site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

How do people here land on the subject of "prescriptive linguistics"? I personally find myself getting irritated at people putting down prescriptive linguistics. For the past 10 years, anyone who tells someone they're not using certain words correctly gets shut down as a prescriptive linguist. I'm reminded of an SSC post

Calling someone a rent-seeker is sort of an economist’s way of telling them to die in a fire

I feel like the same applies for "prescriptive linguistics", it's basically a cudgel, a way of telling someone to die in a fire.

Charitably, people justify this argument by saying that linguistics is a descriptive science, so there's no place to be prescriptive. In their mind, linguistics is meant to just describe how people use language, not tell people how to use it.

Uncharitably, I think this sounds like a general push towards post modernism, a pushback on the notion that there's any correct way to do anything. They're not just against prescriptive linguists, they're against prescriptive anything.
In an anti-prescriptivist mindset, someone may use prescriptive linguistics as a cudgel to shut down alternate ways of expression, and (of course) enforce colonial and white supremecist standards on unprivileged minorities. This especially comes up in conversations about double negatives, which are commonly used in various low-class English variants, like ebonics.

I might push back on anti-prescriptivists by saying, many people who try to enforce grammar rules not a linguistic scientists, but people who are trying to enforce sense in their worlds. Therefore, they're not prescriptive linguists; they're not even linguists! They're people living in the world and using language as a tool, and they want that tool to be as effective as possible.
It's not their sacred duty to simply understand language no matter what, so don't call them a prescriptive linguist. When I tell someone not to use the word "literally" as emphasis, it's because I'm finding that the word literally is less useful than it used to be, and I want to combat that. Nowadays there is no word that accurately works in as an antonym for "figuratively"; the meaning is muddled and unclear because people have watered down the definition of literally to be something else.

I also sense there may be political aspects to the use of the word "prescriptive linguistics". relating to Noam Chomsky's history in the field and his political affiliations, but I don't know enough about that to comment. I'm interested if anyone here has info on this.

I feel like there's conflation in these discussions between four rather different things.

  1. People who insist on "rules" for "good English" that were never rules of English grammar in the first place. Examples include things like "don't split infinitives" and "don't end sentences with prepositions", or even typographical bits like the use or non-use of the Oxford comma and where to place punctuation relative to quotation marks.
  2. People who insist that a meaning of a word is wrong because it is not etymologically "correct" or because it was not the "original" meaning, even though it's had the one they object to for centuries.
  3. People who complain about dialectal differences in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, because these don't match usage in their preferred dialect.
  4. People who object to trends in speakers of a specific dialect (usually, let's face it, a prestige dialect; nobody cares about other ones) using words or phrases incorrectly per the current or recent standards of that dialect.

People in category 1 or 2 are just silly (or maybe I should say nice rather than silly)? They are often the butt of discussions of prescriptivism and I think that this is what was originally meant by the term.

People in category 3 are either trying to enforce their preferred dialect as the "best" form of the language, or just don't understand that different dialects are not simply inferior or erroneous forms of the prestige dialect. In the latter case they are just wrong; in the former, they simply have a goal that a lot of people disagree with, and therefore those people find it useful to imply that they are just wrong.

Category 4, on the other hand, includes almost everyone at one point or another, and trying to tar them with the same brush as 1-3 is always and only a rhetorical move to try to establish the change that the category-4-person opposes as a fait accompli.

Objections to double negatives might be category 3 or category 4. Objections to "literally" as an intensifier, "could care less" for "couldn't care less", "bemused" meaning "amused" (surely a generation ago this one would have counted as a malapropism?), "irregardless", and the like are pretty much squarely in category 4. Argue about each at the the object level if you want, but these objections are not the result of a misunderstanding of linguistics or a chauvinistic desire to devalue another dialect, but out of a desire to preserve something that the objector finds valuable about the language.

(I'm not sure whether arguments about "enormity" and "peruse" are more category 4 or category 2, but I'm afraid that we're likely stuck with at least a double meaning if not outright replacement by this point.)

PS: If you want a masterclass in analyzing what confusions can result from the same word being used in different senses across time and space, I highly recommend C.S. Lewis's Studies in Words.

People who insist that a meaning of a word is wrong because it is not etymologically "correct" or because it was not the "original" meaning, even though it's had the one they object to for centuries.

My favourite example of this are communists, and my favourite examples of linguistic prescriptivisms among that group are Stalinists, who would demand that people call them "Marxist-Leninists."

I don't buy the arguments that prescriptive grammar is important for us to communicate clearly and unambiguously with each other.

The peeves of prescriptive grammarians are at best of marginal relevance to comprehension. When has a sentence-ending preposition, a figurative use of "literally", or even a dangling modifier ever actually caused you to misunderstand someone? If such mistakes make communication less "effective" it is mainly by causing educated readers and listeners to do a double take, because they were trained to sniff out such infelicities, rather than by actually causing confusion.

Of course, real confusion can be caused by malformed sentences, such as those produced by language learners. But descriptivism, not prescriptivism, is what foreign language learners need. To be understood, they need to learn how sentences are actually structured by native speakers. Shorn of those fundamentals, what remains of "prescriptive grammar" consists in large part of arcane proscriptions against mistakes that foreigners would never make in the first place. Foreign language teachers and learners understand this: the primary goal is always to "speak like a native!"

Of course, in parts of society where a narrower linguistic standard is observed, the student, native or otherwise, benefits from prescriptivist instruction by acquiring the ability to signal education, propriety, intelligence, and competence to others. (But even here, the student is best served by a descriptive mindset, refined to the set of people they wish to impress: what are the rules that reputable publishers actually follow? Learning rules that have long been ignored even by the educated is a waste of time.)

But moving from the individual to the society, what is the argument for having such a standard in the first place? I think an honest argument has to have something of the flavor of arguments for tradition, etiquette, and decorum, rather than appeal to "clarity" or "effective communication".

