[Wolves] Archive via Google

[sparkes]

On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 18:47, Aquarius wrote:
> Chris Procter spoo'd forth:
> > 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).
> 
> This is the "prescriptive vs. descriptive" argument, and it's been played
> out in pubs and senior common rooms and offices throughout the land. In
> essence, you can't work with a language which is entirely descriptive, 
> because then every speaker has their own private language and there is no
> possibility of communication.
everybody has their own language and grammer but there is enough common
ground that communication can take place.  This is the very essence of
Chomskyism.  As people expand their sphere of influlence the language
they use becomes more and more common.  Hence the amount of current
urban speak being added to the OED due to the success of garage music
and the amount of black americanisms being added due to the success of
rap and r and b music.  You wouldn't know bling if the music containing
such slogans hadn't crossed over into the mass media.

>  There must be areas of commonality between
> private languages. To drag this thread kicking and screaming back onto topic,
> think of "English" (where that's a subset of whatever you speak) as being
> like the Linux Standard Base, or like the work that freedesktop.org are doing;
> it defines a set of common standards so that people (or projects, or desktop
> environments, or widget sets) can communicate. So grammar Nazis are like the
> LSB people; you're being told off for being non-compliant with "standard"
> English. 
"Ven you read the speeches in the papers, and see as vun gen'lman says
of another, 'the Honourable member, if he vill allow me to call him so'
you vill understand, sir, that that means, 'if he vill allow me to keep
up that 'ere pleasant and uniwersal fiction.'" ;-)

Language evolves.  chaucer would have looked at shakespere as shakespere
would look at dickens as dickens would look at the gorilla joke ;-)

Experimentation takes place on the edges of normallity.  The language
moves forward by constantly changing.  New words have to appear as new
things arrive to describe (and I am not saying you claim different) but
therefore new grammatical constructs can also appear as the environment
requires.  I speak a dialect of english (pure black country) that is
closer in grammer and vocabulary (at least contempory in many cases) to
the language of Dickens above but grammer nazi's will tell me off for
not using the queens english.  It's not her fucking language ;-) when
was the last time she added a new word? we use a lexicon at every
meeting.

> You can add all sorts of extra words, and tell people what they mean;
> private communities will have private languages. (Think of warez d00ds, or
> SMS-speak.) 
you don't even have to tell people what they mean.  People are too shy
to ask and just presume what you mean by the context the new word is
used in.  This is how new words can spread from community to community
in subtully different ways. The jargon file has lots of examples of
words like this.  But we all know what you mean, even if the meaning is
not given explictly it is still available.

> The distinction between the LSB and "standards-compliant" English
> is that the standards are, to some extent, undocumented; the OED, for example,
> is very clear that they don't prescribe "English" like the Academie Francaise
> prescribe French.
If they don't why do you? HHOS ;-)

Oh and before someone misquotes Mark Twain he never said 'I don't trust
people who only have one way of spelling a word'  that was proved when
Al Gore used it in the 90's and the best twain experts in the world
where payed to prove him wrong.  there is no documented evidence that he
ever said it and the first quotes attributed to him appear after his
death. 

> 
> Aq.