@MattDavis,
Quote:I'm sorry JTT. I was wrong to imply that you or any other linguist would wish for this. I truly am sorry to make or imply any such accusation.
Absolutely no offense taken, Matt.
Quote:I didn't miss the falsehoods which have been advanced. Falsehoods are advanced in every field of study. This is a direct consequence of not knowing everything yet.
Actually, that was a direct consequence of some of the shoddiest attempts at scholarship to ever hit "academia". These "rules" were nothing but fads, rules concocted to sell books, to make the enlightened ones look brighter than they were.
I'm not sure why you would suggest that it's beneficial to language, or anything, to allow "bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago" to be used as any kind of instruction today.
Quote:This (I don't think) is some black and white issue. You can keep coloring the terms with as much emotionally biased language as you want, but that's not going to make the dilemma any clearer.
First, we have to know whether we are on the same page. As I mentioned, I have no problem with prescriptions advanced for reasonable ends. I follow English orthography, I punctuate, I did my ibids and footnotes by the book, ... .
When it comes to rules that are complete falsehoods about the English language, it is a black and white issue. I think that this is where your confusion lies. Your response to my second paragraph in this post might help sort out what page we are on.
Quote:I was not suggesting that language scientists are responsible for this drift.
I was suggesting that a prescriptivist strategy of teaching slows this drift.
Most assuredly, it has. But that brings us back to "what page are you on"? The prescriptive strategy has even had a chilling [bad] effect on real language, that of speech. But these have been highly transient, easily forgotten, except by the most anal.
Even the anal mostly forget them.
But you give much too much credit to the prescriptivists.
Quote:Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse. When you have the historical picture before you, and can see how Indo-European gradually slipped into Germanic, Germanic into Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon into the English of Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and then Henry James, the process of linguistic change seems as ineluctable and impersonal as continental drift. From this Olympian point of view, not even the Norman invasion had much of an effect on the structure of the language, and all the tirades of all the grammarians since the Renaissance sound like the prattlings of landscape gardeners who hope by frantic efforts to keep Alaska from bumping into Asia.
[added emphasis is mine]
Quote:Well... I wouldn't really chalk this up as a point for descriptivists. The teaching of grammar has been (by your own claim) far too prescriptivist. Is this not evidence of the moderating effect prescriptivism has on language drift?
With all due respect, Matt, and my intent is not, in any way, to make you kowtow, I think this highlights just how much you don't understand about this issue.
Grammar is innate. Scientists have identified affected genes that affect language proficiency.
"The rules people learn (or more likely, fail to learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought" to talk."
How is some made up rule, a prescription, supposed to compete with what is to humans, innate. That why Pinker said of these prescriptions,
"or more likely fail to learn".
These prescriptions don't stick, have never stuck, because, again to quote Pinker,
"The very fact that they (prescriptions) have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system".
Quote:Matt wrote:
Could it be more helpful to have more benevolent mavens?
Mavens who are descriptivists, who monitor the global English language and periodically prescribe the new more efficient form.
JTT wrote:
Please go back and read the first few paragraphs in the link I provided, Matt.
Matt replied: I have reread the first 1/4 of the Pinker paper. I don't see the point that you are asking me to take away.
You don't understand how complex, how difficult, how mind boggling language really is. It is the most difficult thing the vast majority of us ever do and yet we do it so easily, we understand and use grammar that scientists spend lifetimes studying and still we don't know all there is to what children perform with such ease.
I know you say you have read 1/4 of the Pinker paper. You've read right over the essence of the entire issue. And I understand why. Because, see right above, the underlined.
Do you not see?
But there's still much to discuss, if we get onto the same page, or even within the same chapter.