When has a sentence-ending preposition, a figurative use of "literally", or even a dangling modifier ever actually caused you to misunderstand someone?

Literally every day. Quick, without any other context what do I mean by that?

Contra your implied point, there's no actual way to tell just from my response whether I actually mean it happens to me each day of my life, or if I simply mean that it happens a lot. That's kinda the point of why people bitch about people butchering "literally". Meaning has been lost thanks to tolerating this nonsense.

Fair enough on this specific case; I'll allow that it's ambiguous. But I want to put the case of "literally" in the category of exaggeration or creative usage. You may as well complain that any figurative language can be ambiguous. Never use hyperbole! Never use metaphor! Never use sarcasm! Never use a colorful idiom! It might be unclear! I think this kind of misses the point. A better approach for a teacher would be to say: text your friends how ever you like, but if you use "literally" figuratively in a business email, you might come off as unserious, because it's not the norm.

The thing I think is tough about that is that one form of usage bleeds over into the other, because the language people use every day is what shapes their perception of what is acceptable. This reminds me of something I read about parenting, actually. Children are prone to misbehave, and teenagers even moreso than little kids. As a parent, you can't stop that pushing of boundaries. But the suggestion I read is that if you make the boundaries stricter than you think they should be, then when your kids push the boundaries they will still be in the realm of acceptable behavior.

It seems like a similar dynamic might be important in terms of teaching kids how to communicate properly. Like you said, people don't really care that much how kids text their friends. But by harping on how they should talk while they text their friends, you might be able to instill in them proper writing in more formal contexts. I don't know for sure. But it feels like there might be something there.

Preserving a more formal and technical dialect is useful. It makes more sophisticated conversation a little easier, and keeps the past accessible. At the very least, it's important to maintain technical vocabulary within fields.

The actual motivation, of course, is so that you don't look stupid.

The problem with trying to make language rules explicit for students is that it violates two department's inclinations.

Linguistics majors are predisposed to fetishize change. They find language stability boring. Stability isn't why they got into this niche subject.

Meanwhile Education majors find education programs that work tremendously boring. They hate Direct Instruction, the 'Banking Model' of education, and they hate repetition. Doing sentence diagrams day after day isn't what inspired them to get into teaching.

What happens when you combine a group that finds teaching sentence structure boring with a group that thinks teaching kids grammar at all is inherently evil is that each group feeds into the other. The teachers are given an worldview that says they never need to teach sentence diagrams, they don't need to repeatedly explain the same concepts over and over again, and they don't have to awkwardly watch as some kids get it and some don't. The teachers in turn advocate for the linguist worldview. A Gordian knot is born.

For thousands of years all languages have mutated in this way, so a causal link to contemporary movements is provincial and unlikely to explain much. Of course, politics tries to exert pressure on language. If everything is racist, genocidal, tyrannical, grooming, then nothing is.

I think what you have valid concerns over is word skunking. This video expresses those same concerns, and documents skunking and definition change in the case of bemused (perplexed,confused), ambivalent (extreme interest in opposing ideas), literally (literally), decimate (a modest reduction), etc.

You may enjoy this article: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/descriptivism-self-negates-on-multiple

The fight over the meaning of racism is the last time I remember caring a bunch and getting involved in a linguistic argument.

I personally prefer a definition where any written word or anyone being described as racist should meet the strictest standard of hating other races or being a supremacists for their own race.

And a slightly looser description for the spoken word or describing actions as racist, such that the action only needs to treat races differently without interpreting the motive behind the treatment. This part is mainly a concession to popular use of the term.

I realized though that I was on the losing side of that battle. Racist and racism has almost the broadest definition possible in popular use nowadays. And, as I thought it would, it has lost most of its stigma as a result.

The issue I have with linguistic prescriptivism is that it tends to arise from a pretty incorrect view of how language works. The processes it decries as degrading modern English are the same things that led to the emergence of the language from Middle/Old English, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European etc. I'm sure there were plenty of people during the great vowel shift upset at the "incorrect" way people were using the language, but I've never heard anyone advocate that we go back to speaking like Shakespeare.

I suppose you could argue we should forcibly halt all further evolution of English so that things don't get any worse, but prescriptivists IME seem to want to maintain some supposed purity or elegance of the language as it stands, which is like believing it's necessary to maintain the chastity of the village whore.

They're people living in the world and using language as a tool, and they want that tool to be as effective as possible.

There are a plenty of things we could do to make English more effective that no one seriously suggests because the language works well enough as it is. Should we reintroduce "thou" so it's possible to unambiguously differentiate between singular and plural second-person pronouns? (Ironically enough, most hardcore prescriptivists would frown on people using "y'all" instead of "you" when referring to multiple people, even though it's strictly more effective at conveying meaning!) Maybe we should condense the inflections of "To be" so that instead of saying "I am", "You are" and so on we just say "I is" "You is" etc. English isn't a pro-drop language, so those extra conjugations are redundant. You might say that would sound ugly, and I agree, but I also think the Welsh accent sounds ugly, and I recognize that doesn't mean anything in terms of how effective or legitimate a way it is of using the language.

English and its closest relatives have, as far as anyone can tell(and Old English is one of the few older Germanic languages well documented enough to tell how it worked- spoiler, a lot like modern German but without articles. But neither Old English nor Old Norse allowed pronouns to be omitted, even though verbs conjugated) never been pro-drop in the way Spanish is. Neither are English's close modern living relatives- Dutch, German, Afrikaans, the Norse languages, etc all require an explicit pronoun. For that matter the main non-Germanic influence on English is French, which is notable as the only non-creole romance language which isn't pro-drop.

If your argument is that English should go all the way in dropping inflections, just like Afrikaans did, it'll probably get there eventually. Unlike Spanish which seems to be developing some inflections, English is losing them and this is a process that you can see yourself if you care to.

