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Right, Japanese learners of English are often confused with this difference between "行く and "to go" or "来る" and "to come", me in junior high school, as well.and when they're learning English, this tendency bleeds into their English as well
Right, Japanese learners of English are often confused with this difference between "行く and "to go" or "来る" and "to come", me in junior high school, as well.
Is the "what shall I bring/take" situation an example of misuse, or were you referring to other situations?The distinction between bring/take is probably going to disappear from English at some point, due to modern communication methods which let two physically widely separated speakers occupy the same space mentally. People misusing bring/take is one of my many pet peeves.
Where could you use the phrase "I brought my lunch to work yesterday"?
addendum: what do you think of "Are you bringing anything to the party?"
It seems less a misuse of the word and more a shift in the mentality of the speaker, in my opinion.
You hit the nail on the head. Speakers of a language will stretch it to the limits of being intelligible, and in doing so, that edge of what is commonly accepted (and later formalized) is constantly being eroded away, for lack of a better term. Being away while those changes happen, and then coming back to find people making what sounds to you like mistakes must be a grating experience.Certain linguistic features have a tendency to be shed by the language over time, in response to the changing requirements of the speakers. English has in the past lost case endings, for example. I think the previous bring/take distinction is being lost. You won't find many American English speakers who can correctly use the past perfect tense; they now use it as a faux-formal hypercorrect simple past tense instead.... which is really annoying to someone like me who wasn't present for the change and still expects it to have its former correct usage.
Being away while those changes happen, and then coming back to find people making what sounds to you like mistakes must be a grating experience.