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I'm wondering if I'm missing some big shift in language usage here.
I have recently seen a lot of posters on internet forums, particularly younger ones, saying
"blah blah blah needs to be blah blah"
as
"blah blah blah needs blah blah blah"
For example:
From the Diablo 3 beta feedback forum, someone posts
our character names NEED displayed,
which to me would be properly written as
need to be displayed.
What's strange about this is that the topic for the post is "We need to be heard..." blah blah. Is this a regional thing? Is it some UK versus U.S. usage? Is it some kind of casual language thing that's popular among people in a certain age group?
I just don't get it, what's going on here?
To be clear, I'm not being critical -- language changes over time and I'm fine with that. I'm just trying to figure out where this trend is coming from.
 
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If thought is their, why be bothered by it? Language is for comminucation use. If I haved conveyed my thoughts, regardless of spelllings and grammers, I still used the purpose of Language. correct?
+ Show Spoiler +
P.S. If you are using a Language for educational purposes, then that's another matter altogether. In a school/educational setting, proper use of language is a must, me thinks.
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The Diablo forum quote makes no sense at all. Don't worry your head over it.
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Probably just lazy people. I never noticed.
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On March 11 2012 11:08 shaftofpleasure wrote:
If thought is their, why be bothered by it?
I'm not bothered. Actually, I am bringing it up because I've seen this exact language construction 10 or 20 times over the past few months (including on TL), and I'm really curious where it's coming from, whether it's a regional thing, or an age group thing. It's too consistent to be laziness, because the people who use it don't leave other words out.
Let's call it academic interest -- I'm still trying to figure out what the story is. 
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This construction is common in the North Midland dialect which is like Nebraska to Ohio, but it's also common in Pennsylvania and I think some like New England areas. An example that gets used a lot for some reason is "needs washed" if you want to google about it. Most likely regional use leaked onto the internet where it just picks up some popularity because it's shorter.
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On March 11 2012 11:08 shaftofpleasure wrote:If thought is their, why be bothered by it? Language is for comminucation use. If I haved conveyed my thoughts, regardless of spelllings and grammers, I still used the purpose of Language. correct? + Show Spoiler +P.S. If you are using a Language for educational purposes, then that's another matter altogether. In a school/educational setting, proper use of language is a must, me thinks.
The reason is that it's harder to read a post that is not properly constructed. Minor spelling mistakes are one thing, like if you meant to write "communication" but wrote "comminucation" that's fine. And abbreviations like N/A or etc. are obviously just shortcuts, people use them all the time. But a phrase like "if thought is their" is honestly hard to parse. Certainly not impossible, but it takes more effort than it should, and if someone writes a huge post riddled with poor grammar I'm simply not going to read it.
I'm not trying to pick on you, just to be clear, I'm saying that's why we need to be precise about language.
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On March 11 2012 11:22 Lixler wrote:
This construction is common in the North Midland dialect which is like Nebraska to Ohio, but it's also common in Pennsylvania and I think some like New England areas. An example that gets used a lot for some reason is "needs washed" if you want to google about it. Most likely regional use leaked onto the internet where it just picks up some popularity because it's shorter.
That's interesting -- I spent my first 10 years in Nebraska and didn't pick this up, but I may not have been in the right part.
Then again, my mother, who was born in Minnesota, pronounces "wash" as "warsh" and it makes me crazy, though I think I said that as a child too, so who knows.
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Yeah this is most certainly a US Midwestern regional thing, although its certainly not endemic to the region. I rarely hear the omission in Ohio, but if I travel to Indiana, Illinois, or in the general Western direction I'll start to hear it a lot. That ends around Nebraska though.
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In a romance language, you would always* use the infinitive form of a verb (the "to be" part of an english verb)
Nuestros nombres de los personajes necesitan ser vistos.
Our character names need to be seen.
However, in English, the part that marks a verb as an infinitive is completely separate from the stem of the verb, so I guess some people leave it off.
*I don't know a ton of Spanish, so this might be wrong.
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The "to be" sentence makes sense, whereas "our character names need displayed" does not make sense. There might be one, but I can't think of an example where need is followed by a verb and that verb is not preceded by "to be".
