Inerrancy and prescriptivism
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Today's SMBC:
The mouseover title: "Disappointed with myself that I haven't don't a creationism joke in years. Six years is like 0.1 percent of the past."
The aftercomic:
As I wrote last year, "I've wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11."
In fact, LLOG has been explicit about this puzzle for a couple of decades — see below — but I don't recall that we made the connection between biblical inerrancy and linguistic prescriptivism…
"Linguists boycott Kansas intelligent design hearings", 5/5/2005
"Chomsky testifies in Kansas", 5/6/2005
"Wrathful Dispersion Theory", 12/2/2005
"Creationist linguistics", 7/1/2007
"The science and theology of global language change", 12/30/2007
"Mailbag: The comparative theology of linguistic diversity", 12/31/2007
"The origin of speeches: Wrathful dispersion for real?", 12/31/2007
"Scientific Babelism", 4/1/2013
"Edenics", 11/1/2013
"We should not have brought a linguist", 2/5/2021
"Linguists' Babel myth?", 9/8/2022
"The Origin of Speeches? or just the collapse of Uruk?", 6/23/2023
Update — see also "Subordinate clauses as noun phrases"…
Phillip Minden said,
May 8, 2024 @ 5:52 am
Thing is, at least passively, I can accept all of these "sins".
But "just because… doesn't mean" is chalk drawn slowly down the blackboard.
David Morris said,
May 8, 2024 @ 6:44 am
In one paper I read for one subject of my masters degree, the author *seriously* cited Genesis 11 for the origin of languages.
Jonathan Smith said,
May 8, 2024 @ 6:57 am
@Phillip Minden But from a descriptivist POV, "just because X doesn't mean Y" is really one to love above others — in folding together the likes of "just X doesn't mean Y" and "not Y just because X," it spits in the eye of formal logic in the way the best natural language must :D
on reflection, Chinese languages (I'm sure among others) are chock-full of developments of this kind, which really should have a name if they don't already… these include incidentally close parallels of the above English (jiu4 yin1wei4 … [bing4] bu4 dai4biao3 就因為 … [並]不代表 …)
Phillip Minden said,
May 8, 2024 @ 7:37 am
Of course. :)
Maybe it's connected to situations in which this is typically – and smugly – used. Maybe because it is a formula of logical arguments, which highlights the gap between form and content.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
May 8, 2024 @ 8:18 am
Here's another way of looking at it.
The more/faster language changes, the more "work" you have to put in to be able to "communicate" with voices from the past, and the less culture, drama, poetry, philosophy, theology, science, etc. will be "accessible" to future generations.
A middle-aged speaker of 21st century Western Pennsylvania English opens the "Ayenbite of Inwit" by Dan Michel, written in c. 1340 in a Kentish dialect, and repeatedly encounters the word "kued", which is absent from our present lexicon, but which represented a slice of reality not wholly coextensive with the word "evil" (Michel also uses the word "yuel", but with different shades of meaning from those represented by "kued"). So, when W.Pa.M.Am.Eng.-speaker tries to "talk" to Kent.Mid.Eng.-speaker, the semiotic "bridge" is often a bridge too far to cross; information, once "built into" the language, is now lost. Through study of other texts of the period, I can get a better idea of how that particular word used to function in language, but not at quite the intuitive level I would have had if the word had remained in the working lexicon.
And it's harder. Every use of the indicative where the subjunctive would be expected creates a processing delay in the hearer/reader and loss of information as the counter-factualness or contingency of the subjunctive mood is no longer specified. Plural pronouns with singular subjects create ambiguity, dangling modifiers, split infinitives — any "innovation" is a stumbling block to comprehension. Enough blocks, and you've built a wall.
If it's not important to you to be able to access as much of our common linguistic humanity as possible; if you don't mind the author of Beowulf or Spenser or Chaucer or Michel, or even Shakespeare, being exiled outside this linguistic wall of innovation; if you don't think anything worth bothering with happened before, say, last Thursday, then "prescriptivists" do indeed look like raving caricatures of grumpy old men.
KeithB said,
May 8, 2024 @ 8:24 am
Since they have to invoke extremely rapid evolution to get from the "kinds" on the arc to today's number of species, they would probably say that God created the different language "families" and they evolved from there.
Which raises the question of why they don't do research to unearth these language families and trace them back to the Near East.
Rod Johnson said,
May 8, 2024 @ 8:39 am
Every use of the indicative where the subjunctive would be expected creates a processing delay
I think we need a citation on this. Who is measuring processing timings, and how?
