the way, way to go Latin on making English a necrophile on top of it all

To make it even more icky, English sometimes even dug up Ancient Greek and brought her to the party, resulting in such three-way monstrosities as 'television', 'automobile', 'sociology', and, ironically, 'monolingual'.

Edit: relevant link

[Aedilred]

My observations are based more on my attempted flirtations with each of them than anything more analytical; I don't profess to know any of them intimately (I did get on rather well with French once upon a time, though, and would like to get to know Catalan rather better than I do).

Spanish verbs seemed to be more inflected, and I also seem to recall a (possibly obsolete?) neuter gender. Subjunctive is something else that always makes my eyes narrow too, albeit English still has a residual subjunctive that I can get pretty anal about when I remember, so that's just hypocrisy on my part. I certainly didn't think French was any more inflected than Spanish; I'm prepared for any actual linguists to correct me on that point, though.

I don't set so much store by word order. Considering how laid back English is about most things, word order remains pretty important (much more so than in a more heavily inflected language). You can mix up the word order a bit, but it usually makes you sound either like a foreigner or a poet. Or a tosser. In many social circumstances the last two are pretty much interchangeable.

Of course, by comparison with English, any language will look highly structured. English used to be much stuffier than today, mind, but loosened up a lot after a long period of enforced cohabitation with French. Since then it hasn't looked back and has been running around stealing anything from other languages that isn't nailed down, and several things that are.


Edit: I tend to consider words like "television" to be the product of English's failed lab experiments to clone dead languages, but which it adopted anyway because it was in a hurry and couldn't be bothered to do it properly. Truly it has no shame.

[Vella_Malachite]

That... describes some of my views much better than I've ever been able to. Thank you.

*whew*. So glad I'm not the only one who thinks like that...

[SaintRidley]

To make it even more icky, English sometimes even dug up Ancient Greek and brought her to the party, resulting in such three-way monstrosities as 'television', 'automobile', 'sociology', and, ironically, 'monolingual'.

Edit: relevant link

I've done my best to forget the offspring of that devil's threeway.

Thanks for reminding me.


edit - Aedilred - the neuter gender in Spanish is pretty much confined to certain pronouns, kind of like how inflection for case in English (outside the genitive) is mostly confined to our own pronouns.

I mean, using an adjective as a noun gets the neuter definite article, but that's about it otherwise.

[John Cribati]

This is sort of about language, so I guess it fits here:

Recently, I was watching Digimon Frontier on Youtube, and the whole "Agnimon/Agunimon" thing was brought up in the comments. For those who don't know, because of the pronunciation rules of Japanese, a hard k or g is followed by a short pause that ends up long enough that it sounds like an actual syllable to an untrained ear. So the character named after the Hindu (IIRC) god of fire is called "Agunimon" in the English dub because the dubbers heard the "extra syllable" got picked up on and lengthened. It worked well enough because now Takuya's entire line of evolutions is a callback to the first gogglehead, Tai. and his Agumon. I still think that it was a flub, though.

[Goosefeather]

Spanish verbs seemed to be more inflected, and I also seem to recall a (possibly obsolete?) neuter gender.

Ah, maybe it's because French slurs so much that many of her endings sound identical. Probably all that wine. When you get into the slightly less common tenses (passé simple, imperfect subjunctive, etc), you'll see when she actually fully expresses herself she's at least as much of a dominatrix as Spanish.

Neuter gender is still around, mainly with adjectives that you want to use as a noun (lo bueno de la situación, for example), and when you see a mixed group of men and women referred to with the 'masculine' article, it's technically neuter as well, though it's functionally identical to the masculine.

Subjunctive is something else that always makes my eyes narrow too, albeit English still has a residual subjunctive that I can get pretty anal about when I remember, so that's just hypocrisy on my part.

To be honest, since I started seriously studying French and Spanish, I've starting using the subjunctive more in English. Lest we forget, it still has its place, be it pedantry or be it plain old showing-off

I don't set so much store by word order. Considering how laid back English is about most things, word order remains pretty important (much more so than in a more heavily inflected language). You can mix up the word order a bit, but it usually makes you sound either like a foreigner or a poet. Or a tosser. In many social circumstances the last two are pretty much interchangeable.

It's 'cause English can't be arsed with cases, for the most part. I think a slightly stricter word order is probably the lesser of two evils when compared to German.
EnglishaaaaaaaaaGerman
Theaaaaaaaaaaaader/die/das/die
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaden/die/das/die
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaades/der/des/der
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaadem/der/dem/den

Yeah, we'll just keep our SVO word order and avoid all those declensions, thanks! And the grammatical gender! My God, the genders... They're so ARBITRARY! Maybe I'll go and learn something nice like Persian instead, just to avoid them!