English and its closest relatives have, as far as anyone can tell(and Old English is one of the few older Germanic languages well documented enough to tell how it worked- spoiler, a lot like modern German but without articles.

I'm not sure what I said that you're responding to with this paragraph.

If your argument is that English should go all the way in dropping inflections, just like Afrikaans did, it'll probably get there eventually.

I'm not arguing that English should drop inflections. My point was that if you're arguing that English should be as effective a tool for communication as possible, then there are hundreds of ways the language could be changed for that purpose (including removing obvious redundancies like some inflections) beyond simply insisting people use the word "literally" correctly. I don't think such measures are necessary, because languages are pretty adept at maintaining their ability to communicate all shades of human meaning effectively.

I know McWhorter's argued that there's been substantial celtic influence as well.

I don't expect it to drop inflections any time soon (at least, in American dialects. I imagine there are places which have already lost them). I think most of the loss came as a result of cross-contact between various cultures—Britons, Saxons, Norse, French—leading to a variety of dialects, with features from simpler dialects winning out over time. On the other hand, English now looks more standardized and stable, and I imagine the influence of online media to be a force gravitating people towards more standard dialects.

That's mostly conjecture, don't take what I said too seriously.

Should we bring back thee & thou?

Yes

We should.

As George Fox points out in his classic book titled

A Battle-Door For Teachers & Professors To Learn Singular & Plural; You to Many, and Thou to One: Singular One, Thou; Plural Many, You.

Wherein is shewed forth by Grammer, or Scripture Examples, how several Nations and People have made a distinction between Singular and Plural. And first, In the former part of this Book, Called The English Battle-Door, may be seen how several People have spoken Singular and Plural; As the Apharsathchites, the Tarpelites, the Apharsites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Susanchites, the Dehavites, the Elamites, the Temanites, the Naomites, the Shuites, the Buzites, the Moabites, the Hivites, the Edomites, the Philistines, Amalekites, the Sodomites, the Hittites, the Medianites, & c.

Also, In this Book is set forth Examples of the Singular and Plural, about Thou, and You, in several Languages, divided into distinct Battle-Doors, or Formes, or Examples; English, Latine, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Caldee, Syriack, Arabick, Persiack, Ethiopick, Samaritan, Coptick, or Egyptick, Armenian, Saxon, Welch, Mence, Cornish, French, Spanish, Portugal, High-Dutch, Low-Dutch, Danish, Bohemian, Slavonian: And how Emperors and others have used the Singular word to One; and how the word You came from the Pope.

Likewise some Examples, in the Polonian, Lithvanian, Irish, and East-Indian, together with the Singular and Plural words, thou and you, in Sweedish, Turkish, Muscovian, and Curlandian, tongues.

In the latter part of this Book are contained severall bad unsavoury Words, gathered forth of certain School-Books, which have been taught Boyes in England, which is a Rod and a Whip to the School-Masters in England and elsewhere who teach such Books

We should value our language.

Should we reintroduce "thou" so it's possible to unambiguously differentiate between singular and plural second-person pronouns?

Hiberno-English (the dialect I speak and write in on this website) already makes this distinction with "you" and "ye/yiz".

already makes this distinction with "you" and "ye/yiz".

That might have worked in the past, but I think using the latter these days just gets you branded as a Kanyesexual.

Lol

C'mon, you've been around long enough to know we don't allow "Lol" and "This!" and "Based," etc. If you want to seal clap, at least add something to the comment.

Should we reintroduce "thou" so it's possible to unambiguously differentiate between singular and plural second-person pronouns? (Ironically enough, most hardcore prescriptivists would frown on people using "y'all" instead of "you" when referring to multiple people, even though it's strictly more effective at conveying meaning!)

As someone who uses "y'all" and someone who believes in making language more effective, yes, I'd be in strong favor of people starting to say "thou" again.

Maybe we should condense the inflections of "To be" so that instead of saying "I am", "You are" and so on we just say "I is" "You is" etc.

That wouldn't make English more effective, it'd just make it easier to learn.

That wouldn't make English more effective, it'd just make it easier to learn.

It would actually make it less effective. Condensing inflections seems to be discarding redundant information, but the redundant information makes verbal communication more robust to noise. And verbal communication in real environments has to happen over very noisy channels.

I'm sure this argument applies in some cases but proves too much when applied to English IMO. If we accept that English's minimal conjugations for person and number (limited in almost all cases to the '-s' suffix for third-person singular) encode useful redundancy in any real sense, we'd have to accept that modern English is monumentally inferior to languages with fuller inflectional profiles like Old English or Proto-Germanic for reliable communication. And we should subsequently advocate for far more extensive language reforms, like a complete re-introduction of the case system, than e.g. telling people off for using double negatives or whatever.

As conjugations have been lost, there's been a trade-off to add more redundancy via other linguistic structures. For instance, modern English uses articles, prepositions, and modal verbs much more extensively than Old English. Forcibly dropping more declension and conjugations would just drive us to other forms of redundancy.

If there were a free lunch to be had by dropping redundancy, some individual would have taken it and used it to process information more efficiently.

I think written English could use some significant reform (making spelling more consistent), but the language itself is on the Pareto frontier of information efficiency.

but the language itself is on the Pareto frontier of information efficiency.

Hasn't it been shown that all major spoken languages are riding extremely close to that frontier? Once many people speak a language over a long period of time, it quickly evolves towards extreme information efficiency. For its speakers, there's really no clear advantage English has over its more complicated cousin German, or over Chinese or Arabic.

English is clearly the easiest to learn if you aren't a speaker already, so there's certainly an advantage in that. But only a very minor advantage for English natives...

100% analytic languages seem reasonably effective at communicating(source- Mandarin hasn't developed inflections).

Yes, many way have redundancy. Analytic languages trade off less morphological redundancy for more contextual and syntactic redundancy. The overall information bandwidth of different languages is pretty similar, with noise (the average not differing much between different societies) and neural computational power being the limiting factors.

