Does descriptive linguistics mean "anything goes"?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Certainly there’s a Standard English; more than one, as a matter of fact. (“Overcoming an injury that sent their star striker to hospital, Hibernian have won the game,” is perfectly Standard English … in British English. But not in American English.)

But Standard American English is just one dialect of English, and the point of linguistics is that non-standard dialects are not ungrammatical. Casual English, or African-American English Vernacular, or Gullah Geechee, are governed by rules just as much as SAE. The classic example is AAVE’s use of the verb “to be” - “be” + gerund is a continuous state: “He be working” = “He has a job”. Versus “he working” = “he is at work right now.” This is no more ungrammatical than Standard Spanish’s use of ser and estar to make almost the same distinction (Ella está cansada = “She is tired”. Ella es mexicana = “She is Mexican”).

That’s not to say that there are not appropriate times to use one dialect or another. But as I said upthread, that’s about sociology, not linguistics.

22

Surely context is vital to taking such a position. Would tell off James Joyce for his laziness and rudeness? Or just choose not to read his work if you find it tedious?

If someone wrote the instruction manual for your microwave in the style of James Joyce interspersed with emoticons, you might justifiably feel aggrieved. (Although James Joyce with emoticons might be better than without.) But prescriptivists have been claiming for hundreds of years that the language is decaying to a point where we can no longer understand each other - you know the cites as well as I do. Human language has never needed policing for clarity of meaning.

When I hear something unusual in my language, a term or construction that I would not use myself, my own first reaction is always “that’s interesting”. It may turn out to be an uninteresting error, or it may turn out to be an interesting variant that I not encountered before, or (especially if it’s a young person) something completely new to me. Either way, I just don’t feel the compelling need to go to work to purify the language into a monoculture. If somebody says “to all intensive purposes”, if I’m their teacher or I’m proofreading their resume, I’ll correct them. But otherwise, I don’t feel some pompous desire to lecture them for careless laziness, I don’t feel that the integrity of the English language is at risk, and I don’t feel that the beauty of any great work of literature has been compromised.

It’s the negative framing of so much prescriptivism that I deeply distrust. What proportion of prescriptivism extols the beauty or elegance of language? Threads about language pet peeves quickly attract thousands of posts about how stupid and annoying they are - expressed with vitriol, the false certainty of ignorance, and an utter lack of curiosity about language. It is indeed a cultural phenomenon, and not an attractive one.

23

The article on Standard English notes that there are several different “Standard Englishes”

There are substantial differences among the language varieties that countries of the Anglosphere identify as “standard English”: in England and Wales, the term Standard English identifies British English, the Received Pronunciation accent, and the grammar and vocabulary of United Kingdom Standard English (UKSE); in Scotland, the variety is Scottish English; in the United States, the General American variety is the spoken standard; and in Australia, the standard English is General Australian.[4]

24

I just managed to find the excellent article on this that I wanted to link to above.

25

IOW one should “play the room.” Speak and write with awareness of who your audience is, or at least who you want it to be. Communicate in a manner authentic to you, and understandable to them, and listen respecting their version as proper.

26

Language has several pieces: grammar, usage, spelling, and pronunciation. Spoken language is not the same thing as written language. Language in everyday use can be split into high formal writing (academic texts), formal writing (newspapers and books), casual or colloquial writing (used with friends), argot (technical language idiosyncratic to a profession), slang (terms to bound a group and keep outsiders confused), and several others.

All of this should be well known and unnecessary to repeat. Yet the accusation that something other than strict adherence to formal English, confused with Standard English, is wrong, or worse ruining the language, has been around for hundreds of years. This is only possible because English has been changing rapidly for every one of those hundreds of years. Obviously the notion that English could have declining from an earlier Golden Era for hundreds of years is ridiculous. To the contrary, English always gets better - larger, suppler, more inclusive, less subject to arbitrary rules.

That there are arbitrary rules that can be applied to English comes from the class hatreds of Victorian England. As I said in another recent post, the elites in the 1800s resented the fact that mass media made lowbrow works much more popular than “good” literature. The “Penny Dreadfuls” - copied in the U.S. as dime novels and story weeklies - flooded a market of newly literate lower-class readers. The elites struck back by laying down rules of correctness, applying to all four parts of the language mentioned in my first sentence. That’s where not ending a sentence with a preposition comes from, along with hundreds of “rules” about usage, and the adherence to a certain dialect as the only “proper” pronunciation and so on. The OED was massively influential in codifying these new rules, and deliberately left out all of this new usage, along with scientific terms, Americanisms, and other stuff the editors thought beneath them. The “rules” entered textbooks in all-British influenced countries and stuck them like old gum.

Actual grammarians and linguists saw through this nonsense almost immediately. Otto Jerpersen’s Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (1909) tore them to pieces on one level and even the very conservative Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) attacked as unfounded the not ending sentences with a preposition “rules.” (American usage guides appeared with less conservative usage guidance.)

