At first glance, I thought this was some new TC39 JavaScript syntax proposal.
This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?"
Possibly-interesting comparison: in Japanese, the way to talk about trying to do some verb-phrase X, is "Xて見る" — which is usually literally translated as "we'll try [X]ing", but which breaks down into "[verb-phrase X in present tense] [the verb "to see" in whatever tense you mean.]"
Which means that the construction can be most intuitively framed (at least by an English speaker) as either "we'll see [what happens when] we [X]"... or, more relevantly, "we'll try [X] and see [what happens/how it goes]." Or, for short: "we'll try and [X]."
It's even better. The "X-te" (Xて) is technically not X in present tense, it is specifically X in the te-form (て is read "te").
The te-form has a bunch of different uses, but in the case of "verb-te verb", if the second verb is not one of a list of special verbs (of which miru (見る, to see) is one), X-te Y normally means "X and Y". For example, yorugohan o tsukutte taberu (夜ご飯を作って食べる) means "(to/I/we/you/...) make dinner and eat it": yorugohan is dinner, the "o" is a particle marking the direct object, tsukuru means to make (becomes tsukutte in the te-form) and taberu means to eat. (The first word in English is ambiguous because grammatical subjects are usually optional in Japanese, plus its verbs are not inflected for person or number.)
For a number of verbs, however, if they are in the second position, the phrase gets a special meaning. If it's miru, e.g. tsukutte miru, it means "to try to make" — or perhaps more aptly, "to try and make". If it's iku (行く, to go), it means "to go X-ing": tabete iku (where taberu (to eat) -> tabete in the te-form) is "to go to eat [something]", or perhaps: "to go and eat [something]".
Not all such special verbs correspond to English pseudocoordination though; a common one is shimau (the dictionary says "to finish / to stop", but it's uncommon in bare form), where e.g. tabete shimau means "to finish eating" or "to end up eating" / "to eat accidentally" depending on context.
The analogy between English and Japanese here is likely coincidental, but it's amusing nevertheless.
The point I was waiting for them to get to was saved for last: entails completion.
Try to do something, you might or might not do it. “I’m going to try to persuade them to decide in my favor.”
Try and do something, you expect to get it done one way or another. “I’m goin down there to try and straighten them out.”
I don’t have a long history of research in this going back to the 1500s, but I grew up in southeast Texas, and this is how I’ve always understood it to be used around here, when it is used with any intention at least.
Interesting, where I’m from in southern california, “try and” doesn’t entail completion. (The article only mentions this for “go and”, which here does indeed entail expected completion.)
It's kind of funny that in Norwegian, people mix up the infinitive "to" and "and", as they are pronounced the same, "o" in IPA. So we have the same thing in Norwegian writing, but if you happen to use "and", you must use the imperative form of the verb for it to be grammatically correct. So, "try to stop me" is "prøv å stoppe meg", and "try and stop me" is "prøv og stopp meg". The latter is much more colloquial.
This isn't a problem in Swedish and Danish, as their infinitive marker is "att/at", which in Norwegian only means "that" in its conjunctive form.
I wonder if there's any relation to the Norwegian here.
Actually, the situation is even weirder in Swedish! Even though we write "att", it is pronounced "o" when used to mark an infinitive but not when used like the word "that" in English. So, in the sentence
Jag tror *att* han gillar *att* äta
I think *that* he likes *to* eat
the first "att" (that) is pronounced similar to its orthography but the second one (to) is pronounced "o".
> In his 2014 paper "English: The Language of the Vikings" (co-authored by Joseph Embley Emonds), Faarlund and Emonds assert that English is a Scandinavian language (or North Germanic language) which was influenced by Anglo-Saxon (a West Germanic language) [1]
You can also interpret the Dr Dre quote an abbreviation of, “I’m gonna try (to change the course of hip hop again) and change the course of hip hop again.”
In this form “try and” means you will try to do something and that you will succeed. Some of the articles tests make more sense in this light; Of course you wouldn’t reorder the trying and the succeeding because that’s the order the events will happen.
This ignores the fact that “try and” developed concurrently with “try to” and possibly before. So it wasn’t originally an abbreviation for a phrase that was yet to be established.
