We should just start calling it the “true passive voice”, the same way entomologists call members of the order Hemiptera “true bugs.”
BTW, sorry for using “dumbing down.” It only semi-adequately conveys the process that I’m trying to describe, but a term that does the job more competently just would. not.come.
I suppose I could have just made one up and hoped for the best, but “rizzification” just struck me as beyond the pale, no matter how cool it may sound.
No, it’s only the sclerotic who cannot see outside their own linguistic box that have a problem. The English language is wider and deeper than you think. The “shrunk/shrank” conflation has been around for over a millennium. English has been doing just fine with it.
It’s too bad that schools don’t teach Shakespeare properly. He was extremely flexible and innovative with the English language, using old words, new words, and self-invented words. It’s one of the things that made him a master of the language.
Curmudgeons like @kaylasdad99 who don’t know the extent or history of the language try their best to hobble others’ to their own limited wordsmithy.
Britain was invaded by pretty much anyone that could reach the island, and all of their languages got all mixed up into the English we have today. Like a cocktail you make from dumping everything you can find in the liquor cabinet into a garbage can.
Simplifying, and more importantly, making it consistent can only improve it.
I believe you may have meant Académie Anglaise (if you’ll pardon my French)
I will defer to your greater ability to create faux Francophoneticizations.
Sure they do. By the same token, in my view, they can also devolve. Not all language changes are beneficial.
A skilled writer or orator finding an original way to be richly expressive is an example of positive evolution. Conversely, mistakes due to mishearing (as in “for all intensive purposes”, for example), or an inaccurate impression of the meaning of a word or expression, and other such failures introduce potential ambiguities and otherwise impede clear communication. IMHO, language devolves when these solecisms are promulgated through repetition and eventually become commonplace.
Just as with data communication protocols, effective communication requires both sender and receiver to follow the same rules. The fact that natural language is far more forgiving in this respect than computer protocols doesn’t change this basic fact. Common colloqualisms aside, in general poorly constructed sentences are objectively harder to understand than well constructed ones and may require some degree of mental decoding by the receiver. The problem with the standard defense of devoted descriptivists that “I understood perfectly well what they were saying” is that this mental decoding works just fine until it doesn’t.
The language of Shakespeare’s time was not any more complicated than the English of the present day, it was just different. Shakespeare wrote for the common masses.
Exactly
Lets see what my little friend has to say.
@discobot fortune
Outlook good
This shows how much you’ve misunderstood linguistics. Science describes the language as it is, as it was, and what it might be. A descriptivists no more defends word usage than a physicist defends gravitation.
Prescriptivists push what they think language should be. All it can ever be is opining, never science.
Seeing where the conversation has gone, it’s time for this:
I don’t know what gave you the impression that I was trying to describe linguistics. I’m well aware of what it is. I’m describing certain crusading enthusiasts, both here and elsewhere, who vociferously defend poor and blatantly incorrect language constructions on the basis of various pretexts. The linguist John McWhorter wrote an entire book about it, full of dubious rationalizations stretched to the breaking point about how commendable bad grammar is. At least Steven Pinker tries to be analytical about why certain usages thought to be “wrong” really aren’t.
That’s not a thing. Like every other prescriptivist, you denigrate any usage different than your own. It’s bigotry, exactly like denigrating the clothing, food, custom, or any other cultural phenomenon different than their own.
I don’t think you intend to be a bigot, but that’s how the phrase I quoted above reads: bigotry.
It definitely is a thing. It’s defined in dictionaries and thousands of grammar and usage guides, the key factor being broad agreement on the basic principles. I’m not talking about style guides which are often very specific and arbitrary.
I believe the word that is preferred by self-righteous braying descriptivists is “classisist”, although the word doesn’t mean what they think it does. They’re trying to describe someone who allegedly wishes to distinguish themselves from the riff-raff through the use of what is commonly referred to as Standard English. This is, however, also completely wrong.
This whole argument is only about clear communication, especially among those brought up in environments with different dialects. That’s why we have systematic rules of grammar describing how parts of speech are put together, and rules of semantics that define the meaning of what we utter. Without that guidance, language becomes chaos. There’s nothing judgmental about this.
It’s frankly ridiculous to compare language standards with clothing or other cultural norms. Why would I care what someone wears or what food they prefer? But there’s a legitimate and compelling argument for being able to communicate with other people without having to code-switch or otherwise engage in mental gymnastics. The virtue of a standard isn’t any inherent superiority to anything else, it’s intrinsic in the fact of being a standard.
Are you ever going to stop being wrong about this stuff?
Why would we stop recognizing the totally awesome fibre technique?
And that’s why no humans successfully communicated before these “rules” were codified…
Did people actually communicate in the past?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the pre-modern era, every region, and sometimes every village had its own dialect, many of which were not mutually intelligible. The only languages that covered more than a few hundred square miles were languages imposed on the country by governments or religious organizations. In fact, these imposed national languages, with strict rules, were one way the upper classes controlled the masses - because while nobles from across the country all spoke the same tongue, commoners spoke dozens of languages, and thus latter’s ability to demand their rights on a collective basis was severely curtailed. You can’t have a revolution if the revolutionaries don’t understand each other, right? It’s only when the entire country was able to understand each other that any chance of equality existed.
So yes, abandon rules of language if you want. Those who don’t abandon them will end up being the ones in charge.
Is this a serious question? Of course they communicated.
Cite? Where’s the charter of the Académie Assyria or the Egyptian Grammarian Institute’s minutes?