[Wolves] Archive via Google

[sparkes]

On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 16:19, Chris Procter wrote:
> Does the English Language count as the mother of all open source projects?
All spoken (and signed) languages are giant open source projects

> 
> It is after all a language where new words are made up or imported from
> elsewhere by its community of users rather then dictated by a central
> authority, it evolves through usage and a distributed development model
> rather then by dictat (even the OED adds words when they proove common). 
the OED has started adding words that are common among sub-cultures but
not in common usage.  When they added yuppie pretty much everyone
understood it because it had been used in all sections of the media but
when they added bling recently I am pretty sure not very many daily mail
readers understood it.

> If
> you want to add a new word or gramatical structure to the language all you
> have to do is persuade enough people that its usefull, it is (sometimes
> literally) a language developed in the bazaar.
This is how all languages develop.  You can't create a language and
expect people to use it.  Esperanto and some offical signing languages
have proved this.  A pidgeon language will form and from that a creole
rather than use any language dictated from an offical source.  

> 
> If so then this implies however that grammer nazis can never be correct
> because there is no correct or incorrect usage only the opinion of
> individual users, so there can be no right or wrong in English usage only
> stable and development branches, and forks (e.g. American English).
Ebonic english as spoken by black americans has several dialects and all
of them have come under attack in the states from the media and
government bias.  You wouldn't get that great job if you went to the
interview and said 'Yo, Blood' for example.  But now not only are white
americans from poor neighbourhoods using ebonic language structures and
words but Jeremy Paxman can sometimes be heard using them on bbc2.

language grows and evolves from every misheard phrase and new jargon and
sub cultures (and I include our own) add more to the language than any
dictionary could hope to keep up with.  I once used Steven Pinkers The
Language Instint and a Noam Chomsky web page to prove that
requackingisation should be a real word in scrabble when we didn't have
a dictionary and jenny made the mistake of trying to use an prefix/afix
that opened the floodgates to me ;-)

> 
> 
> chris 
> (who's waiting for a batch database extract to run and so has too much time
> on his hands)
> 
sparkes - whos waiting for his tea ;-)