I don’t think that’s anything like the meaning of “I’ll try and go to the store tomorrow”. There’s no implication that anyone is trying to stop me.
Also, your abbreviation analysis would still leave a syntactic mystery, as that sort of ellipsis doesn’t seem to follow any general attested pattern of ellipsis in English.
I also like how several linguists attempt to call out this usage as wrong:
> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).
This is a good intuition. The construction is actually sometimes jokingly called the "Try And"-C, where "C" stands for Complementizer, a thing that introduces and subordinates a clause.
I think this capture’s the essence better than anything else, “try and” simply behaving as “try and see if I can” (or whatever fits instead of “I” here)
As a nonnative speaker of English who lived more than 30 years in an English speaking country, "try and" sounds to me as bad as "should of". Right or wrong, I perceive it as something an "uneducated" person would say. That said, I firmly believe that correct language is whatever people deem to be appropriate for their communication.
There is nothing more annoying than being told something annoying, and then learning to be annoyed by it.
Try not to internalise that dictum or it will recursively annoy you.
Next time you hear a really annoying vague repetitive/intermittent sound at work, mention it to a coworker if you wish to ruin their worklife.
(Minor edits). I often hear people who have learned English make a particular class of mistake (usually pronunciation) that is a result of being taught English by reading from books. Modern schooling for languages causes certain types of mistakes. There is a natural mimicking art/skill to learning a language by ear. Unfortunately the art isn't taught and is hardly even recognized: perhaps because it works best with intense one-on-one interaction and intent. Book learning was the default that our society used, and some well-educated people prefer books. When learning spoken English it is important to try and ignore spelling. Natural English speakers learn the spelling after learning the language and are in an environment where we have tricks to learn pronunciation of unfamiliar words. There is a strong classist/academic ridiculing of people that make the mistake of pronouncing a word as it is spelled (knowing how words are "properly" pronounced is an important distinction to many people - as is received wordplay).
Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't.
It also depends on the audience and medium, with "should've" being more appropriate for conversational/informal usage. It would be perfectly normal to say something like "he shouldn't've done that," but if I were writing a message, I'd at least expand the last contraction to "have."
I think there's a general perception that many of the common dialects of American English, especially in the South and West, are associated with being less educated. I am not sure where that comes from.
I'm a native English speaker, and my perception is that when someone speaks in a way where they don't use contractions, it seems verbose and stilted; I associate it with being scolded or disciplined, or when someone is speaking sternly to make a point (or out of anger).
E.g.:
"You don't know where you're going, you should've taken a left" - informative/neutral
"You do not know where you are going, you should have taken a left" - critical/scolding
Omitting contractions can result in speech that sounds strange and unnatural in general:
"Shouldn't we go?" -> "Should not we go?"
"Aren't you coming?" -> "Are not you coming?"
"We didn't, but we should've." -> "We did not, but we should have."
In written British English it would be correct grammar to say “try and” or “go and”. In speech it would be said “go’n” with very little emphasis on the ‘n’ and some dialects drop the ‘n’ completely but would still write ‘and’. I suspect that this would also be true for other dialects of English from NZ, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, India etc but I stand to be corrected.
Guess it depends on the country? As a native speaker of British English “try and” sounds fine to me, and in some cases would flow more naturally than “try to”
Native speakers don't think so, but I suppose that's why you're nonnative—"and try" is completely conventional, idiomatic, and correct (even if it breaks a pattern, but that's English for you). Should "of" is generally a spelling error. Not remotely in the same category.
How can “should of” sound bad to you, when it sounds identical to (a not super carefully enunciated pronunciation of) “should have”, at least in every dialect I’m aware of
They are not even remotely the same. "should of" is a phonetic issue. of is spoken with the schwa vowel uh, so the o sounds like uh, and the f takes the v sound, so "should of" sounds like "should uhv", and "should have/should 've" sounds exactly the same, "should uhv". The issue is that folks that don't read much hear "should uhv" and think it's should of, so when they write "should of" because they expect should 've to sound like "should have" even tho they completely use the contraction when they speak!
It's like saying that people with accents come across as uneducated when it come just be that the person has a deafness to American th and hears t does a substitute so they will say ting instead of thing or tin in place of thin. With that said, I grew up speaking/hearing the form of British english and "Try and" sounds perfectly fine to me.