Chris Button said,
May 8, 2024 @ 9:45 am
"If language can evolve, then there is no law"
Except for the laws of evolution (although violations often give historical linguists pause, who may forget that synchronic variation should be a key consideration in any diachronic study)
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
May 8, 2024 @ 10:45 am
Rod,
This isn't an electrodes-and-timers empirical thing. This is an a priori thing; as long as it's a non-zero number, it doesn't matter what that number is. Prescriptivists want that number to be as low as possible so that we can extend our minds further through time and space. Descriptivists don't mind because grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 8, 2024 @ 11:23 am
@Benjamin O.: There are intermediate possibilities, like using a deliberately archaizing register for certain sorts of texts and/or retaining archaic texts in particular cultural domains, side by side with other texts in a more current version of the language. So for example well into the 20th century in American society, a quite high percentage of Protestant churches used the King James Version for scripture lessons read in public worship, and various other sorts of texts ranging from Kahlil Gibran's _The Prophet_ (a massive best-seller in its day) to e.g. English translations of Nietzsche were done in an archaizing KJVish style. Which on the one hand increased the odds that a higher percentage of modern Anglophones would be able to grok less prominent older works written in something like that style, while on the other increasing the odds that these texts would have a certain numinous aura about them but not necessarily be intelligibly parsed or correctly understood by all of their 20th-century audience. Although the fellow in this cartoon seems so shallowly-rooted that he doesn't specifically decry disuse of the thou/thee/thy/thine pronoun set and the associated second-person-singular verb endings in -[e]st.
KeithB said,
May 8, 2024 @ 11:33 am
J.W Brewer:
And the Book Of Mormon was also written that way, even though it was dictated ca 1830.
Allen Thrasher said,
May 8, 2024 @ 11:34 am
I am told that many of the great medieval Persian poets are easily comprehensible to modern Farsi speakers, so that Rumi's words may be quoted in everyday conversation, and Firdosi's Shah-Namah can have dramatic recitations by streetcorner performers, or be recited by professional reciters to accompany those working out in traditional gymnasiums. If this is so, it is a great example of the benefits of slowing linguistic change.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 8, 2024 @ 12:31 pm
Separately, as I've said before, Genesis 11 doesn't (if you don't get too literalist about how many years Before Present the events it relates occurred) actually contradict historical linguistics. To the contrary, it offers a potential explanation for why the reconstruction of Proto-World is impossible and even proposals like Nostratic always seem to be out too far ahead of the available supporting evidence to be judged more plausible than not. The functional equivalent, in terms of subsequent developments, of polygenesis rather than monogenesis of human language.
Matt Juge said,
May 8, 2024 @ 12:33 pm
I am skeptical of claims by speakers of language X that they have substantial understanding of Ancient X. Too many non-language factors may influence such assertions.
What evidence is there that force of will can stop or slow language change?
David Marjanović said,
May 8, 2024 @ 12:33 pm
Then stop expecting. :-) In German, the "present subjunctive" (Konjunktiv I) is practically limited to reported speech by journalists. (It has become a way of explicitly not expressing an opinion on whether the paraphrased claims are true.)
Seriously? I find the attempts to avoid "splitting infinitives" stumbling blocks to comprehension. And I'm not even a native speaker! Worse, we really don't "split infinitives" in German!
There really aren't any, and I'm saying this as an evolutionary biologist.
I submit the tens of millions who believe Wherefore art thou Romeo! means "Where are you, Romeo!"…
It probably helps that the vowel changes that have happened since then haven't had any effect on the spelling.
Matt Juge said,
May 8, 2024 @ 12:34 pm
I am skeptical of claims by speakers of language X that they have substantial understanding of Ancient X. Too many linguistic factors may influence such assertions.
What evidence is there that force of will can stop or slow language change?
Matt Juge said,
May 8, 2024 @ 12:35 pm
Apologies for the double post.
David Marjanović said,
May 8, 2024 @ 12:37 pm
…whoa. No, we don't know if reconstructing Proto-Nostratic or even Proto-World is impossible, because nobody has seriously tried yet. And that is because an enormous heap of intermediary work hasn't been done yet. The existing attempts tried to take shortcuts around that fact – and that didn't work very well.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 8, 2024 @ 12:56 pm
@ David M.: Feel free to read my "is" as "may be." But many folks not reliant on the Genesis 11 account seem to think it impossible because it would require substantial evidence of a type that is currently inaccessible to us and there's no particular reason to believe will ever be accessible to us other than on a "who knows what hypothetical future clever people will or won't invent or stumble into" basis. Referring to the acquisition of that evidence as "an enormous heap of intermediary work," as if (although I realize you may not have intended this implicature) that were work we currently know how to do successfully if only we were better at writing the grant proposals and getting the necessary funding and other resources seems unjustified.