After WWII, Americans started getting hysterical over inadequate schools. Putting this post-Sputnik as people often do is wrong: Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It came out in 1955. Yes, exactly when people today insist was a Golden Age for public schools. In 1961, Webster’s published a Third edition of their unabridged dictionary, making it descriptive rather than prescriptive. The howling can still be heard down the decades. They were of course right - all dictionaries today are descriptive - but a number of self-appointed amateurs threw their bodies on this grenade, releasing bestselling books about the dangers to the English language and the “rules” that the lazy and unwashed were breaking. Jim Quinn’s American Tongue and Cheek (1980) is a delightful breakdown of their sheer ignorance about language and its actual daily use.

Little has changed since then. Self-anointed “experts” still declaim that English is dying and that the Internet is killing the corpse. None of them ever bother to make thoughtful distinctions about the many ways that language gets sliced or whether their strictures apply to any specifics: the hand-waving cuts the outdoor temperature on a hot day by twenty degrees.

The world of 2022 cannot be compared to any past era. Instead of seeing in some sort of print the words of 1% of adults, we now get to see something close to 100%, fixed in electrons and passed around the world. The average writer will be far less able and far less interested in obeying the arbitrary rules of “Standard English.” This is nothing more than a continuation of a process that is nearly two centuries old.

Nobody knowledgeable ever says “anything goes” for any piece of text. Conventions still exist, levels of formality still exist, grammar still exists, the inclusion of apostrophes in plurals is not approved of in any “good” writing. English is surely changing - just as it always has. Good writing remains enjoyable, and high formal remains unreadable. Adapt yourselves, not the language.

27

Then there are those who view English prescriptivism as inherently discriminatory towards nonwhite and non-wealthy speakers, which I disagree with while acknowledging the facts and forces that led to that conclusion.

28

The people who have been voicing these complaints for hundreds of years are not quite wrong, in a sense, otherwise people would not need to approach Old English or even early Middle English as if it were a foreign language.

Sometimes radical changes are more suddenly and artificially introduced for political purposes, like changing from Arabic or Chinese letters to Latin orthography, or government committees (including linguists!) re-engineering the vocabulary.

29

That’s not supporting claims that language has decayed. You’re making an argument that it would be better if a language remained static - just so that we can read ancient literature more easily? That seems like a very minor benefit, and dubious in itself. Isn’t there also artistic merit in a greater diversity of literature, using different forms of language, even if it takes some effort to read it?

30

This reality is exactly opposite the claim you make. The changes in every part of the language were far greater and swifter than any of the changes going on today, which are mostly extremely minor alterations to usage.

Nothing compares to the Great Vowel Shift, which took place independently of the standardization of spelling which followed, giving us a language that can have spelling bees. Imagine the indignation of today’s pedant-wannabes if either of these were happening now.

31

I (personally) make no such judgements that the word “decayed” would imply—but the people mentioned in that article as grumbling about neologisms may have been noticing actual fashions or long-term trends in language use.

About reading ancient literature, what always seems to be suspicious, or at least deserving close scrutiny, is when the government does something like mandate a completely different alphabet, ensuring that the following generation will read all literature up to that point with difficulty at best.

ETA according to the Wikipedia summary of the Greek language question, legislation in 1834, 1836, as well as 1856 indeed decreed that Ancient Greek should continue to be the only language of the readers and textbooks used in schools, so it’s not like that was not a real idea, but evidently it was not really popular in the long term.

32

Then those people will need to support what they “may have been noticing” with evidence.

This has nothing whatsoever to do what the article was about - the perennial claims that the language is in decline through laziness and carelessness, and that if heroic prescriptivists don’t make a stand, pretty soon we’ll all just be grunting like chimps.

33

That same Victorian period saw a near-worldwide effort to simplify and systematize almost everything. A series of international conferences, along with uncounted national ones, saw experts wrangling over the best ways to do weights and measures, coinage, and time. Proposals were also made for a universal language, or a new invented language, or for simplified spelling. (A good light summary of all the overlapping efforts is in Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet

Simplified spelling was a cause of hundreds of major figures in the 19th century, especially Melville Dewey, he of the Dewey Decimal System, who changed his name to Melvil Dui at one point. Lots of people indeed screamed that it would make older books unreadable. Yet it was in the American tradition of Noah Webster, the dictionary Webster, who Americanized as many words as he thought he could get away with as he revised his dictionaries. We still use almost all those spellings.

Early English is a different language in most ways and uses several letters not in our current alphabet. The thorn character Þ comes from runes, a language once used in England. It was pronounced like th and was slowly replaced by the two-letter combination. When movable type arrived the thorn wasn’t revived, so y was often used as a replacement. ye was pronounced the, but that is forgotten today in Ye Olde Knickknack Shoppe.

Other countries did take more drastic steps and change whole alphabets. Kazakhstan is currently in the process of changing from Cyrillic to Latin. Countries do this for global conformity, just as they change from right-hand driving to left-hand driving, or go off national currencies to a single Euro, or adopt metric. There are always pros and cons, winners and losers. Some changes are better thought through than others. Rarely is the cause of the change some evil conspiracy of government to rewrite the past or make reading dead languages suspicious. Languages are especially good at surviving obstacles, and the kind of people who think that having a knowledge of runes is dangerous are best ignored. They’re actually the dangerous ones.