> regular coordination permits the order of conjuncts to be changed, while in (7) we see that the same is not possible with try and (De Vos 2005:59).
But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.
It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”
The emphasis is a really interesting point and overlooked by the article. Your "went and" examples do seem very analogous to "try and". "He went and got himself arrested again," is less about the going and almost exclusively emphasizing the other half of the conjunction.
"Try and" can operate the same way by de-emphasizing the trying. If Dr. Dre said "I'm gonna try to change the course of hip hop again," the sentence is about attempting to do something. On the other hand, "try and" makes the sentence more assured- Dr Dre is going try it and then do it.
I wonder if this half about ordering, half about emphasizing is the reason for the special rules of usage.
Prompted by reading an instance of "try and" instead of "try to" in an HN-linked Register article[1] this morning, I thought this might be of interest to both non-native and native English speakers in our community.
Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
I thought from the title that this was going to be about some new exception handling mechanism in a programming language I'm not familiar with. In fact, the article was even more interesting than that, as I've often wondered about this in the past but never quite got to looking it up. Thank you!
In his comments on the use of symbols P and V in semaphores, Dijkstra gave the reason for choosing P as it having come from "probeer te verlagen", which he infamously explained that when translated into English means "try and decrease" [sic].
‘Try and’ is correct British English and the Register is a UK publication. If the author had written ‘to try make’ they would have gotten in trouble with their editor and ‘to try to make’ doesn’t flow as well, to my eyes at least.
Interestingly this pattern also exists in Danish (though not for the same reasons). Correctly speaking you’d say “try to…” which is “prøv at…”, but since the infinitive “at” and “og” sort of both turned into /ə/ when quickly spoken and you get “prøv og…”.
Every time I read something like this, I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something - all that matters is that your intended audience understands it, eventually.
Hadn't heard about this project before; it's a really good idea.
English is not a language that either lends itself well to, or is historically regulated by, prescriptivism (with a few specific attempts that didn't claim universal adoption). Treating it as a language where "If you've heard this novel construct, here's where it came from and what it's related to" is a good way to approach it.
(I liken it often to C++. C++ is so broad that the ways you can glue features together are often novel and sometimes damn near emergent. It's entirely possible to be "a fluent C++ user" and never use curiously recurring template pattern, or consider case-statement fallthrough a bug not a feature, and so on).
> I'm going to try and change the course of Hip-Hop.
can be parsed as
> I'm going to try; I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop.
which has been subject to a well-understood extraposition process to factor out the leading "I'm going to" from all the clauses, so that a single copy of it distributes into all of them.
It's essentially the same as what is going on in the following unassailably correct sentence:
> I'm going to turn on the TV, crack open a beer, and watch the game".
Also note that this "and" is not something which exclusively pairs with "try":
This pales when compared to my favorite grammatical annoyance, a common perverse construction, for example "... similar effect to ..." when "... effect similar to ..." is actually intended. This misordering is so common that, in a Web search, it appears to outnumber the canonical ordering.
I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
"try 'n" sounds suspiciously close to "tryin'", so I suspect that people who were saying "tryin' to" began to reanalyse the first two syllables as "try 'n" and then started dropping the newly-superfluous "to".
[+] [-] rezmason|7 months ago|reply
This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?"
https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/what-all
[+] [-] derefr|7 months ago|reply
Which means that the construction can be most intuitively framed (at least by an English speaker) as either "we'll see [what happens when] we [X]"... or, more relevantly, "we'll try [X] and see [what happens/how it goes]." Or, for short: "we'll try and [X]."
[+] [-] tomsmeding|7 months ago|reply
The te-form has a bunch of different uses, but in the case of "verb-te verb", if the second verb is not one of a list of special verbs (of which miru (見る, to see) is one), X-te Y normally means "X and Y". For example, yorugohan o tsukutte taberu (夜ご飯を作って食べる) means "(to/I/we/you/...) make dinner and eat it": yorugohan is dinner, the "o" is a particle marking the direct object, tsukuru means to make (becomes tsukutte in the te-form) and taberu means to eat. (The first word in English is ambiguous because grammatical subjects are usually optional in Japanese, plus its verbs are not inflected for person or number.)
