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OP did you put a typo in your title to bait the prescriptivists?
… Yes, I am totally that clever. 👀
they make terrible linguists too.
they should aim for “cunning” instead of “terrible”.
They don’t.
Language requires intelligent design from intelligent people sometimes. When needed, prescriptivists in legion can make a literate civilization out of illiterate primitives.
The asinine and the arcane can both make learning unnecessarily difficult.
I knew after the first FOUR WORDS of your comment that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Language literally evolves organically, constantly.
They don’t know we’re in the 4th iteration of English.
The English they think is perfectly correct proper English would make the language prescriptivist from a couple centuries ago puke and kick them in the groin
You don’t consider the simplification of Chinese “language”, nor the ordering of Nynorsk, or the creation of the Korean alphabet.
You don’t think the efforts of thousands of teachers across a nation teaching the language prescriptively according to the designs of the state constitutes language. You seem to consider it forceful meddling in a natural evolution that should be left to just do what it does, unrestrained and undisturbed by judgmental nerds.
People are taught how to write in an academic style in school.
There’s different applications for writing. Some examples in include but are not limited to academic, creative, and conversational/casual writing. Education tends to focus on academic(correct grammar, writing essays, doing research papers) followed by creative writing which is storytelling and poetry.
Expecting people to write academically in casual settings is weird. If I write a letter or email to my friend it’s going to include slang and have looser grammar.
Casual and academic writing have their place and time. Suggesting casual writing is inferior is just silly. If people always wrote everything like some formal essay it’d be fucking boring. No humor, no colorful language. Just boring ass academic writing everywhere.
Plus, believe it or not some of my most brilliant professors had a very casual way of speaking and writing. Academic use of language does not indicate intelligence. It just means they know how to write in an academic setting. Nothing more, nothing less.
There are some cases in history where academic writing (seen in government and religious documents) differs so greatly from the actual language of the people (which those very same government employees and clergy use when outside of their professional environments) that the two languages are more like distant cousins.
Of course, it’s the popular language which evolves into the language of today, while leaving the ancient, once “proper” language behind where it belongs.
And then, that region’s language prescriptivists of today say that the version they were taught is the right one, all over again 😅
oof, no. “in legion”? lol wtf, do you think this is Warhammer or something?
we started speaking way before we started writing. literacy had been irrelevant in the evolution of a language. and even today it barely matters; thanks to the the current ubiquity of media and communication, people can start using a new word, or start pronouncing a word a different way, or spelling something a new way, and it can spread faster than it ever did before. some dickwad insisting that this is “incorrect” is not going to change anything if most people disagree.
speaking of which, why are you not speaking or spelling the way Shakespeare did? what are these newfangled bullshit words and spellings you’re using like some illiterate primitive?
I mean writing systems are not a part of the real spoken language and how it evolved. I think it’s fine to be prescriptivist about writing systems as many did not evolve naturally anyway, and many could be made far easier to learn and use. You shouldn’t mess with spoken language as that’s the part that did evolve naturally and is still subject to evolution. The focus though should always be on making these writing systems simpler and a better reflection of the spoken language. Hangul is a great example of prescriptivism over writing systems.
I don’t think designing a writing system is prescriptivist – or at least if it’s any good then it isn’t.
Here’s a good and recent example, a new, unified, orthography for Low Saxon. The way they did it is to take Old Saxon, re-trace the sound changes in modern dialects phoneme by phoneme and then assign glyphs to everything, which may be realised differently depending on dialect, say “sk” can be pronounced (English orthography) sk, shk, or sh. Mergers etc. are preserved in the over-regional orthography, though there’s also a set of regular changes you can make to that universal orthography to get at dialect orthographies.
That is, what it’s doing is simply to try its best to do both the history and the present of the language justice, to preserve nuance while providing regularity. Situations such as “loose” vs “lose” are perfectly fine because you derive the spelling of the adjectives from their roots (at least I assume why it’s that way in English). Your dialect may, or may not, merge them in that situation the orthography doesn’t say that you should or shouldn’t do that – only that you should still distinguish it in writing because there’s people who don’t merge stuff like that. People don’t start to write “cot” and “caught” the same all of a sudden, either, they probably don’t even realise they’re pronouncing them the same.
Contrast that with the previous “standard” orthography (for the dialects within Germany, that is), Sass. It basically says “write it like you would write German” and that’s right-out disastrous as German orthography just can’t deal with the phonetics, merging and shifting especially vowels left and right away from what anyone is speaking. As such it was prescriptive by negligence, confusing many a learner.
Yes and no but mostly no. Prescriptivists are are great when you need to build a general structure of a language, but language can and will evolve without any intelligent design by the people using it.
The primary purpose of language is to communicate ideas and most of the times the linguistic rules are not necessary to convey an idea.
Isn’t the primary purpose of languge to think?
We used to believe it’s true, but it has come under question. In fact just recently there was a paper that concluded language is more a tool for communication than thought.
I’ll check it (and try to understand it). I was thought that in my philosophy class.
Internal inconsistencies fester and degrade a language if the changes people like you defend are not only left unshamed, but even encouraged as “creative”.
There are language that have lived for centuries without any lexical rules. Any value lost is only in the the eyes of the preceptivists. Language can and will easily live on with all the internal inconsistencies. In fact language rules are usually built around those inconsistencies because the language people speak is more important than whatever rules purists come up with.
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I think there is a very fine line between prescribing language because of a world view that insists on conformity, and correcting grammer and vocabulary because being clear and understood is kinda the point of language.
Why would anyone want rules and consistent applications of those rules? ANYONE could just learn any language that way. How would we keep our ability to communicate for native speakers only? It doesn’t make sense.
You can want it all you want. It’s just not reality. And pretending like it is isn’t helpful to people trying to learn the language.
We don’t have to be silly with descriptivism either. Of course languages evolve over time, but speakers also make mistakes that should still be corrected to keep language cohesive. It’s the difference between change in body shape from evolution, and an isolated growth that probably shouldn’t exist. We use a different word for that second one: cancer.
You gotta have both IMO. Not too rigid, not too flexible.
I really hate the idea of saying corrected in this context. There is really no right and wrong in language iself. Standardized language is not some “correct” way to speak, but a common guide to try to help an individual be understood by more people. Someone not following standard is not wrong, just maybe difficult to comprehend due to not following convention. I think in one off mistakes that are hard to understand, it is better to thinking in terms of asking for clarification. In more consistent problems of understanding, I think explaining (which is not the same as correcting) to them a more conventional way of speaking to easy future communication is the best path.
Also equating individuals unique linguistic quirks to cancer is gross.
You can pick a word besides ”correct" but it means sort of the same thing either way: we are moving individual variations of language toward the collective standard.
Languages all have categories of words, general rules for how those categories are applied, exceptions to the rules, and idiomatic parts to name a few. Misconjugating a word is not evolution of language, it is a mistake. Mismatching count is also a mistake. Mixing direct and indirect object pronouns is a mistake. The risk is not “i don’t understand you”, it is rather that I did understand you, but what I understand is not what you mean. You can call it a “unique linguistic quirk”, but if it leads to people misunderstanding you it’s a mistake. And yeah, pushing mistakes under a rug of " it’s descriptivism" is just as gross as any allegory to runaway cell growth.
If everyone understands you and its not a perfectly grammatically correct construction and lots of people start to use it, sure this is evolution of language. Every deviation is not that.
Be mad then I guess lol
