Your phone auto correct has a preference as well it seems.
I mean sure, linguistic descriptivism is relevant for the evolution of language. However, why study language at all if that’s the sum-total of your perspective on language? We could all just speak however we want as long as we are understood… except then we end up with an uncountable number of dialects and creoles a la mainland china. This is also how you end up with linguistic rules that are basically impossible to teach I suspect.
Speaking is sort of a different animal. “Should of” is a malapropism that is a homophone for “should’ve”. There is no transformation of language from that, it’s just an error. If you accept an alternate written version though, you’re creating an alternate conjugation for the conditional perfect tense. There’s no reason for this at all: it’s accommodating failings of literacy by adding complexity to language rules for one, and creating a new (and faulty) evolution point for two.
It’s like saying “oh, the speed limit is 55, but everyone drives 60, so let’s make the law so the police can’t ticket you unless you go over 60 since 55 or 60 is correct”. What does it mean when you see a sign that says 25 now? You can accept that people break the rules, but that doesn’t mean we should change the rules to describe the situation in every circumstance.
Speed limits are a not a good analogy to language rules, partly because they are generally intentionally designed rather than a product of an evolutionary pattern, partly because there is a clear and accepted authority that sets and enforces them with actual penalty, and partly because the consequences for not having them are often deadly.
By contrast, there is no clear authority that “owns” a language and can enforce it’s rules. Some government or academic body might in some cases declare that it has that authority, but they don’t really have any ability to set more than guidelines for how people working for them or producing documents on their behalf must write. Unlike speed limits, which simply would stop existing in a meaningful sense if governments stopped existing, languages existed before any such “authorities” did and would continue to exist if those organizations ceased. As such, I’d argue that linguistic rules aren’t really rules at all in the normal sense, there’s no-one with actual accepted authority to create, repeal, impose or enforce them, they’re just guidelines, loose ones at that, that one should follow if one’s intent is to be understood by someone else using the same or sufficiently similar guidelines. If you understand what someone is saying, which in cases like “should of”, people calling it against the rules clearly do, then they have succeeded in that goal, so it cannot really be a failure at being literate.
I reject any notion that this will eventually overcomplicate language to the point of it being too difficult to learn or use, because ultimately, people are not born knowing it, they must all learn, so any language too complex to learn wont be learned and therefore won’t be used, and similarly, any language too complicated and unclear to be used to communicate, can’t be used, and so won’t be. The complexity of language is inherently self-limiting at a level that prevents it from becoming useless.
Or for a TLDR: we don’t have to change the rules to accommodate people breaking them, because there aren’t really any rules at all.
What you say is true for passed down spoken language because errors like the ones we are talking about are transparent. Once you can write it down, the rules are evident and persistent. Nobody has to own them to say that as we transcribe language X these are the rules for conjugation, pluralization, etc. you can break them if you want, but as you say nobody owns the language: you need not be accommodated in your mistakes. Spoken language can change and the rules can follow, but being shit at writing (even if lots of people have the same problem) isn’t something written language must accommodate.
To understand it, and how and why it evolves over time, just like any other study. There’s no such thing as prescriptivist physics, or math, or biology, or etc etc. We don’t get to tell the world how it works, and pretty much no science is focused on that assumption other than historical linguistics.
we could all just speak however we want as long as we understood
We do speak however we want, and we do understand, because we pick up new trends in language on an unconscious level and this is the way languages have always worked and evolved.
then we end up with an uncountable number of dialects and creoles
We’ve already ended up there, and that’s nothing new. Sure, new languages/dialects/creoles creep into the world, but that’s how all languages evolve — instead, the lines between “what’s a language”, “what’s a dialect”, and “what’s a creole” get grayed and more blurry and fuzzy.
The thing is, humans developed language a very very long time ago, and those languages evolve and split off due to large-scale trends in the lives of humans speaking those languages, for a multitude of reasons that interact and make the process essentially random.
Here’s one way to look at it: it’s the opposite of the “jurassic park” problem, instead of “your scientists were preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to ask whether they should”, linguists spent so much time arguing over prescriptivist/descriptivist arguments, and never asked whether prescriptivism actually can control the evolution of a language.
Anybody, even some random teen in some random neighborhood in any english speaking country, can come up with a new word, and it can catch on and eventually become a new accepted and widely-used word. That’s because it’s a “you can use this if you want” situation, whereas the prescriptivist version is “if you use ___ you are wrong, if you want to be right use ___ only”.
It should be obvious why telling someone they can do something is an easier argument than that they can’t, and this is why prescriptivism has failed. especially because, again, nobody saw “should of” in this post and thought “oh god i don’t know what this is supposed to mean”; instead people either understood and said nothing, or they understood but jumped in to tell people they’re wrong for making them understand in a way that contradicts what their own english teachers in school said they SHOULD be able to understand.
I mean, sort of, I guess. I also read “Frindle” in school.
There is nothing wrong with a descriptive approach to spoken language, but what I see you arguing is that written language should be treated the same way. This increases complexity in written language for no reason other than to protect mistakes in literacy.
There’s real value in preserving spelling (it often contains etymologically relevant information to the current or past meaning of the word) and also grammatical structure. If the sound of two samples is indistinguishable, why make it harder to teach or to infer meaning from by accepting spurious representations as correct?
When you write it down, you gotta follow the rules, yo.
Your phone auto correct has a preference as well it seems.