Gene Hill said,
May 8, 2024 @ 2:02 pm
Who knew that the language straw man had a religion?
TR said,
May 8, 2024 @ 2:28 pm
@Benjamin E. Orsatti, you seem to think that a society could choose to put a permanent freeze on linguistic innovation, or even slow it down significantly, through its language ideology. This is wholly impossible. There's no world in which English speakers collectively decide to desist from language change to the extent that a modern English speaker could fluently read the Ayenbite of Inwit. And a good thing too; culturally we would lose very much more through such conservatism than we gained (including for example Shakespeare, one of the great linguistic innovators).
Chris Button said,
May 8, 2024 @ 4:07 pm
Regarding the "laws of evolution", I was actually thinking in terms of a comparative perspective. Neogrammarian sound laws and the like.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 8, 2024 @ 5:02 pm
Separately, this cartoon fellow's notion of Divine certitude and its relationship to prescriptivist grammar betrays a lack of sound Biblical knowledge. To cut and paste from a straightforward internet summary:
'As early as the third century C.E., Dionysius of Alexandria said about the Greek of Revelation: “I observe his style (διάλεκτον) and that his use of the Greek language (ἑλληνίζουσαν) is not accurate (οὐκ ἀκριβῶς), but that he employs barbarous idioms (ἰδιώμασίν τε βαρβαρικοῖς χρώμενον), in some places committing downright solecisms (σολοικίζοντα).” (Eusebius Hist. eccl. 7.25.26-27)
…
'What kind of solecisms do we find in Revelation? There are singulars for plurals and vice versa; disagreements in case, number, and gender; incorrect use of prepositions; and, incongruent use of verbal tenses and moods.'
All of this weirdness tends to get smoothed out in translation and many generations of students have been taken aback when they first got to a point in their study of NT Greek that they saw for themselves John the Divine doing weird things that would have led to extremely poor grades had they tried them in their own elementary composition exercises. Yet there it is, and it is data regarding the inscrutable desires of Providence as regards grammar and prose style that any coherent Bible-based (or even Bible-congruent) theology must reckon with.
Circeus said,
May 8, 2024 @ 5:23 pm
Because no one who obsesses that much over what the bible says actually is interested in what they can't use to beat the things they don't like over the head with.
Robert T McQuaid said,
May 9, 2024 @ 3:13 am
Is there anything you can wreak but havoc?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
May 9, 2024 @ 9:04 am
(Where's Philip Taylor when you need him? Seems like he'd line up squarely with us over here at Team Curmudgeon)
Moving from the question of "should you?" to the question of "can you?", the answer is — Of course you can! J.W. Brewer has already given one example involving translations of Gibran and Nietzsche. But it is obvious, once one realizes that the rate and direction ("telos") of language change are entirely dependent on choices made by individual speakers of a particular language, that it's all a question of various localized "tipping points". If enough speakers of Language A do x or stop doing y, then that will become the "standard" and the language will change.
So, again, it's a conflict of worldviews. There is one worldview that says (see TR above): "[If] English speakers collectively decide to desist from language change to the extent that a modern English speaker could fluently read the Ayenbite of Inwit [then] culturally we would lose very much more through such conservatism than we gained (including for example Shakespeare, one of the great linguistic innovators)." That's a worldview that prioritizes the Secular / Renaissance / Humanist / Enlightenment / Empiricist human experience of the past 400 years or so and it's the worldview that generally "frames" our experience now.
But being attentive to the entirety of our linguistic patrimony and consciously choosing to draw from that wealth before rushing to adopt some new linguistic phenomenon allows us to look at, and speak with reference to, the world we see around us today _without_ having to step down from the shoulders of those who have gone before us.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 9, 2024 @ 9:16 am
Just a small point, but that's not a translation of Gibran. Gibran (who had immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon when he was 12 years old) wrote the book in English, and made the authorial choice of that particular archaizing style/register as suitable for the genre in which he was writing.