As someone who uses "y'all" and someone who believes in making language more effective, yes, I'd be in strong favor of people starting to say "thou" again.

Fair enough. How far would you take this? We could introduce distinctions between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns, so that in the expression "John spoke to his brother and his wife", we would know whether the wife belongs to John or his brother. What about clusivity? Or reintroducing noun classes/genders for easier referent-tracking? There's no shortage of cool features we could add if we were really interested in making language "as effective as possible".

That wouldn't make English more effective, it'd just make it easier to learn.

Removing obvious redundancy in most cases would count as making something at the very least more efficient, if not more effective outright. It certainly wouldn't make it any less effective, but it would enrage those same prescriptivists who claim to care primarily about efficacy of language.

Fair enough. How far would you take this? We could introduce distinctions between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns, so that in the expression "John spoke to his brother and his wife", we would know whether the wife belongs to John or his brother. What about clusivity? Or reintroducing noun classes/genders for easier referent-tracking? There's no shortage of cool features we could add if we were really interested in making language "as effective as possible".

Omg, I would love a way to distinguish between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns. I really face that problem all the time when I'm trying to write extremely succinct reports of technical details to senior leadership. And the only way around the problem is to make it wordy-er. And in the worst, case, you didn't even think to distinguish up front, and you realize after the email was sent that it's confusing or could have multiple meanings.

I'm generally in favor of useful features.

Well, I'll at least say your the first consistent prescriptivist I've come across!

Omg, I would love a way to distinguish between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns.

If you ever find yourself in the unlikely position of having to pick up a Nordic language, you'll have that to look forward to.

A lot of the more obnoxious prescriptivism came from elites who wanted to impose (imagined) Latin grammatical structures on English. Entirely status and in-group signaling, and totally contrary to English as spoken by anyone at the time.

Recognizing that AAVE has its own consistent structures doesn't mean you can't teach SAE. But it's kind of important to recognize that it's a shibboleth to indicate education level and class membership. That way you know that someone who says nucular is an outsider and therefore an enemy (if only by virtue of the fact that they're choosing to use the vernacular of the enemy).

SAE is not merely a shibboleth. Keeping language variation small enough that mutual intelligibility is largely maintained is an important practical goal.

It's totally a shibboleth. I speak 'redneck English' and can easily understand both Ebonics and standard American English(and can speak either) a bit more easily than the Queen's English and whatever the hell Marianne Williamson speaks(and can't really speak either of those), and understand both of those with less effort than blue collar Hispanic ESOL(where it'd be 50/50 on whether it's easier to switch to Spanish), and understand that a bit more easily than Chinglish, which I in turn find easier to understand than something like Dutch(which I can, haltingly, string together a few sentences in).

Now the signal "I am literate" is a valuable one to exist and we don't have to pretend it isn't. That someone finished society's basic educational expectations is important information, and choosing to share or not share that information is an important contextual signal. A black who speaks Ebonics in a job interview is sending a signal and that signal is 'I'm either uneducated or don't give a shit'.

'redneck English'

I was about to ask you a question under the impression that you meant the dialect(s) spoken in Appalachia, and then remembered that you live in Texas, not in my neck of the woods. Rednecks are everywhere!

Anyway I mostly agree with you. Dialectal variation in American English is shockingly small, certainly compared to e.g. the variation in Great Britain. Aside from maybe AA(V)E, which does seem to have some unusual grammatical constructions, pretty much all varieties of American English are easily mutually intelligible if you are willing to try. (For what it's worth, though I grew up in Appalachian Virginia, my parents are highly educated transplants. My brain seems to produce exclusively SAE even though I have no trouble understanding the Appalachian dialect/accent.)

Southern American English is likely considerably closer to AAVE than Midland or Mid-Atlantic, so no surprise you can understand it better than many other white Americans. And most Southerners seem to code-switch to something less distinctively southern when talking to Northerners.

Yes, in a formal register I speak something closer to SAE than my usual red dirt dialect. "I" instead of "aaah" but I keep the guttural R and the WH sound.

“Guttural R”, as in French or German? Can you give an example word?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_approximant#Voiced_velar_bunched_approximant

When I say agree and argue it sounds like I'm saying the standard American English R and a modern Greek gamma or Arabic GH at the same time. It's not a gargle like the Parisians use. Clear sounds like 'klee-a-growl' said by an auctioneer. Raise and red sound a bit closer to the SAE counterparts but rude and rub don't.

Languages naturally diverge over time. To counteract this, you need some kind of central coordination to act as a centripetal force. I don't trust any group to police language in a way that doesn't betray their own parochial biases. And, in particular, I don't trust the people who today have the power to police Proper English not to mangle it even more than they already have as a display of raw power.

It's better to let individuals use language in whatever way that's most useful to them. Those who want to participate in the broader consolidated market can naturally learn to code switch to the dialect they need to.

To be clear, I don't think you have any obligation to try to communicate with people using dialects that are grating.

Languages naturally diverge over time.

And this is generally bad, as it makes communication more difficult.

I don't trust any group to police language in a way that doesn't betray their own parochial biases.

Indeed. And some of those groups (like the woke, and AAVE speakers demanding other blacks not "talk white") are going to try. So the other groups better try too, or they're just going to get wiped off the language map.

I think we've arrived at the reason why so many hegemonic empires choose a prestige dialect with few or no native speakers- Latin, Mandarin, Koine, etc.

So the other groups better try too, or they're just going to get wiped off the language map.

Your claim is that SAE is in danger of being wiped off the language map?

Your claim is that SAE is in danger of being wiped off the language map?

Not "Standard American English", the living dialect. But the version spoken today, yes.

Yeah, I guarantee that all dialects spoken today will be unrecognizable in a few hundred years except for those fortunate languages who are already dead, that being the only real way for a language to endure unchanged.