For a number of verbs, however, if they are in the second position, the phrase gets a special meaning. If it's miru, e.g. tsukutte miru, it means "to try to make" — or perhaps more aptly, "to try and make". If it's iku (行く, to go), it means "to go X-ing": tabete iku (where taberu (to eat) -> tabete in the te-form) is "to go to eat [something]", or perhaps: "to go and eat [something]".
Not all such special verbs correspond to English pseudocoordination though; a common one is shimau (the dictionary says "to finish / to stop", but it's uncommon in bare form), where e.g. tabete shimau means "to finish eating" or "to end up eating" / "to eat accidentally" depending on context.
The analogy between English and Japanese here is likely coincidental, but it's amusing nevertheless.
[+] [-] jmbwell|7 months ago|reply
Try to do something, you might or might not do it. “I’m going to try to persuade them to decide in my favor.”
Try and do something, you expect to get it done one way or another. “I’m goin down there to try and straighten them out.”
I don’t have a long history of research in this going back to the 1500s, but I grew up in southeast Texas, and this is how I’ve always understood it to be used around here, when it is used with any intention at least.
[+] [-] purplehat_|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Sardtok|7 months ago|reply
This isn't a problem in Swedish and Danish, as their infinitive marker is "att/at", which in Norwegian only means "that" in its conjunctive form.
I wonder if there's any relation to the Norwegian here.
[+] [-] touzen|7 months ago|reply
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/att#Swedish
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] triyambakam|7 months ago|reply
> In his 2014 paper "English: The Language of the Vikings" (co-authored by Joseph Embley Emonds), Faarlund and Emonds assert that English is a Scandinavian language (or North Germanic language) which was influenced by Anglo-Saxon (a West Germanic language) [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Terje_Faarlund
[+] [-] Arn_Thor|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nyeah|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] onionisafruit|7 months ago|reply
In this form “try and” means you will try to do something and that you will succeed. Some of the articles tests make more sense in this light; Of course you wouldn’t reorder the trying and the succeeding because that’s the order the events will happen.
This ignores the fact that “try and” developed concurrently with “try to” and possibly before. So it wasn’t originally an abbreviation for a phrase that was yet to be established.
[+] [-] foldr|7 months ago|reply
Also, your abbreviation analysis would still leave a syntactic mystery, as that sort of ellipsis doesn’t seem to follow any general attested pattern of ellipsis in English.
[+] [-] bendigedig|7 months ago|reply
"I’ll try and eat the salad." could be expressed as "I'll try eating some of the salad and, if possible, finish eating it."
[+] [-] echelon|7 months ago|reply
> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
You can't really reign in language.
[+] [-] WaxProlix|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] foolswisdom|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] KurSix|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] samiskin|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bsoles|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] robocat|7 months ago|reply
Interesting that you've used the spelling mistake which is perhaps why you hate it?
If you heard "should've" or "should have" then perhaps it wouldn't annoy you so much??? Also listen for would've / could've
But listening to https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/should_of_would_of_c... made me wonder if people do clearly pronounce the "of" in "should of"... Now I'm worried that I'm going to hear the mistake and be annoyed.
There is nothing more annoying than being told something annoying, and then learning to be annoyed by it.
Try not to internalise that dictum or it will recursively annoy you.
Next time you hear a really annoying vague repetitive/intermittent sound at work, mention it to a coworker if you wish to ruin their worklife.
(Minor edits). I often hear people who have learned English make a particular class of mistake (usually pronunciation) that is a result of being taught English by reading from books. Modern schooling for languages causes certain types of mistakes. There is a natural mimicking art/skill to learning a language by ear. Unfortunately the art isn't taught and is hardly even recognized: perhaps because it works best with intense one-on-one interaction and intent. Book learning was the default that our society used, and some well-educated people prefer books. When learning spoken English it is important to try and ignore spelling. Natural English speakers learn the spelling after learning the language and are in an environment where we have tricks to learn pronunciation of unfamiliar words. There is a strong classist/academic ridiculing of people that make the mistake of pronouncing a word as it is spelled (knowing how words are "properly" pronounced is an important distinction to many people - as is received wordplay).