I will say, however, that generating reasonably fluent and idiomatic-by-its-own-standards results in that archaizing style is a particular skill and not one that everyone can or does master easily. I am familiar with a wide range of 20th-century English translations of Eastern Orthodox liturgical texts into English (some translators working from the Greek text, others from Church Slavonic) and there are plenty of examples of people trying to generate output in that "King James Version" style and doing it badly. Not even in terms of getting it literally wrong and muddling up their -eth and -est verb endings, but in terms of the results being turgid and clunky rather than smooth and eloquent. Sometimes these translators were pious immigrants who were not themselves L1 Anglophones but even so I feel like trying to generate the output in a more contemporary English would often have led to better results, if it were not possible to bring in a consultant editor with the requisite feel and flair to turn clunky 17th-century pastiche into elegant 17th-century pastiche. (There are other examples of people doing it well! It's not impossible! But it's not natural or easy for many folks who try their hand at it.)
Rodger C said,
May 9, 2024 @ 12:10 pm
Is there anything you can wreak but havoc?
Vengeance is the first thing that occurs to me.
TR said,
May 9, 2024 @ 12:23 pm
Lots of things are entirely dependent on individual choices yet cannot be socially controlled by fiat or ideology in any significant way. If everyone chose never to go to war, there wouldn't be any wars, but that fact has yet to bring about world peace. Human societies simply don't decide to freeze their languages over centuries or millennia. In the counterfactual world where English speakers did consistently do this, though, we wouldn't have the Ayenbite of Inwit in its current form, because Dan Michel would still have been speaking the English of Beowulf; except that we wouldn't have Beowulf because its author would have still been speaking Proto-Germanic; except that…
Sure, individual writers can choose to write in an archaizing register, though as JWB says this is not as easy as it sounds. If this choice becomes the default, what you end up with is diglossia, not an unchanging spoken language. One could again imagine a counterfactual history of English literature where the written language stayed moored in place — at some necessarily arbitrarily chosen state — while the spoken language evolved; it seems doubtful that most writers or readers would prefer to live in that world (otherwise more of them would have tried to create it). All the more so if you think "processing delays" are a problem — it obviously takes a lot more cognitive processing to read a deliberately archaizing text than one written in everyday language.
The "linguistic wall of innovation" will always be there; you can try to push it in one direction or another, but your success will be very modest and will come at a cost. In any case it's a fallacy to conflate innovation and ambiguity: some innovations introduce ambiguity, others reduce it, others are neutral or have a context-dependent effect. Some, like singular "they", deliberately introduce ambiguity because speakers think it desirable. And of course many prescriptive rules, like the ban on split infinitives, are innovations themselves.
Philip Taylor said,
May 9, 2024 @ 4:00 pm
"(Where's Philip Taylor when you need him? Seems like he'd line up squarely with us over here at Team Curmudgeon)" — here, but (a) somewhat preoccupied with non-linguistic matters at the moment, and (b) wary of offering any opinion on matters religious. To focus on (b), I am not a believer in any of the religious doctrines that obtain anywhere in this world (or even outside of it) but I wholeheartedly support the right of others to believe what they will — I may disagree with much or all of what they believe, but I will defend to the death their right to believe it. So, while I am firmly in Benjamin’s 'Team Curmudgeon' camp [1], I will not be drawn into discussing any putative connection between inerrancy and linguistics.
But speaking as a member of Team Curmudgeon, what on earth did the cartoonist mean by “haven’t don’t” in the mouseover title ?
[1] Language was perfectly entitled to change right up until the moment I was born — at that point all existing words and phrases should have been required to retain the exact meaning (and spelling) that they had at that time, but new words to cover new concepts would be permitted to enter the language provided that their etymology was 100% sound. Hanging, drawing and quartering would be the mandatory penalty for anyone seeking to introduce portmanteau abbreviations such as "gonna", "wanna" and their ilk, and a minimum of 72 hours would be required to elapse before the coup de grâce could be administered.
Kenny Easwaran said,
May 9, 2024 @ 4:11 pm
> This isn't an electrodes-and-timers empirical thing. This is an a priori thing; as long as it's a non-zero number, it doesn't matter what that number is. Prescriptivists want that number to be as low as possible so that we can extend our minds further through time and space.
I don't think this can be an a priori thing. It's a priori that a language that makes more distinctions creates more challenges for speakers and makes it easier for hearers to receive subtle distinctions in messages. And it's also a priori that a language that makes fewer distinctions makes it easier for speakers and focuses language on simpler messages that are harder to misunderstand. But whether one of these one net makes communication easier or harder, faster or slower, better or worse, is not a priori at all, but is entirely empirical, and is going to be heavily shaped by conformity with community expectations.