Shakespearean English is recognizable today. And I'm talking about dialect, not accent. And I'm not talking about a few hundred years, but a few decades. Your post is just a smokescreen.

More comments

It makes communication between groups more difficult. But it makes communication inside the group and communication of who is in the group easier. Which of those is more useful or valuable is largely dependent on what you're valuing and circumstances.

If everyone in the world spoke perfect English only then communication would be easier. But we would certainly have lost something of value I think.

I agree with others downthread that linguistics per se is and ought to be descriptive, but that there's nothing wrong with having and enforcing prescriptive rules based on some standard form of a language. This argument, when it isn't a vehicle for fighting over the relative social status of different class/ethnic groups, mostly boils down to some people choosing to emphasize the fact that such standards are arbitrary, as opposed to the fact that we need them in place to communicate.

As for myself, while I have my own idiosyncratic pet peeves (proper use of the subjunctive is one I picked up after learning a few Romance languages), I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads literally explode.

mostly boils down to some people choosing to emphasize the fact that such standards are arbitrary, as opposed to the fact that we need them in place to communicate.

A standard can be both arbitrary and necessary. My pet example of this is roads: sure, it's arbitrary whether a country mandates people drive on the left side of the road or on the right, and it doesn't really matter which one of those two they pick… but it's absolutely essential that they pick one.

Surely they aren't literally exploding?

I think he was demonstrating that he was "deliberately provoking pedants".

Although, I suppose that sufficiently harassing someone might cause him/her to eat his/her gun, which would cause his/her head to "literally explode".

I think this sounds like a general push towards post modernism, a pushback on the notion that there's any correct way to do anything. They're not just against prescriptive linguists, they're against prescriptive anything. In an anti-prescriptivist mindset, someone may use prescriptive linguistics as a cudgel to shut down alternate ways of expression, and (of course) enforce colonial and white supremecist standards on unprivileged minorities. This especially comes up in conversations about double negatives, which are commonly used in various low-class English variants, like ebonics.

Indeed, just another way to cope with the lower verbal abilities of non-Asian minorities :always_has_been.jpg:

See also: “Other ways of knowing” for a more modern example with regard to lower non-Asian minority test scores and academic achievement.

Who? Whom?, as always. It’s open season to mock rural white Americans for their accents and vocabulary, but ebonics are to be worshipped as if they’re channeling the voices of Shakespeare and Nabokov from the beyond.

mock rural white Americans for their accents and vocabulary

channeling the [voice] of Shakespeare... from the beyond

Even though the rural Americans sound more like Shaksper Sheakspaer Shakhspere that playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon than a $CURRENTYEAR1 BBC announcer does....

Uh, aren't the English dialects most similar to Shakespeare northern British ones, particularly Scottish English?

Red dirt English(rural northeast Texas and the Oklahoma lowlands) is probably the most conservative American dialect, true, but a lot less so than Scotland or rural northern England.

Supposedly the American English dialects most similar to Shakespeare are Appalachian (so rural, but hillbilly rather than redneck). Of course these reconstructions are always questionable. For instance, just because a rhyme wouldn't work unless you pronounced a word a certain way doesn't mean it was pronounced that way; Shakespeare may have used an obsolete or novel pronunciation to get his rhyme to work.

hillbilly rather than redneck

I always understood that "redneck" was a general term referring to poor(er) rural, white, mostly southern Americans, including Appalachians south of Pennsylvania, which would generally (though not totally) encompass "hillbilly" -- a person living in rural Appalachia or the Ozarks -- rather than excluding it. ("Hillbilly" is also generally more derogatory -- or at least some people seem to think so; I definitely recall people trying to make a distinction between "rednecks" (themselves) who were, well, definitely Appalachian rednecks and probably hillbillies by most people's estimation, and the "hillbillies" who lived way out in the boonies.)

Is it common to interpret the terms as mutually exclusive, or am I misreading your sense here?

"Redneck" comes from the sunburn a farmer would get working in the fields, "hillbilly" refers to living in the hills (the Appalachians and the Ozarks, mainly).

As to whether they're exclusive, I always considered them such (if you were a hillbilly you weren't a redneck). I don't know whether the people referred to think so, though there's a scene in Ozark which indicates at least one writer does.

Both terms are generally derogatory, though they've sometimes been adopted by the referents.

I might push back on anti-prescriptivists by saying, many people who try to enforce grammar rules not a linguistic scientists, but people who are trying to enforce sense in their worlds. Therefore, they're not prescriptive linguists; they're not even linguists!

The point is that any particular set of grammar rules is arbitrary and in flux. Yes, double negatives are not correct in Standard American English, but there's no reason that makes them ungrammatical in Black Vernacular English. BVE has its own internal rules and structures in the same way that SAE does - it's not a free for all.

Of course the progressives take it too far and think it's oppressive to teach kids SAE despite the fact that it is way easier to get ahead in life if you don't exclusively speak BVE.

Uncharitably, I think this sounds like a general push towards post modernism, a pushback on the notion that there's any correct way to do anything.

There's quite obviously no one correct way to speak. I guarantee there are rules that you break that would have caused pearl clutching in previous generations. Everyone's a prescriptivist until it's time to say "up with this I will not put".

I guarantee there are rules that you break that would have caused pearl clutching in previous generations.

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,

egsode eorlas.

I knew Tolkien was a linguist and did a lot of work with Old and Middle English, but for some reason it's only just now that I realized all of the names/words used by Rohan (i.e. Eorlingas) are just thinly veiled Old English.

Theoden sings....

I am the very model of a mediaeval Anglian

The truth of this suffuses every nerve and every ganglion

While some proclaim my folc to be Germanic (miscellaneous)

I am in in fact bewildered by this theory extra-aneous

I'm neither Lombard, Hun or Goth or any of that eastern crowd

We're Anglo-Saxon to the core although we fight on horses proud

Some seem to think our armour bright could easily be Persian

But it is plain to see that it is mediaeval Mercian

https://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/theories/medieval.htm

I would have also accepted

Perle, pleasaunte to prynces paye

To clanly clos in golde so clere,

Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,

Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.

