I don’t think it would be an egregious hijack, and it’s an interesting line of debate. I don’t mean to hound you on it, but I’d really like to see you expand on this.
I honestly can’t conceive of a way to use language that is not, in some way, a form of communication. Consequently, I can’t think what other possible purpose language could have than communication.
I’ve been talking about linguists in this thread. I don’t have much patience for grammarians. They’re useful for elementary-level education, but past grade school, their efforts do more to impede language than improve it. The world around us is constantly changing, and language needs to change with it. Grammarians would seek to freeze language at an arbitrary point (usually, whatever form happened to be in vogue when they were learning the language) in a quixotic quest of “correctness” that has no real-world application.
I would object to either statement.
I find pretty much all that to be undesirable. Everytime I’ve seen someone complain about the “standards” of English, it has not been because the usage they complain about is “lazy,” “sloppy,” or “imprecise,” but simply because it’s a usage different to what they are accustomed. (There are a few exceptions: the usage of the word “literally” to mean “figuratively” is the only example I can think of off the top of my head.) I especially object to “disdaining” people for how they speak, which usually smacks of racism or class discrimination. That’s not how language evolves. Language evolves to meet needs. If a word fulfils a specific need, that word is valuable, regardless of how it fits with the preconceptions of the grammarians. Change is good. Diversity is good. Innovation is good. Prescriptivism stands four-square against all three of these, and would be incredibly damaging to the language, if there were any possible way the prescriptivists could actually implement and enforce their preconceptions. Luckily, what they attempt to do is similar to trying to hold back the ocean with a thimble, so I can’t get too worked up about it. Language does what it does, and pays no heed to the scoldings of the grammarians.
Great. Just great. Thanks to my anti-prescriptivist stance earlier in this thread I am forced to sit on my hands and not slap Miller silly for his use of “different than” and “different to” when what he meant was “different from.” :mad:
Actually, I want to expand on this. A lot of the problems, as I see it, that occur between prescriptivism and descriptivism stem from the fact that prescriptive rules intended for writing are mistakenly thought to apply to speech. Thing is, they’re two entirely different beasts.
I proof transcripts for a living, and I can say with certainty that speech is damn near illegible when written down. I can look at a transcript and read a sentence that makes absolutely no sense to me, but if I turn on the audio from which it was transcribed and listen to the same sentence, it makes much more sense. Primarily this is because of inflection and stuff, but speech just does not translate well. Most of the clear transcripts come from moderated conversations, scripted conferences, and speakers trained to speak clearly and precisely, and even then it’s possible to tell that’s not how they normally talk. But conversations that would be perfectly easy to follow were I listening to them are almost impossible to understand when reading them.
Point is that a significant amount of prescriptive rules are there to make writing clean and readable. They’re not really applicable to regular speech because people can get on just fine without them. I myself would never use ain’t in writing unless I was trying to affect a conversational tone, but I use it with gleeful abandon while talking.
See my comments above. The point is that the “prescriptive rules” are actually descriptive – they describe appropriate usage for English as used in certain specific cultural applications. It’s no different than distinguishing the various forms of honorific circumlocution of traditional-usage Japanese. Formal written communication and particular unique oral usage calls for a particular subset of English that eschews sentence fragments, contractions, a certain set of “colloquial vocabulary” words, requires a certain precision and structure in presentation (which is normally instead provided in speech by the ebb and flow of conversation)…
I have been doing this song and dance on the Dope for some years now, and I think I’ve gotten one convert to the idea. But eppur se muove – it does happen to be the truth. Prose style is one element of what the linguist properly describes, if he is doing his job.
Fellow linguaphiles, I regret to say I won’t be able to continue this discussion until Monday because I am headed out of town. I struggled in vain to finish a post about why I don’t believe the purpose of language is communication, but, alas, tempus fugit. To be sure, I have enjoyed reading your responses and you have given me a good deal to ponder.
In response to PolyCarp, which is much shorter and less mentally taxing, I will say that I agree it’s possible to talk descriptively about prescriptive grammar. A person who doesn’t use what I’ve been calling proper English is still speaking English, just some other form of it. I just happen to think that proper English is superior to most other forms in most contexts and it saddens me that a great many people are unable or unwilling to learn it. I realize it’s not particularly benevolent to judge people by their words and grammar, but it’s something I feel fairly strongly about.
I’m not sure what this means. Certainly there are some people who’ve grown up only knowing one dialect of English and haven’t the means to go to school, which is where most people learn SAE.
In the context of this discussion, however, the implication is that people who use ‘ain’t’ don’t have a good grasp of SAE and in fact cannot use it, either due to inability or unwillingness. I don’t believe that’s true. I don’t have a cite to back my assertion up, but the point I’ve been sort of hinting at and dancing around with my analogy is that people can use SAE, it’s just that most of the time they choose not to.
Besides, SAE isn’t really superior. It’s just the standard. It has some features that other languages and dialects lack and vice versa.
SAE allows for distinguishing between ‘isn’t’ and ‘aren’t’ (which, honestly, is hardly a significant distinction. It’s just two forms of ‘to not be’ [hah! I split an infinitive! Take that, prescriptivists! ]), while other dialects only use ain’t.
Conversely, SAE does not have a single word for a plural second-person pronoun and must rely on ‘you all’ and ‘you guys’ and ‘all of you’ whereas other dialects have ‘yinz’ and ‘y’all’ (yes, I’m aware it’s just a contraction of ‘you all’).
SAE allows for only one modal (would, could, should, might, may, can, etc.) at a time, while some dialects allow for two. And while I’m sure ‘I might could do that’ sounds hickish to a lot of people, does it get across any less meaning than ‘I could probably do that’?
Obviously, if you prefer one dialect over another, that’s fully your perogative. All descriptivists are really looking for is the recognition that different does not necessarily mean bad. It’s possible it could mean bad in a certain context, but not bad in general.
While that was Galileo’s POINT, it is LITERALLY, “E pur si muove,” or, “And yet it moves.” *
Speaking personally, I like Great Debates where I can use smilies since my posts are rarely earth-shaking and are, really, just>this<far from drive-bys.