I mean sure, linguistic descriptivism is relevant for the evolution of language. However, why study language at all if that’s the sum-total of your perspective on language? We could all just speak however we want as long as we are understood… except then we end up with an uncountable number of dialects and creoles a la mainland china. This is also how you end up with linguistic rules that are basically impossible to teach I suspect.
Just my 2 cents.
I mean, we kinda already do speak however we want, people saying such speaking breaks the rules doesn’t really stop people from doing it anyway
Speaking is sort of a different animal. “Should of” is a malapropism that is a homophone for “should’ve”. There is no transformation of language from that, it’s just an error. If you accept an alternate written version though, you’re creating an alternate conjugation for the conditional perfect tense. There’s no reason for this at all: it’s accommodating failings of literacy by adding complexity to language rules for one, and creating a new (and faulty) evolution point for two.
It’s like saying “oh, the speed limit is 55, but everyone drives 60, so let’s make the law so the police can’t ticket you unless you go over 60 since 55 or 60 is correct”. What does it mean when you see a sign that says 25 now? You can accept that people break the rules, but that doesn’t mean we should change the rules to describe the situation in every circumstance.
Speed limits are a not a good analogy to language rules, partly because they are generally intentionally designed rather than a product of an evolutionary pattern, partly because there is a clear and accepted authority that sets and enforces them with actual penalty, and partly because the consequences for not having them are often deadly.
By contrast, there is no clear authority that “owns” a language and can enforce it’s rules. Some government or academic body might in some cases declare that it has that authority, but they don’t really have any ability to set more than guidelines for how people working for them or producing documents on their behalf must write. Unlike speed limits, which simply would stop existing in a meaningful sense if governments stopped existing, languages existed before any such “authorities” did and would continue to exist if those organizations ceased. As such, I’d argue that linguistic rules aren’t really rules at all in the normal sense, there’s no-one with actual accepted authority to create, repeal, impose or enforce them, they’re just guidelines, loose ones at that, that one should follow if one’s intent is to be understood by someone else using the same or sufficiently similar guidelines. If you understand what someone is saying, which in cases like “should of”, people calling it against the rules clearly do, then they have succeeded in that goal, so it cannot really be a failure at being literate.
I reject any notion that this will eventually overcomplicate language to the point of it being too difficult to learn or use, because ultimately, people are not born knowing it, they must all learn, so any language too complex to learn wont be learned and therefore won’t be used, and similarly, any language too complicated and unclear to be used to communicate, can’t be used, and so won’t be. The complexity of language is inherently self-limiting at a level that prevents it from becoming useless.
Or for a TLDR: we don’t have to change the rules to accommodate people breaking them, because there aren’t really any rules at all.
Alrighty so… I think you’re full of shit.
What you say is true for passed down spoken language because errors like the ones we are talking about are transparent. Once you can write it down, the rules are evident and persistent. Nobody has to own them to say that as we transcribe language X these are the rules for conjugation, pluralization, etc. you can break them if you want, but as you say nobody owns the language: you need not be accommodated in your mistakes. Spoken language can change and the rules can follow, but being shit at writing (even if lots of people have the same problem) isn’t something written language must accommodate.
To understand it, and how and why it evolves over time, just like any other study. There’s no such thing as prescriptivist physics, or math, or biology, or etc etc. We don’t get to tell the world how it works, and pretty much no science is focused on that assumption other than historical linguistics.
We do speak however we want, and we do understand, because we pick up new trends in language on an unconscious level and this is the way languages have always worked and evolved.
We’ve already ended up there, and that’s nothing new. Sure, new languages/dialects/creoles creep into the world, but that’s how all languages evolve — instead, the lines between “what’s a language”, “what’s a dialect”, and “what’s a creole” get grayed and more blurry and fuzzy.
The thing is, humans developed language a very very long time ago, and those languages evolve and split off due to large-scale trends in the lives of humans speaking those languages, for a multitude of reasons that interact and make the process essentially random.
Here’s one way to look at it: it’s the opposite of the “jurassic park” problem, instead of “your scientists were preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to ask whether they should”, linguists spent so much time arguing over prescriptivist/descriptivist arguments, and never asked whether prescriptivism actually can control the evolution of a language.
Anybody, even some random teen in some random neighborhood in any english speaking country, can come up with a new word, and it can catch on and eventually become a new accepted and widely-used word. That’s because it’s a “you can use this if you want” situation, whereas the prescriptivist version is “if you use ___ you are wrong, if you want to be right use ___ only”.
It should be obvious why telling someone they can do something is an easier argument than that they can’t, and this is why prescriptivism has failed. especially because, again, nobody saw “should of” in this post and thought “oh god i don’t know what this is supposed to mean”; instead people either understood and said nothing, or they understood but jumped in to tell people they’re wrong for making them understand in a way that contradicts what their own english teachers in school said they SHOULD be able to understand.
I mean, sort of, I guess. I also read “Frindle” in school.
There is nothing wrong with a descriptive approach to spoken language, but what I see you arguing is that written language should be treated the same way. This increases complexity in written language for no reason other than to protect mistakes in literacy.
There’s real value in preserving spelling (it often contains etymologically relevant information to the current or past meaning of the word) and also grammatical structure. If the sound of two samples is indistinguishable, why make it harder to teach or to infer meaning from by accepting spurious representations as correct?
When you write it down, you gotta follow the rules, yo.