The world needs to make enormous changes and short-term sacrifices to cope with global warming. The more countries who adopt these changes in the shortest amount of time the better. People are screaming about these as well. Change is often necessary, nevertheless, and retreating upon “but we did it that way in the past” is often no more than a child’s tantrum.

34

Speak for yourself :slight_smile: I do not agree with all of his proposed revisions. (I have not published a dictionary, though.) You are correct that many journals and publishers accept “American” spelling and some even mandate it.

I wish I could remember exactly what he said, but I remember agreeing with someone who said something along the lines that official reforms were creating a distinction between classes of people (those who think they know better than the illiterate peasants), and that it should not matter whether someone uses pre- or post-1996 German orthography, for example.

PS

I do not imagine that tinkering with German or Russian or Chinese orthography will fix global warming one way or the other! :slight_smile:

35

Not exclusively those. More broadly classist to the preference of the educated elite which of course has some overlap with other groupings.

Of course those with power are in individual subcultural circumstances not always the educated elite. Sir Patrick Stewart was interviewed on NPR a while back and shared his Yorkshire origins. A very specific dialect. No surprise that to be accepted in North End theater he learned and mastered Received English. But he would sometimes be off work and inadvertently slip into it with his mates. It was not well … received. In the neighborhood those with power spoke the Yorkshire dialect and staying accepted required remembering where you were and with whom.

36

Actually, something almost exactly like that is going on right now - linguists call it the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Speakers of the American Inland North accent - which stretches across the Great Lakes from Rochester, N.Y. to Milwaukee: think Bill Swerski’s Superfans from Saturday Night Live - started raising the a vowel in words like trap or hat, which is occasioning a reshuffle of all the short vowels in that dialect.

37

I’m just going to respond to a couple of specific points here, to avoid going around in circles with repetitive arguments.

I disagree and I think this mischaracterizes the argument I’m actually making. Sure, “rules” like never ending a sentence with a preposition (which I think someone mentioned upthread) fall into this category, but that’s a classic straw man because it’s not actually a rule that any sensible person would make or care about.

What I’m talking about is a consistent pattern of bad writing, full of convoluted sentence structures, bad grammar, spelling mistakes, awkward punctuation, eggcorns (“for all intensive purposes”) and all the other familiar markers of marginal literacy that we see so often. The problem with this sort of bad writing is not that it violates some contrived standards of cultural etiquette but that it’s problematic for entirely practical reasons, because it undermines the essential purpose of language which is effective communication.

The argument that it’s perfectly acceptable writing because you can, in fact, understand it is rather specious, somewhat like arguing that an unmarked, rutted, boulder-strewn dirt road is just as good as a well-marked freeway because it will ultimately get you to your destination. It may, but it’s a slow and bumpy ride, and you may get lost or bust an axle on the way. I’m certain that if you measure the time it takes a reasonably literate person to read well-written prose compared to the time it takes to struggle through semi-literate composition, the latter will take significantly longer, and will be much more susceptible to misunderstanding. It’s why reading bad writing leads to a sort of mental exhaustion – it’s hard work!

Yes, this is indeed exactly what @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness was referring to. But the fact that we all have an innate instinct for language and a deeply ingrained sense of the most rudimentary aspects of grammatical structure is hardly the point here. The ability to say “Me like sammich. Sammich is good. Me want more.” is not the basis of a successful civilization or a productive society.

Those who would dismiss this as mere classism should have a look at the article cited below. It suggests that low levels of literacy in the US cost the economy an estimated $2.2 trillion a year. It contains the following rather astonishing statistic (bolding mine):

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. That’s a shocking number for several reasons, and its dollars and cents implications are enormous because literacy is correlated with several important outcomes such as personal income, employment levels, health, and overall economic growth.

38

n.b. English is my second language,
I wanted to add a footnote by saying that this exact debate is going on, AFAIK, in many languages. For certain in my first and third.

Umm… Language, like evolution, does not have a purpose. Language just is.

39

It varies, but the truly unintelligible is more likely than not to be rejected for publication, so its influence is self-limiting. Furthermore, as weak prose it has no impact anyway, compared to an unforgettable masterpiece.

The U.S. is estimated to have 79% adult literacy[1], well below the average global or developed nations rate, but who claims that the problem is with the English language (or other languages used in the US) itself?

  1. National Center for Education Statistics, 2019. Sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences. ↩︎

40

Humorous of course that they write “low levels of adult literary … “

Reading and writing competency and rigidity to a specific set of rules that do not necessarily reflect actual usage are at best tangentially related.

It is advantageous for those who want to participate in an educated environment, professionally or otherwise, to all know what others understand as proper and to apply that usage. To do otherwise risks presenting yourself as less educated and possibly less competent. To do otherwise impedes effective communication. Those rules being a bit slow to change makes sense. It allows us to focus more on the ideas than getting distracted by variant usages.

But language is subject to evolution. There will be variety out there. Many variations will fail. Some will spread and become the predominant form.