I don't even need to know Middle English to know that last line is dirty.

I think prescriptivism is of vital importance, because without it language is completely incoherent. I find linguistic descriptivism to be rather vapid, actually - all you can really say as a descriptivist is "that person sure is using word X to mean Y". You can't actually say whether it is correct or incorrect. I would much rather have an effort (imperfect though it is) to at least try to say "this usage is the correct one" so we can actually communicate with each other.

I also think it's interesting that you mentioned postmodernism, because sometimes linguistic descriptivists feel like they are engaging in serious motte and bailey arguments. And of course, Scott Alexander's original essay talking about motte and bailey arguments focused on the rather bad faith arguments you sometimes see used to defend postmodernism. So I think there's definitely something to the parallel you are noticing.

I will say, in fairness, that language does change over time and at some point you need to accept it. But at the same time, I think you can take that too far, and it usually is taken too far. Some people are just plain ignorant, and they speak/write the language poorly. There's absolutely nothing wrong with acknowledging that and refusing to lower one's standards.

I think prescriptivism is of vital importance, because without it language is completely incoherent. I find linguistic descriptivism to be rather vapid, actually - all you can really say as a descriptivist is "that person sure is using word X to mean Y". You can't actually say whether it is correct or incorrect.

You can say whether it's correct or incorrect, it's just that "correct" means "consistent with language norms of a particular time and place" rather than "consistent with the eternal unchanging Platonic ideal of English".

Regarding your last paragraph, I'm a fan of expanding Scott's principle of Give Up 70% of the Way Through the Hyperstitious Slur Cascade to all questions of controversial linguistic change.

For relatively uncontroversial issues, like a new technology you can "give up" and accept the new terminology at 1% adoption rate, but when it comes to considering something a slur or a faux pas, I think people waiting until 70% of people feel that way is a good rule of thumb.

If a large group of people act on this principle, it has the desired function of keeping language relatively stable.

The use of "literally" for emphasis annoys me. So does saying "everyone" when you mean "most people", or "literally no-one" when you mean "almost no-one". Oddly, I find that even here where most people have above-average verbal skills, I see this quite often.

Using "everyone" to mean "the overwhelming majority of people" is fine, as it's usually obvious that the person is speaking figuratively for emphasis (although Eliezer noted years ago that this can quickly shade into a value judgement and appeal to conformity). Likewise "literally everyone has a torso of some description" - the qualifier "literally" indicates that the statement is not intended to be taken figuratively - the statement means exactly what it appears to mean on its face. What's not okay is "literally everyone thinks Kamala is the superior candidate".

It's called hyperbole. Everyone knows what those words literally mean, which is why using them figuratively creates emphasis. It's not a lack of verbal skills, in fact it takes verbal skills to be able to encode and decode the hyperbole.

It may be called hyperbole, but it isn't. Look at how it works

Contrast the example from up thread

I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads literally explode.

with this alternative

I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching them become literally annoyed.

It doesn't work as emphasis because "annoyed" is not itself hyperbole so asserting the literal truth of it falls flat. Had one written hyperbolically

I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads explode.

then one can add shock value with literally, until your listener realizes that you are piling hyperbole on top of hyperbole, literally double hyperbole. Eventually listeners identify the figurative use of the word "literally" as a double hyperbole. Then they think the figurative use is like telling a joke, and then when nobody laughs, repeating it, but louder.

The problem is that hyperbole can eat a word. It ate "very", "truly" and "really". All of those words originally meant "this is not hyperbole; this happened in reality" - look at the etymology. Rampant hyperbole destroyed that meaning, and now the hyperbolic meaning is considered the normal one. Now we have to use three syllables if we want to indicate a lack of hyperbole - "actually" or "literally". If we lose those, we'll have to use more than three.

We need a word of reasonable length to signify "I am on simulacrum level 1; this is truth"; this is a very-important concept. Hyperbole, ironically, has a strong tendency to eat such words. The only viable solution seems to be exactly the kind of opprobrium that you're decrying; shame people for using these words as hyperbole.

I've noticed a lot of "presciptivism for me, descriptivism for thee". That is, the distinction is employed strategically. When it's prescribing a language change you like or think is moral, then it's fine. When it's prescribing a status quo, or a change, you dislike, then don't you know language evolves and changes with the times? The culture war angle is obvious. Left wing prescriptivism is inevitable, natural, aligning with the direction of history. Right wing prescriptivism is wrongheaded, denying the nature of language itself, and just slowing the march of progress.

For me, sure, understand linguistics in your own head descriptively, but engage in your language community prescriptively, or else the other guy's preferences win by default. Descriptivism in practice is unilateral disarmament.

Grammar Nazis versus Grammar Commies, to coin a phrase.

I tend toward the prescriptivist end of things simply because if words don’t have fairly solid definitions, any sort of communication between groups is difficult or impossible. If we don’t mean the same thing when using the same word, if I mean “race supremacist” when I say “racist” and you mean “not specifically dismantling white privilege”, we aren’t communicating effectively here. And either we begin inserting potted definitions in our writing, or we accept that the other person is going to take you to mean the worst possible thing.

The issue is that when there is a correct language, it creates a target for any group to seize for its own ends. And if you trust the people best positioned to seize correct language--university academics, media personalities, and government bureaucrats--to be careful stewards of useful, pleasant English, I don't know what to tell you.

Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive, doesn’t mean that there’s no such a thing as a grammarian.

Obviously there’s a place for both- someone has to describe how people actually talk, like John Connor in terminator 2. Someone also has to teach people how to communicate, and communicating properly and on the same page is actually a thing that is important so that everyone understands each other.

Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive, doesn’t mean that there’s no such a thing as a grammarian.

