Somewhere Eric Blair and a whole bunch of lawyers are trying very hard to not piss themselves.
But communicated what, exactly? Has any important information that benefited the human species and advanced our knowledge and well-being ever been communicated by grunts, gestures, and facial expressions? Well, at least since the discovery of fire?
Ummm…I get by with ASL and a great bitch face reasonably well, most days.
Could French-speaking medieval commoners from Normandy communicate with French-speaking medieval commoners from Provence? I don’t think they could - I don’t think their dialects were mutually intelligible. I do know, however, that the nobility from Normandy and Provence could communicate with each other.
Well, take Latin for instance:
Cicero and his contemporaries of the late republic referred to the Latin language, in contrast to other languages such as Greek, as lingua latina or sermo latinus. They distinguished the common vernacular, however, as Vulgar Latin (sermo vulgaris and sermo vulgi), in contrast to the higher register that they called latinitas, sometimes translated as “Latinity”.[note 1] Latinitas was also called sermo familiaris (“speech of the good families”), sermo urbanus (“speech of the city”), and in rare cases sermo nobilis (“noble speech”). Besides the noun Latinitas, it was referred to with the adverb latine (“in (good) Latin”, literally “Latinly”) or its comparative latinius (“in better Latin”, literally “more Latinly”).
Latinitas was spoken and written. It was the language taught in schools. Prescriptive rules therefore applied to it, and when special subjects like poetry or rhetoric were taken into consideration, additional rules applied. Since spoken Latinitas has become extinct (in favor of subsequent registers), the rules of politus (polished) texts may give the appearance of an artificial language. However, Latinitas was a form of sermo (spoken language), and as such, retains spontaneity.
It seems to me that Latintas, or “the Latin of Good Families”, with its formal. prescribed rules, was one of the tools the Romans used to control their empire. There might not have been an official “academy”, but the rules were agreed upon in one way or another by the ruling class.
I’ll put Orwell aside for now, but I think “legalese” is definitely a highly formalized language that the ruling class (lawyers) uses to keep themselves on top of the heap. If more people spoke it, we’d all be better off.
Who’s talking about grunts? I’m talking about language.
Which exists absolutely independently of rules of semantics and grammar.
Only one of those groups spoke “French”, so not really, no. The other didn’t speak a different dialect, they spoke a different language. They’d have less difficultly speaking with a Catalonian or someone in the Italian Alps.
That languages don’t line up with modern borders isn’t some revelation.
Would you like me to count up all the empires and pan-national religions that existed before the Late Roman Republic?
I wasn’t arguing that a polity codifying a language didn’t happen. I was arguing that other, much earlier, empires had empire-wide languages without that.
And that’s without going into Levantine and Silk Road trade - humans have not really had a problem communicating over distances.
Fine - then Anjou and Aquitaine. Same story.
Show me an ancient empire that didn’t have an official “court” language, or if it did, that this language didn’t have generally accepted rules.
Look, it is the nature of language to fragment into dialects and new languages. It’s why we have so many of them. The only way to slow this process is to fix them in place with rules. Now, you may not think that this is good thing - but I do. The more people understand each other, the better.
Note that I’m saying that dialects should be eliminated, somehow. On the contrary - bilingualism and code-switching are excellent things. Who better than us to know? After all, neither of us is using his native language right now.
No, I’m pretty sure they would have been able to communicate. That’s why we consider them speaking dialects of Old French, not separate languages (unless you’re counting Gascony in Aquitaine as it sometimes was, in which case, some of them are)
“Generally accepted rules” is not the same as codified grammar and semantics.
It’s also the nature of languages to syncreticize and creolize.
Why the hell should we want to?
As a mother-tongue speaker of not one, but two, bastard amalgamation creoles, you bet I don’t.
English wouldn’t even exist if the Normans were as rule-bound as the later French.
Not sure what you mean - English is very much one of my native languages.
This is one helluva tangent.
Only on this messageboard would a thread dedicated to complaining about other people evolve into a detailed debate on linguistics.
Way to be irritating and endearing at the same time!
That’s not how languages work. That’s not what dictionaries do.
You’re arguing that physics textbooks keep satellites in orbit.
Or is it a detailed complaint about other people’s silly ideas about linguistics?
Third base!
Even our bitching is erudite.
You’re exactly like the person complaining about when or not to wear white. Clothing has legitimate purposes, but that doesn’t excuse complaining about nonconformity to your clothing expectations.
Descriptivists are David Attenborough.
Prescriptivists are Cesar Milan.
Sometimes, you revel in the endless variety of nature, other times, you need your dog to stop chewing the furniture.
Endirritating
If you think that there’s a parallel between the colour of someone’s clothing and my ability to comprehend what the hell they’re saying, then you’re entirely missing the point.
Defining our lexicon and providing usage examples is precisely what dictionaries do, but as I said, there are also thousands of important grammar and usage guides. The fact that in the past some have been excessively stringent sometimes to the point of silliness doesn’t detract from the importance of the basic principles. If you end a sentence with a preposition I have no difficulty understanding your meaning, but if your whole sentence structure is mangled or you throw in pronouns with unknown referents, then I may genuinely not know what you’re trying to say.
I’m not, and they don’t. But physics textbooks written with both grammatical and mathematical correctness definitely help put those satellites there. In the whole general area of human endeavour, particularly in science, language precision is closely related to mathematical precision.
From today’s i newspaper :-
Quote of the day
“The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from
sticking to the matter at hand” - Lewis Thomas