Although that may be an American thing, and just to gripe for a second, whenever I hear "write him"/"write me", I get kinda irked. This is because you are writing TO someone, because they are the indirect object of your action, not the direct object. I.e., to me, if someone says, "write me", instead of "write to me", I would think that it would be correctly interpreted as actually writing the word "me", rather than writing something and then sending it to "me".
But whatever, language changes in different places, but I'm pretty sure the sentences that you posted only make sense with "to be" in there.
edit:misread your post and thought you were saying that "to be" was not correct. fixed my post
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On March 11 2012 15:04 Suc wrote:
I don't see what's so weird about this, the "to be" sentence makes sense, whereas "our character names need displayed" does not make sense. There might be one, but I can't think of an example where need is followed by a verb and that verb is not preceded by "to be".
Although that may be an American thing, and just to gripe for a second, whenever I hear "write him"/"write me", I get kinda irked. This is because you are writing TO someone, because they are the indirect object of your action, not the direct object. I.e., to me, if someone says, "write me", instead of "write to me", I would think that it would be correctly interpreted as actually writing the word "me", rather than writing something and then sending it to "me".
But whatever, language changes in different places, but I'm pretty sure the sentences that you posted only make sense with "to be" in there.
Well it's just a dialectical thing that doesn't sacrifice much. It's not like ambiguous, and the "to be" in "needs to be washed" doesn't communicate a lot of semantic information besides setting the object up as the thing that's going to get washed, which gets through just fine without.
Also "write me" is just following a dative construction that's fine in English. If English kept its Germanic case markings this would be more obvious, but that me is a different me than the one in direct objects. It's like when you say "give me a letter," you don't have to say "give a letter to me." Languages won't just randomly make suboptimal forms that are ambiguous, and you'll note that if you say "write me sometime" the stress on your words is way different from the stress in "Write "me" sometime."
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I wouldn't have noticed anything if it was "Character names need displaying" rather than "Character names need displayed".
In the sense of "X needs washing" meaning to me the same thing as "X needs to be washed"
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On March 11 2012 15:10 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2012 15:04 Suc wrote:
I don't see what's so weird about this, the "to be" sentence makes sense, whereas "our character names need displayed" does not make sense. There might be one, but I can't think of an example where need is followed by a verb and that verb is not preceded by "to be".
Although that may be an American thing, and just to gripe for a second, whenever I hear "write him"/"write me", I get kinda irked. This is because you are writing TO someone, because they are the indirect object of your action, not the direct object. I.e., to me, if someone says, "write me", instead of "write to me", I would think that it would be correctly interpreted as actually writing the word "me", rather than writing something and then sending it to "me".
But whatever, language changes in different places, but I'm pretty sure the sentences that you posted only make sense with "to be" in there. Well it's just a dialectical thing that doesn't sacrifice much. It's not like ambiguous, and the "to be" in "needs to be washed" doesn't communicate a lot of semantic information besides setting the object up as the thing that's going to get washed, which gets through just fine without. Also "write me" is just following a dative construction that's fine in English. If English kept its Germanic case markings this would be more obvious, but that me is a different me than the one in direct objects. It's like when you say "give me a letter," you don't have to say "give a letter to me." Languages won't just randomly make suboptimal forms that are ambiguous, and you'll note that if you say "write me sometime" the stress on your words is way different from the stress in "Write "me" sometime."
I see where you're coming from, but I have to somewhat disagree. With your example "give me a letter", "me" can only really be interpreted as the indirect object, whereas with "write me", it could be interpreted as the direct object and hence the word (although it is probably less likely).
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On March 11 2012 15:10 Lixler wrote:
Well it's just a dialectical thing that doesn't sacrifice much. It's not like ambiguous, and the "to be" in "needs to be washed" doesn't communicate a lot of semantic information besides setting the object up as the thing that's going to get washed, which gets through just fine without.
Sure, and I wasn't making the argument that it was making the phrase impossible to parse. I was just interested because I've been a fluent speaker of American English for pushing 40 years, and I hadn't seen this particular construction at all until a couple years ago. I was curious from where it had come. Sounds like some of the posts here have answered that.
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EPT