Yes, you're right. I had forgotten, but the term my college acquaintances used to call me was a prescriptive gramarian when they wanted to tell me to die in a fire. So my main point should be that I think it's okay to be a prescriptive gramarian.

Linguistics is inherently descriptive rather than prescriptive because it is a science, the attempt to study and understand the reality of language as it actually exists. However, that does not mean there is anything wrong with trying to advocate for language norms or trying to shape language so that people use it the way that you prefer it to be used. It's just that when you try to shape language, you are not doing linguistics, unless the reason you are trying to shape it fundamentally scientific - for example, as some kind of experiment to gather more data for linguistic analysis. You are doing some kind of social activity, but not the science of linguistics.

Both linguistics and trying to shape language norms to make language more effective are worthy activities, they're just two different things.

Not to sound like a silly fence sitter but to me this is obviously one of those "it takes both types" things.

Obviously language evolves or we'd all be speaking Proto-Indo-European or whatever came before that.

Obviously people need to be taught the right and wrong way to use the present language or it would be impossible to communicate.

Some people are inclined to push the boundaries of meaning and those people will never give a fuck when you tell them they used a word wrong.

Other people are inclined to feel indignant about every improper usage and those people will be teachers creating smart, sharp, well-spoken citizens.

The language will drift regardless.

  • Excitatory and inhibitory neurons
  • Liberals and conservatives
  • The thrust from the bowstring and the drag from the fletching
  • Descriptivists and prescriptivists

idk it all seems necessary

I think there's a few subcategories of of boundary pushers that play very different roles.

There are people who deliberately make up a new word, or adapt an existing word or phrase to a new use. Science in particular is a common example. These people need to be able to communicate their ideas, generally new ideas about things people have never thought of before so there isn't a word for it, so language has to change or their ideas can't be communicated, or would be communicated very inefficiently with entire phrases. Pushback is not really needed here unless they make some really stupid choices.

There are people who modify or use words to mean things as slang out of some combination of convenience, usefulness, and laziness. Kleenex does not mean the same thing as "tissue", "Coke" does not mean the same thing as "soda" or "pop", someone who is "cool" is not actually cold, something that is "hella lit" is not burning with the fires of hell. Basically every contraction ever is just a shorter faster way of saying two words that go together so frequently that you don't need to say the whole thing in order for someone to figure out what you meant. It's laziness, but it's efficient laziness. Here, I think, is where your explanation makes the most sense. Some people will advance such slang, some people will push back on it, and hopefully the good ones that serve their purpose well will survive while the dumber ones will fail to become popular and die.

Then there are people who just learn and use language incorrectly. "Let me axe you a question", "supposably", "could care less". There's a thing they're trying to say, it's language that already exists, they just heard it wrong or remembered it wrong or pronounced it wrong. Unlike the above case where the user is generally aware of what the old language was and chooses to use the knew language, people in this category are not usually doing it on purpose. It's just a mistake. We don't treat five year olds learning how to speak as guides and copy their language, we correct them and teach them how the language is actually used. Similarly, we don't treat people with the language skills of five year olds as guides and copy their language, we correct them and teach them how the language is actually used. The only reason prescriptivists might not be useful here is that adults are hard to teach, and your prescriptivism is likely to fall on deaf ears, but they're absolutely right to enforce to the extent that it is possible here.

If we're looking at things from a coarse scale then all the boundary pushers can push forward, and the prescriptivists push back, and then the more useful things get more people pushing forward and fewer people pushing back and survive, and both forces are useful. But if we zoom into these categories, the third category is not serving any purpose. Vanishingly few if any of their mistakes are actually useful language changes, in many cases they make things more confusing and ambiguous. Most of their mistakes are destined to die because nobody wants to copy them, and the few that do survive end up making the language worse and harder to understand for future generations. Granted, there isn't an unambiguous line at the boundary between deliberate slang and mistake slang, but there are examples that clearly fall into one or the other. Meaning a substantial portion of "boundary pushers" are just useless and the prescriptivists who oppose them are just right, even if the dynamic you point out is occurring at higher levels.

I don’t think you can just say that there’s something wrong with ‘axe’ over ‘ask’. It’s an arbitrary change, and aren’t most changes in language like that?

There are obviously cultural/educational assumptions about person who says axe, and that influences whether or not it’s beneficial to say it, but if tomorrow every English speaker switched and only ever said ‘axe,’ then what’s wrong with that?

If the rules of language change or dialects form, then there will always be intermediate points where people say a mix of things

Then there are people who just learn and use language incorrectly. "Let me axe you a question", "supposably", "could care less". There's a thing they're trying to say, it's language that already exists, they just heard it wrong or remembered it wrong or pronounced it wrong.

What makes more wrong to "axe" a question than to say "it's"? Contractions did not always exist and most languages I'm familiar with don't have them, certainly not to the extent English does. It's clearly the legacy of people hearing, remembering, and pronouncing "it is" wrong.

What makes more wrong to "axe" a question than to say "it's"? Contractions did not always exis

"Axe" in place of "ask" isn't a contraction: the two words have exactly the same number of letters and syllables. I don't think one could even argue that one is superior to the other from the perspective of euphony.

Obviously they are not the same. My question is why one is better than the other.

Can't comment on why one is better than the other. Just pointing out that one is obviously not a contraction of the other (unlike "it's").

  1. Redundancy: Axe already has a meaning. It's primarily a noun, a tool/weapon that chops things. It's only a verb when you mean hitting something with an axe, in which case it's very much not very friendly to axe someone. Any language change that overlaps other meanings receives a penalty. I suppose the contraction "it's" overlaps the possessive "its", and being able to tell the difference matters: it will almost always be clear whether you meant to ask something or hit someone with an axe, so this isn't a huge point against it, but it is a point.