[+] [-] eaglelizard|7 months ago|reply
It also depends on the audience and medium, with "should've" being more appropriate for conversational/informal usage. It would be perfectly normal to say something like "he shouldn't've done that," but if I were writing a message, I'd at least expand the last contraction to "have."
I think there's a general perception that many of the common dialects of American English, especially in the South and West, are associated with being less educated. I am not sure where that comes from.
I'm a native English speaker, and my perception is that when someone speaks in a way where they don't use contractions, it seems verbose and stilted; I associate it with being scolded or disciplined, or when someone is speaking sternly to make a point (or out of anger). E.g.: "You don't know where you're going, you should've taken a left" - informative/neutral "You do not know where you are going, you should have taken a left" - critical/scolding
Omitting contractions can result in speech that sounds strange and unnatural in general: "Shouldn't we go?" -> "Should not we go?" "Aren't you coming?" -> "Are not you coming?" "We didn't, but we should've." -> "We did not, but we should have."
[+] [-] willyt|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] petesergeant|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vehemenz|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] umanwizard|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|7 months ago|reply
It's like saying that people with accents come across as uneducated when it come just be that the person has a deafness to American th and hears t does a substitute so they will say ting instead of thing or tin in place of thin. With that said, I grew up speaking/hearing the form of British english and "Try and" sounds perfectly fine to me.
[+] [-] smelendez|7 months ago|reply
But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.
It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”
[+] [-] brianpan|7 months ago|reply
"Try and" can operate the same way by de-emphasizing the trying. If Dr. Dre said "I'm gonna try to change the course of hip hop again," the sentence is about attempting to do something. On the other hand, "try and" makes the sentence more assured- Dr Dre is going try it and then do it.
I wonder if this half about ordering, half about emphasizing is the reason for the special rules of usage.
[+] [-] urquhartfe|7 months ago|reply
You are confusing semantics with grammatical correctness. In both your examples, they would still be grammatically correct with reversed order.
(I would actually suggest they are still semantically reasonable too, but that's besides the point).
[+] [-] trimethylpurine|7 months ago|reply
A group works together. One offers to get flour, another offers to bake the cake.
A third could offer, "I'm going to both get some flour and bake a cake."
It would make sense to use "both."
[+] [-] KurSix|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] treetalker|7 months ago|reply
Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
[1]: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639)
[+] [-] quietbritishjim|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cxr|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] willyt|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] refactor_master|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jp0001|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ziroshima|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|7 months ago|reply
English is not a language that either lends itself well to, or is historically regulated by, prescriptivism (with a few specific attempts that didn't claim universal adoption). Treating it as a language where "If you've heard this novel construct, here's where it came from and what it's related to" is a good way to approach it.
(I liken it often to C++. C++ is so broad that the ways you can glue features together are often novel and sometimes damn near emergent. It's entirely possible to be "a fluent C++ user" and never use curiously recurring template pattern, or consider case-statement fallthrough a bug not a feature, and so on).
[+] [-] zvr|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|7 months ago|reply
That is to say,
> I'm going to try and change the course of Hip-Hop.
can be parsed as
> I'm going to try; I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop.
which has been subject to a well-understood extraposition process to factor out the leading "I'm going to" from all the clauses, so that a single copy of it distributes into all of them.
It's essentially the same as what is going on in the following unassailably correct sentence:
> I'm going to turn on the TV, crack open a beer, and watch the game".
Also note that this "and" is not something which exclusively pairs with "try":
> Linguists, go ahead and fight me!
[+] [-] dcminter|7 months ago|reply
I'm curious how common it is in Indian English.
[+] [-] lutusp|7 months ago|reply
I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
[+] [-] throwmeaway222|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] euroderf|7 months ago|reply
"try 'n" sounds suspiciously close to "tryin'", so I suspect that people who were saying "tryin' to" began to reanalyse the first two syllables as "try 'n" and then started dropping the newly-superfluous "to".
[+] [-] foysavas|7 months ago|reply
"try and X" = can X -> must X = not can X or must X
That said, the word "both" doesn't collocate before "try and X" because it instead pushes us toward an interpretation as logical conjunction:
"both try and X" = can X and must X
Likewise, despite the usage of "try not to", the phrase "try not and" doesn't show up, because under material implication the phrase becomes nonsense:
"try not and X" = not can X -> must X = can X or must X