[DeadManSleeping]

This is sort of about language, so I guess it fits here:

Recently, I was watching Digimon Frontier on Youtube, and the whole "Agnimon/Agunimon" thing was brought up in the comments. For those who don't know, because of the pronunciation rules of Japanese, a hard k or g is followed by a short pause that ends up long enough that it sounds like an actual syllable to an untrained ear. So the character named after the Hindu (IIRC) god of fire is called "Agunimon" in the English dub because the dubbers heard the "extra syllable" got picked up on and lengthened. It worked well enough because now Takuya's entire line of evolutions is a callback to the first gogglehead, Tai. and his Agumon. I still think that it was a flub, though.

The dubbers were right.

Japanese language is actually founded on something similar to a syllable called a "mora". There is a list of mora in the Japanese language for which characters exist. Every one of these, with the exception of the "n" character, contains either a single vowel, or a consonant followed by a vowel. This means that you cannot make the "g-n" sound out of Japanese writing. There is such a thing called a "whispered mora", where the vowel is not enunciated, but that only occurs between voiceless consonants (like "k" and "t", and unlike "g" and "n"). Thus, the script was written "Agunimon" (and if you look on the wiki, you can find the Japanese rendition to prove it), and the voice actor probably read it as such, and, of course, the translators faithfully rendered it the same way. However, because mouths are lazy, mora can get quite shortened, so listeners who don't speak Japanese might not be able to tell the difference between a shortened vowel and a nonexistent one.

Oh, and before anyone gets uppity, yes, I am aware that it is possible for a consonant to be its own mora when you stretch one mora by doubling the consonant.

[The Second]

I am not a linguist, I am in point of fact barely able to conjugate verbs, I often abuse plurals, and I never did learn just what the heck a participle was supposed to be.

I probably butchered the above sentence. Ah, well, such is life, I guess, I am much more of an informal speaker than a formal one. Even in informal speech, however, there are usages that rub me raw.

"I'll do it right now."

This phrase has somehow, unbelievably, come to mean 'I'll do it soon', or 'I'll do it in a moment from now'. How? Why? It is so absurd that it drives me up the wall every time I hear it said.

"I'm fine."

Ugh. Ok, I realize that when someone asks how you are doing, they are not asking for a life story; but this stock, two word response is just... lazy.

"Hon" - "Girl" - "Babe"

When did it become acceptable to walk up to a complete stranger and open a conversation with the words, "Hey babe." Come on, really? When did I become everyone's 'honey', 'babe' and 'home girl'? Even omitting the pronoun all together would be, ever so slightly, more polite. At this point I might even accept a 'Hey you' with a smile.

"Yeah"

When answering a phone, it seems that it is now much more fashionable to blurt out 'yeah' than it is to say 'Hello?' Well ok, I'll give you that, with the advent of cellular phones, most people know at a glance who they are talking to, but still. Saying 'yeah' instead of 'hello' sounds so crude, as if you are telling the person on the other line something along the lines of "Oh, it's you. I really don't feel like talking to you right now, but I'm not going to tell you that because it would probably hurt your feelings, so I'll listen to what you have to say and just make an annoyed grunting sound every ten seconds or so just to let you know I haven't hung up on you."

There are, of course, many, many more words and phrases that annoy me, but these are the ones that top my list.

[The Succubus]

RAGE.

I share your pain. Its amazing how kids' these days do'nt learn how to aspotrophize properly. Im of the school of thought thats in favour of savage beating's for kids that wont make the effort to put them in the right place.

[Goosefeather]

"I'll do it right now."

This phrase has somehow, unbelievably, come to mean 'I'll do it soon', or 'I'll do it in a moment from now'. How? Why? It is so absurd that it drives me up the wall every time I hear it said.

You should probably never come to Wales. We have the wonderful expression, "I'll do it in a minute now".

[CurlyKitGirl]

You should probably never come to Wales. We have the wonderful expression, "I'll do it in a minute now".

Try down Cornwall then. We have a phrase: "'e'll do 'er dreckly."
This breaks down into 'he/she/they/we'll do/finish/buy/other verb [whatever] after [pronoun]'s done doing whatever it is they're doing now'.
'dreckly' specifically means 'a unit of time anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours or more'.

I known some people say they'll do a task dreckly and do it a few days later, other do it dreckly and do it a few minutes later. Others do it dreckly and do it right then.

[The Succubus]

These musings on language have stirred a rather dusty memory in my head.

