I have been asking for examples, you refuse to offer them.
And as humans not grammar is never a free-for all but that is another strawman.
You claim these prescriptive rules are needed, yet you can’t provide any examples of ones that must be learned through instruction and that were devised seporate from natural language.
Or are you using prescriptive grammars in a way diffrently than people typically do?
I am not the one useing prescriptive in a non-standard way.
Are you arguing for the teaching of descriptive grammar, I am all for that and I am not nessisarrly anti-prescription but I don’t think it is required for language.
Examples of what? All the grammar rules out there? No, you can look those up yourself. Saying they don’t exist is silly.
No, I have never once said they are “needed.” Just that they exist, and cannot possibly not exist.
So you never took an English class?
This is getting silly. Sure, you could learn language completely without instruction. I bet if you had the chance to let your kids opt out of all language instruction, though, you wouldn’t.
Oh, the irony of that sentence! It completely contradicts itself. I’ll let you figure it out, you’re smart.
I’m saying that teaching = prescription, even if it only teaches descriptive language.
African American Vernacular English exists and has quite complex rules without the need for someone to invent them, put them in a book and teach them.
English existed for centuries with no prescription.
Strawman once again, and completely from left field
I know this has you all smug and thinking you have a “win” but I have never claimed to be anti-perscription, and what does the definition of technical terms have to do with grammar anyway?
If this is what you think, you are ignoring consensus and “Oh, the irony” you are refusing to use a well defined field wide term definition.
Grammar taught in school is prescriptive but grammar studied by academics is descriptive. Grammar changes over time (and varies within sub populations), and the prescriptionists have to continually update their material. Only constructed languages have solely prescriptive grammar.
Issues of grammar that are still in dispute are covered by style guides.
People do invent rules out of thin air. John Dryden invented the rule against ending sentences with prepositions. He invented the rule to suggest the the language of his time was improved over the recent past. He was suggesting that Shakespeare and Jonson lacked education and learning.
More recently, Wilson Follett invented a rule against starting a sentence with “hopefully.” He reasoned that the mistake came from hack translations of how Germans use hoffentlich. Follet didn’t provide his evidence for his hack translation theory. The editors of Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage couldn’t find his evidence when they looked. They did find examples of English sentences starting with “hopefully” in the 100 years before Follet’s criticism was published, but the use was uncommon. However, using the word at the beginning of a sentence became popular in the early 1960’s.
Follet’s example shows one area where invented rules are common. Groups of English speakers are reviving old meanings for words, finding new meanings for words, or inventing cromulent new words. When this comes to the attention of language peevers, the peevers invent rules proscribing against the new. If the new catches on with a large body of English speakers, the proscription is usually forgotten. If the new fails to catch on with a large body of English speakers, the proscription is also forgotten.
Sometimes, the invented rule dies slowly. I expect my children will be surprised to learn that starting a sentence with “hopefully” was ever against the rules.
I didn’t know personal attacks were allowed in this sub-forum but I did…almost exactly two decades ago. Not that I remember much but I just checked at my local University and they cover it too.
If it taught them how to use English, it would therefore be, by definition, prescriptive, as that’s what teaching someone “how” to do something entails. And all those writers adhered to the rules that then existed in the language, because, if they didn’t, they would be unintelligible. kjasl; d afdlasfdl alsfdalasfdk afkl;asfd <- that is not following any rules of language.
This is a settled debate, people. The idea that prescriptivism and descriptivism are at odds is outdated, if not made up out of the whole cloth.
What’s the difference between some old white grumpy guy making up rules and some kid on a street corner inventing slang and the rules for using it though? One is top down and one is bottom up, but they’re still people inventing ways to do things and other people following them. The only real difference is that the grumpy white guy gets to grade papers.
I very much enjoy this site. My english, grammar, vocabulary and spelling suck compared to many on here. I still enjoy interjecting my thoughts now and then knowing full well I may get my head ripped off. Fot the most part my experience here has been a positive one and I have learned to try and be more careful about hitting keys without checking sources.
I think a lot of people preclude prescription too early, on the basis on linguistics or whatever. Here’s the thing: linguistics has no issue with prescription, prescription influences linguistic evolution.
Ultimately language, even prescriptive language is descriptive. That’s why there’s a new MLA handbook with different rules every year, because even though it’s prescriptive it evolves too (well, that and they’re in the business of selling new books). Any linguist will tell you that there are dialects and sociolects. I see no problem with certain sociolects having prescription. It’s just a different type of linguistic evolution, a type that takes into account natural language drift, but also puts a lasso around it so that people everywhere can understand one another.
This also goes the other way, language without prescriptivism works to, and is probably more natural. There is no good reason to tell people speaking AAVE they’re speaking “incorrectly”, but it is perfectly fine to say that they are not speaking clearly or correctly within a certain setting. That’s why I think it’s okay for a research journal to reject a paper written in AAVE, but it’s not okay to mourn casual speakers for “ruining English” or whatever. It’s also why I don’t think it’s good some people are making AAVE an “official school dialect” (there was a news article I can’t be arsed to find), because it sort of ruins the point of a common academic sociolect. Making AAVE an official educational language only makes it harder in the long run for them to be accepted in a university setting, despite it being a perfectly fine dialect outside an academic institution. There’s no real issue between prescriptivism and descriptivism, the problems comes when prescriptivists try to argue that all language should be prescriptive, or try to ignore natural linguistic evolution altogether (like rejecting grammatical forms that have been in use for hundreds of years with no objections).
What you describe as the “only real difference” is superficial. Teachers teach the distinction between lay and lie and the rules on when to use whom, but the people who speak English might still remove the distinction and might just drop the word whom. (I don’t understand why you see a top and bottom to English, and I don’t know why you made your assignments to the top and bottom, so I won’t really address them. If you want to follow a “top” trying to confine language, the French have an academy that tries to remove by fiat certain English words from the modern French vocabulary.)
Probably the easiest way to think of it is that English follows rules; it doesn’t obey orders.