In any case, prescriptivists don't always advocate on the side of drawing more distinctions and having a more fine-grained language and descriptivists don't always advocate on the side of drawing fewer distinctions and having a simpler language. Some innovations that increase distinctions, and yet are opposed by many prescriptivists, include the use of singular "they", the introduction of various words like "like" that help modify the force of a speech act, various iNnOvAtIvE forms of capitalization and "punctuation", and so on.
Philip Taylor said,
May 9, 2024 @ 4:12 pm
"it obviously takes a lot more cognitive processing to read a deliberately archaizing text than one written in everyday language" — I respectfully disagree. I can read the King James version of the Bible without any processing delays whatsoever, but if I attempt to read something that seeks to paraphrase the KJV into 'modern' English I can waste literally hours asking myself (or anyone else who happens to be present) "how on earth could they have thought that that was an improvement ?". Rather as I tend to miss what a radio announcer was about to say if he or she refers to an actress as an actor, or speaks of a spokesperson rather than a spokesman or a spokeswoman, since I feel obliged to attempt to correct their [ab]usage by shouting at my radio set (sorry, Benjamin, my wireless).
Idran said,
May 9, 2024 @ 4:12 pm
@Benjamin E. Orsatti: I'm surprised no one's pointed this out to you yet, but split infinitives are a horrible example of the sort of thing you're talking about, because that rule was invented whole cloth. Split infinitives were common throughout Old and Middle English and into the start of Modern English, then started to decline in popularity around the 16th century, then their popularity rebounded again in the 18th century. But then Henry Alford and a bunch of other scholars in the early 19th century thought English wasn't Latin enough and imposed "no split infinitives" as a grammar rule along with other Latin-derived rules like "no ending a sentence with a preposition".
Those rules weren't keeping English in line with speech at the time or preserving historical English, they were nothing more than trying to force English grammar to be more in line with Latin grammar. Not allowing split infinitives in English is entirely ahistorical.
TR said,
May 9, 2024 @ 4:27 pm
"if I attempt to read something that seeks to paraphrase the KJV into 'modern' English I can waste literally hours…" — well, yes, but that's a different kind of cognitive processing.
In any case I think the cognitive processing argument is a canard, as it usually is in discussions of language. We hominids are pretty good at processing speech; a few milliseconds here or there make no difference.
John F said,
May 9, 2024 @ 5:57 pm
Pre 2011 the NIV was starting to sound archaic. I tend to lean towards the ESV because it has a great app.
Rfp said,
May 9, 2024 @ 6:21 pm
I guess I'm from the both/and school of thought on this.
Linguistic innovation is not only unavoidable, and pretty great to behold when done well, but we have a lot to lose if we let go of, say, the King James Version of the Christian Bible—regardless of what our religious beliefs might or might not be.
The KJV is in part easier to read and understand for so many of us because it was written by some of the best writers in the kingdom! But it also profoundly influenced the development of Modern English, much as Shakespeare did, meaning that its literary influence has persisted. (I recall Philip Pullman stating that he might be an atheist, but he was "a Church of England atheist," which I take to include not only the influence on his thinking of the liturgy and other scriptures, but in large part of the KJV itself, thundering down through the ages.)
So it's still more or less in the bones of our speech and our writing—even those many of us who weren't raised in the Protestant tradition, and even though we don't really employ its formalisms to the degree people did even a hundred years ago.
I'm reminded of being stunned when I first read the great early–twentieth century fantasy novel The Worm Ourobouros by E.R. Eddison. I was a big fan of The Lord of the Rings, which I had read over and over again, thinking it was written in an archaic style.
But when I read Ourobouros, I realized that Eddison was actually writing in what was basically an Elizabethan style (Early Modern English, I guess you'd call it), and Tolkien was writing primarily in a formal style that echoed Early Modern English in some ways, but was truly twentieth-century English.
Given, however, that I could understand both with equal facility, while listening with great joy to Jimi Hendrix and James Brown and Bob Dylan…
"That he not busy being born is busy dying…"
Julian said,
May 9, 2024 @ 11:42 pm
[scene: bored child in church]
"Our father which art in heaven. .."
[thinks] "Wait a moment. Shouldn't that be 'who'? 'Who' and 'whom' for human antecedents; 'which' for non-human antecedents; and 'whose' for either, I think, although 'whose' does sound a bit odd with non-human…. Oh, it's over, is it?"