When I was in middle school (that's 9 or 10ish), I was in an English lesson and we were discussing descriptive words, specifically, in regards to the way a phrase can be said.

For example:

"Your doom is now at hand," he intoned.

"All the chocolate biscuits are gone!" she wailed.

"Nyer-nyer, your a silly poopy-head!" he mocked.

The blazing row came about because of this sentence, or something like it:

"Well, it looks like you're in trouble now!" he grinned.

I took exception to this because, for me at least, grinning is firstly a facial expression, not involving the vocal chords and secondly grinning is a silent action, having no sonic component which can translate into speech.

So I have to ask - is there a way you can say something "grinningly"? Also, if "grinningly" is a word, it really, really shouldn't be.

[dehro]

apparently an hour has different lenghts across the globe.
when I landed in Cuba, traveling with a dutch company, the resort manager told me and my travel mates that we should be andvised that hours, in Cuba, consist of 90 minutes and punctuality is not highly rated.
I failed to mention to the man that I understood because I live in a country where dinner is served at varying hours, depending on the latitude you're at..from 7 pm to as late as 22.30.. and that in the south of the country, people say they meet around midnight at the local to decide what to do next, and actually turn up sometimes around 2 am. the fun comes when one of the members of the party is northern, has actually turned up at midnight and by the time everybody is there is roaring drunk.

[Thufir]

"I'm fine."

Ugh. Ok, I realize that when someone asks how you are doing, they are not asking for a life story; but this stock, two word response is just... lazy.

How so? How more so than other two/one word answers (Possibly omitting the "I'm") such as "alright", "OK, etc?
What else should one say if one has nothing in particular to say?

I share your pain. Its amazing how kids' these days do'nt learn how to aspotrophize properly. Im of the school of thought thats in favour of savage beating's for kids that wont make the effort to put them in the right place.

...
You are treading on very thin ice...

So I have to ask - is there a way you can say something "grinningly"? Also, if "grinningly" is a word, it really, really shouldn't be.

Yes, clearly. And why shouldn't it be a word? It has a perfectly obvious meaning which otherwise lacks a word.

[Dogmantra]

I took exception to this because, for me at least, grinning is firstly a facial expression, not involving the vocal chords and secondly grinning is a silent action, having no sonic component which can translate into speech.

Unless there's a very good reason for it, most of the time in good writing, you will get "said" or an action. It's a bit like in film, if you have a child on a bicycle going one way, cut to a car coming the other way, then cut to a bicycle on the floor with its wheel still spinning, you haven't shown a car crash, but that's what the viewer will assume happened, just like if you've got speech marks and then someone right afterwards doing something, the reader's going to add meaning to the speech from what they're doing and they'll know that this person was the one to say it. Facial expressions are a common one, and they help to add a second layer of meaning to the word without compromising the flow. Sighing is a good one too, or even just whatever they're doing at the time, like
"I just hate you, I hate you and your arse face." She punched the nasty robber.
or
"English is such a dumb language," he sipped his drink, "it has too many rules, y'know?"

"he said, grinning" is fine too, but it could lead to "said saturation" which is something I just made up a term for but sounds pretty legitimate, no? So you might want to a) use it sparingly and b) make up for it by using fewer saids elsewhere.

Now obviously, since you're aware of this, you can choose to do whatever you want in your own writing as long as you acknowledge that the flow of it will be unconventional (which is quite often a good thing).


Personally I would advise against "he said grinningly". Adverbs in modern writing are an odd one. The rule is typically each one you use halves the impact. Again, your writing, do what you want as long as you're aware that adding adverbs can decrease the perceived quality of the writing. And of course there are exceptions, sometimes saying "he slowly paced the room" is going to be more appropriate than leaving out the slowly. But adverbs after "Said" tend to be rather iffy, they break up the conversation a little too much for most people's liking, since the reader tunes out saids, but if there's an adverb there, they can't.

[The Succubus]

"he said, grinning" is fine too, but it could lead to "said saturation" which is something I just made up a term for but sounds pretty legitimate, no? So you might want to a) use it sparingly and b) make up for it by using fewer saids elsewhere.

"He said, grinning" is absolutely fine and make sense to me. But using "grinned" as an adjective for vocal expression does not. Another one is "He said, laughingly" is ok as well as it suggests speech being punctuated with short bursts of laughter. Whereas something like ""When you come to Newcastle, I'm going to leave your grammatically incorrect butt to freeze at the station" Thufir laughed." doesn't make sense to me because you're either laughing, or you're talking. It's very difficult to do both at the same time.