What the heck is wrong with splitting infinitives? English is a Germanic language, and in Germanic languages people are allowed to freely split ininitives. Like the singular "they" split infinitives have been a part of English from the very beginning, the efforts of some pedants who think that English ought to be more like Latin notwithstanding.
English is merely what we English speakers speak. We have no College of English to tell us what proper use is, like the Spanish or the French have. Instead we work by a combination of consensus and tradition. "Y'all" isn't a standard contraction because most English speakers don't use it. English certainly has rules, but those rules are like scientific laws in that they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. When scientists discovered that radioactive materials lost matter over time they didn't say that those materials weren't allowed to do so because of conservation of mass, they went back to the drawing board and came up with new laws that accounted for what they observed. It would be a simple and elegant rule to say that "they" is English's third person plural pronoun, but the truth is that in usage it is now and has always been doing double duty as a third person singular neuter.
What the heck is wrong with splitting infinitives? English is a Germanic language, and in Germanic languages people are allowed to freely split ininitives. Like the singular "they" split infinitives have been a part of English from the very beginning, the efforts of some pedants who think that English ought to be more like Latin notwithstanding.
English is merely what we English speakers speak. We have no College of English to tell us what proper use is, like the Spanish or the French have. Instead we work by a combination of consensus and tradition. "Y'all" isn't a standard contraction because most English speakers don't use it. English certainly has rules, but those rules are like scientific laws in that they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. When scientists discovered that radioactive materials lost matter over time they didn't say that those materials weren't allowed to do so because of conservation of mass, they went back to the drawing board and came up with new laws that accounted for what they observed. It would be a simple and elegant rule to say that "they" is English's third person plural pronoun, but the truth is that in usage it is now and has always been doing double duty as a third person singular neuter.
I can only assume you posted in the wrong thread. Oh, and you said 'neuter'. Hehe. Neuter.
Comments
I, for one, have stopped doing this because of misinterpretation. (I may have to make an exception if Rym doesn't stop splitting infinitives).
English is merely what we English speakers speak. We have no College of English to tell us what proper use is, like the Spanish or the French have. Instead we work by a combination of consensus and tradition. "Y'all" isn't a standard contraction because most English speakers don't use it. English certainly has rules, but those rules are like scientific laws in that they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. When scientists discovered that radioactive materials lost matter over time they didn't say that those materials weren't allowed to do so because of conservation of mass, they went back to the drawing board and came up with new laws that accounted for what they observed. It would be a simple and elegant rule to say that "they" is English's third person plural pronoun, but the truth is that in usage it is now and has always been doing double duty as a third person singular neuter.