Prescriptive grammars are neither natural nor nonnatural. That’s not what they’re about. Prescriptive grammars teach the rules of Standard English that differ from various dialects. The idea is for students to learn the grammar that serves them best educationally and socio-economically, along with their home culture’s dialect.
Pray tell, can you provide examples of “natural” prescriptive rules that must be taught yet are purely natural English?
I don’t know if I completely understand the question. In each dialect, all the rules are "natural " in that a native speaker of that dialect applies them without conscious thought. It is “natural language.” “Natural language” may differ for another dialect. Example: my mountain dialect is a natural language–it has built up in my brain’s deeper processing for my entire time on this earth. Your dialect is New Yorkese or Southern or whatever and it too is a whole and perfect system.
Now, the truly prescriptive grammar rules are taught to make native English speakers of whatever dialect “overcome” the rules in their dialects that differ from Standard English.
Well, then there’s the reverse, a sort of social prescription, such as:
“Don’t y’all go talkin’ like Yankees. They ain’t from these parts.”
The “Standard English” The English that Is taught in schools, thus is assume to be more correct and allows people to make value related to social issues such class or ethnicity?
Yes that one does require prescriptive rules because they are unnatural rules.
Well it has a lot of hard and fast rules, being prescriptive and all. Yet you can’t cite one simple rule that is “natural” but requires prescription?
The future tense will/shall rule fails
The double negative prohibition rule fails.
You as an advocate for prescription have the stack of rules, it would seem that you could come up with a few examples.
We are speaking a different dialect (metaphorically).
If I’ve sounded like an “advocate for prescription” then I have failed miserably to express my self. I am describing the reason for prescriptive grammars existing, rather than advocating anything at all.
Well, justifying prescriptive grammars by saying it you need it to learn a dialect that only exists due to prescription falls a little short 
I think prescription could be a good thing, I’m just waiting for some one to educate me that it has been so far.
Especially seeing as there is no one “Standard English”
But as the OP and others have claimed, that without prescription we would turn into babbling idiots is fiction.
As an example African American Vernacular English has very complex and uniform rules just as the queens or standard English would. They tend to be natural rules and a person can pick them out without odd Lowthian style guides and formal education.
I think prescription makes sense for entities such as newspapers and magazines.
I’ve read one idea in favor of prescription that I think merits a wee bit of consideration: the natural drift in language makes it harder for us to understand the great literature of the past. This makes me think of a Shakespeare textbook with annotations so that we can understand the word play. But then, I wonder how much those of that literature and their authors helped the language to change.
Ratatavar-- I agree with every line of your last post, except that I would tweak this phrase from the first point: you need [prescrptv grammar] to learn a dialect that only exists due to prescription
That dialect is Standard English and it does not exist due only to “prescription.” (Whatever that would mean.) Standard English is a dialect that developed naturally, and eventuallly became the *lingua franca *of American English. It carried status associations as to wealth and education. So now we use prescriptive grammars to teach the differences between other dialects and this Standard English so that people aren’t judged negatively in the world by their non-standard dialects. They can “code-switch,” as it’s called to the arbitrarily chosen “higher” dialect.
Do you mean message boards and email, etc., or are you just metaphorically referring to writing in general as a kind of conversation?
Because that would then be the age-old tradition of the study of rhetoric, which only by implication involves grammar.
In any case, the on-going problem with this thread is the insistence that prescriptivism can somehow be divorced from instruction. By it’s very nature prescription must involve some kind of instruction, whether in the modern classroom, in your drawing room from your 19th-century tutor, or by way of a William Safire column. The fundamental point of having prescriptive standards is to induce others to communicate in a way in which they otherwise wouldn’t. And that should be obvious, because if it didn’t have to be taught, it wouldn’t be necessary at all.
Yeah, that’s what I mean. What is appropriate for an instant message is not appropriate for an email.
Well, to great extent grammar doesn’t need to be formally taught, children pick up grammar as they go along by passively learning it. They make a few ‘mistakes’ as they go along, but they soon learn the nuances of English, without ever even entering a classroom. Parents do a lot of correcting, and that is of course a form of tutoring, but children acquire grammar much more dynamically than just being instructed to learn it.
What this thread mostly seems to be about is orthography, and this may be part of the confusion here. When linguists refer to grammar, they do not mean commas, full stops, and apostrophes. In fact the term ‘orthography’ does mean something along the lines of ‘correctly written’. It is orthagraphical rules that need be taught in the classroom, because they are arbitrary human constructions and are not a natural part of language. Orthography needs to be prescriptive, or else there’s no other way it is acquired.
However, my previous point still applies - that it needs to be under constant revision and change. And the role of the tutor should never be to state that these rules are somehow universally true (because there is more than one standard) instead it should be to allow children to understand how people are using orthography today. It’s both prescriptive and descriptive in that sense, depending on how you define the terms.
And where did it develop naturally?
If it developed naturally why did those who had access to education need to be taught it?
Do you really think it is not grown out of Lindley Murray’s books?
It developed naturally in the way that any dialect of any language develops. It’s designated Standard English now, but it’s just another route that language development took (takes).
As for your second question, we might think of SE as being an “ideal” (socially constructed) dialect and any actual dialect in use is a nearer or farther approximation of that. To get students as close as possible to this “ideal,” we teach the differences between D1 and D2, using made-up grammar rules.
Despite that, which got a little off-topic, do I think grammar rules and hence the “ideal” or standard dialect grew out of a grammar book? Absolutely not. Prescriptive grammar rules grew out of whatever dialect’s rules had a higher social/financial/academic standing. Prescriptive grammar rules are just a description of those forms, with Do and Don’t labels.
What you are describing is descriptive grammars, not presription, and many of the “rules” were not in everyday speach but were adapted from Latin or were made to “improve” english in the view of a historical grammarian.
Are you prescribing to me?
We’re speaking different dialects again… carry on then.
No we are not, unless you can point to prescriptive rules in yours it is not “standard english” with it’s prohabitions on double negitives, ending with a preposition etc…
What oher “prescriptive rules” are there outside of the ones that were foisted on childern in schools until a short time ago.
You learn about the history of those rules in the first week of linguistics 101.
If you like other claimed “presciptionists” can not point out a single rule, that must be taught you are not talking about prescription.
And to clairfy, when a linguist observes and writes down the rules for a naturally developed grammar they are being descriptive, teaching that grammar to others is not prescription.
I disagree completely.
Prescriptive grammar doesn’t just come out of thin air either. Nobody sits around and makes up random grammar rules. The rules are simply descriptive norms being taught as rules. That’s the only difference. That, and the fact that prescriptive teaching often lags behind how people are currently using language, since changes in language often involve breaking old, and thereby creating new, “rules.”
You may be right when it comes to linguists, whose act of “teaching” isn’t quite the same as an English teacher’s, but my point is that there isn’t this bright line between description and prescription. They work together.
Oh, come on. You’ve got to be kidding. The only rules of grammar that anyone feel firmly about are no prepositions at the end of sentences, and nobody cares about that any more? Grammar is a free-for-all, anything-goes, post-modernist utopia now, and nobody is ever shunned, graded poorly, fired from a job, or otherwise expected to follow certain rules of grammar? Bullshit.