Peter Grubtal said,
May 10, 2024 @ 2:03 am
The cartoon character may correspond for all I know to a common type in the States, but from where I am you almost never meet anyone like that. It looks like a caricature designed to make people who hold a certain opinion feel good about themselves.
It should be seen as positive that we share a language which is understood over a very wide geographical area and connects us with an enormous body of literature extending back, ok sometimes with a few little difficulties, over several centuries.
I suspect that many of the people visiting this site and who would be horrified at the thought of being described as a prescriptivist are subconsciously moulding their speech to maintain this commonality. To imply that "anything goes" is doing children and young people a disservice:
it's bound to reduce their chances of getting on in the academic and professional world.
Philip Taylor said,
May 10, 2024 @ 3:32 am
Julian — « "Our father which art in heaven …" [thinks] "Wait a moment. Shouldn't that be 'who' ? » — not only a bored child. I also wince whenever I hear "which art in heaven", and despite that phrase occurring at least twice [1, 2] in the KJV, according to the Church of England web site the traditional version reads :
[1] Matthew 6:9
[2] Luke, 11:2
Doug said,
May 10, 2024 @ 7:04 am
Philip Taylor asked:
"But speaking as a member of Team Curmudgeon, what on earth did the cartoonist mean by “haven’t don’t” in the mouseover title ?"
It could be some clever linguistic humor I don't get, but most likely it's just a slip for "haven't done".
Philip Taylor said,
May 10, 2024 @ 10:13 am
Agreed. “haven’t done” makes perfect sense. Odd that it got past the proof-reader, though …
stephen said,
May 10, 2024 @ 8:58 pm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Doescher
Ian Doescher has written all 9 Star Wars movies in the form of Shakespearean plays. He also has been writing Shakespearean versions of some other works including Frankenstein,
The Taming of the Clueless, and The Avengers.
Sally Thomason said,
May 11, 2024 @ 4:57 pm
@Tr's `The "linguistic wall of innovation" will always be there; you can try to push it in one direction or another, but your success will be very modest and will come at a cost.' — Not necessarily all that modest: some instances of deliberate language change have resulted in entirely new languages that combine big chunks of two different languages: Media Lengua, 90+% Spanish lexicon, all-Quichua grammar; Mednyj Aleut, Aleut with some Russian borrowings throughout but an entirely Russian finite verb morphology, Michif, French noun phrases combined with Cree verbs and sentence structure. Such results are admittedly rare as stable languages of communities (learned by children as first languages), but they attest to the possibility of drastic deliberate change. Created by communities, not by a single individual (I assume, without direct evidence), so it depends on the referent of "you" in your sentence — if just one person is "you", then you'll need to be awfully persuasive to achieve a dramatic result.
David Marjanović said,
May 12, 2024 @ 7:34 am
I realize and intend exactly this implicature. What you described is what is needed to test the hypothesis that reconstructing things like Proto-Nostratic or even Proto-World is impossible. Nobody has done it yet, despite a few promising steps in the general direction of the former at least.
TR said,
May 12, 2024 @ 11:56 am
@Sally Thomason, how deliberate are those instances of mixed language genesis? In any case, they involve much smaller speech communities; it's hard to imagine any remotely comparable degree of deliberate change succeeding in the case of a world language like English.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
May 13, 2024 @ 8:42 am
Peter Grubtal said:
"The cartoon character may correspond for all I know to a common type in the States, but from where I am you almost never meet anyone like that. It looks like a caricature designed to make people who hold a certain opinion feel good about themselves."
Looks a bit like that Stateside too!
"I suspect that many of the people visiting this site and who would be horrified at the thought of being described as a prescriptivist are subconsciously moulding their speech to maintain this commonality."
Funny, that. I'd always thought of things like "code switching" and "linguistic accommodation" as "exceptional" features of spoken language, but maybe they're rather the rule than the exception? Am I unconsciously delimiting the boundaries of the "Anglo-American / Central European graduate-school-educated 'lect" prior to commenting here?
"To imply that 'anything goes' is doing children and young people a disservice:
it's bound to reduce their chances of getting on in the academic and professional world."
Truly, we need different speech for different things we "do". Academics need the speech that allows them to discover truth (or "texts", for the po-mo "quid est veritas?" crowd). Doctors need the speech that allows them to _do_ medicine; lawyers need the speech that allows them to _do_ law.
And when we're not searching for truth or responding to the calling (vocation) we've professed, when we're just interacting with each other as one child of G-d to another, I have to use everything I know about you to "speak your language" and if you do the same, maybe we can meet on the common field of humanity and exchange a thought or two.