  2. Efficiency. "It's" is faster and easier to say than "it is". I very highly doubt that the legacy is actually people hearing, remembering, and pronouncing "it is" wrong, so much as being lazy and pronouncing it quickly. People who are entirely aware of what "it is" means might choose to say "it's" to save time. Meanwhile, "Axe" and "Ask" are approximately the same length to speak or write, and I think "axe" actually takes slightly more time/effort in the middle of a sentence because it doesn't flow as well. Nobody would ever use "axe" on purpose unless it's to fit in with other people who already do it by mistake.

  3. Momentum. I am not an etymologist, I don't know exactly when/why/how "it's" became a thing, but by this point it is clearly established, while "axe" is not. Maybe it was a mistake at the time when "it's" became a thing and if people had resisted it then we could have less ambiguity about "its" (and might be allowed to use an apostrophe like we do with every other possessive). I'm not sure. But at this point it has been established and people understand it and use it. The primary purpose of language is to communicate with each other, consensus is incredibly useful in that regard, so all changes are immediately suspect and need to have positive reasons to justify themselves. If the majority of people said "axe" and some people started saying "ask" instead, I would oppose that on the same grounds.

Obnoxious pedantry: In fact "axe" can be used as a verb in another context, when it is used figuratively to mean "to eliminate, remove, or cancel" something (or someone).

Obviously this affects your point not at all.

Aks predates ask; it's the form preferred by Chaucer and the author of Beowulf. Ask is a modern degeneration enforced by London statists in their government building exercise. An unsavory task (or, more appropriately, tax).

This is the type of ridiculous and irrelevant retort beloved of the kind of progressive critic who points out that evidence that a handful of black people might occasionally have graced Elizabethan London with their presence means that a depiction that uses the city’s modern demographics is in fact entirely historically accurate.

Lest this dissolve into another generic debate about Lyotardian postmodernism and grand narrative, I think everyone who believes that “axe” sounds ugly and wrong and that people who say it should be corrected agrees that this sentiment is unfounded on any fundamental laws of the universe. I simply prefer it, and I believe that the state, society and institutions should enforce my will and my preferences upon everyone else. Does that satisfy you?

In 10 years, suppose proper SAE (which descriptively is the prestige dialect used by the American college educated class) has managed to extirpate archaic forms like "mom" and "mother" in favor of the correct "birthing person." They remain in use among some holdouts insisting on speaking CAVE (conservative American vernacular English), but state, society, and institutions all vigorously police its use and shut out CAVE people from positions of power. What's a prescriptivist to do, once that has become the prestige dialect? Shrug their shoulders and get on with the times?

What's a prescriptivist to do, once that has become the prestige dialect? Shrug their shoulders and get on with the times?

Obviously there will be prescriptivists on both sides -- the fact that institutions are vigorously policing its use demonstrates there are prescriptivists on the novo-SAE side. The issue is to be decided by the axe. Though the fact that the new thing is "SAE" indicates that in your scenario it already has been.

While I don't know the history of "ask" vs "aks", I do also tend to find a lot of stuff like this in descriptive linguistic spaces, which is something that annoys me that I did not include in my original post.
Often when I see someone committing a prescriptive faux pas by questioning certain misuses of language, I see many people rush in to tell that person they're wrong.

Don't you know that use of the singular "they" in English is correct and ancient? Shakespeare used to use the singular "they". The same goes for use of "literally" as an emphasis. And we've always been at war with Eastasia.

I'm not personally equipped to argue back at these people, because I don't know enough of linguistic history, but something just feels like it could be wrong, like they may be misrepresenting history. But I have no way of knowing.
Maybe it was used, but was it "proper"? Must we defend any language simply because it was used at some point in history?

The singular they where gender is genuinely unknown is legitimately old, in the sense of predating middle English(IIRC it comes from old Norse which used neuter for referents with unknown gender), and opposing it is actually a neologism attempting to bring English in line with continental languages which use a generic he.

Using it to refer to persons whose gender can be reasonably implied(the father took their son to the matinee) is as stupid as any other gender ideology neologism.

The singular “they” is often used in a particularly annoying motte-and-bailey fallacy.

Motte: The singular “they” has been used for thousands of years! Shakespeare used it! [Used it—but in the context of an unknown person or unspecified person, as in “Someone left their bag here”]

Bailey: Let’s use the singular “they” to refer to specific, named people! (E.g. “When I asked Jamie what they were doing this evening, they said that they were going to the protest”)

And none of that changes that it is bad English to say "axe a question". The people who say that aren't appealing to some older tradition, they are ignorant and speaking the language poorly.

They aren't ignorant: they know that SAE has you say ask instead of axe. Otherwise, they wouldn't axe someone who used ask: "why you speaking white?" And people can and do regularly code switch depending on their audience.

Vernaculars are used as a way to indicate tribal membership. Going out of your way to use a vernacular mismatched with your audience is always going to raise eyebrows.

Let's keep in mind here that the claim is that it's incorrect to say "axe" instead of "ask". Reasons that boil down to "I don't like it" don't make it correct, because clearly there are people who like it.

Redundancy: Axe already has a meaning.

Homophones are not incorrect. There are about a billion of them in English.

I suppose the contraction "it's" overlaps the possessive "its", and being able to tell the difference matters: it will almost always be clear whether you meant to ask something or hit someone with an axe, so this isn't a huge point against it, but it is a point.

Looks like it's a tie game for it's vs axe so far.

I very highly doubt that the legacy is actually people hearing, remembering, and pronouncing "it is" wrong, so much as being lazy and pronouncing it quickly.

As far as I can tell, "'it's' is lazy but 'axe' is ignorant" is purely mood affiliation on your part. Not to mention I don't see why laziness is a more pardonable sin than ignorance, if we're going to keep a ledger.

People who are entirely aware of what "it is" means might choose to say "it's" to save time. Meanwhile, "Axe" and "Ask" are approximately the same length to speak or write, and I think "axe" actually takes slightly more time/effort in the middle of a sentence because it doesn't flow as well.

Your opinion on how well it flows doesn't make it incorrect, unless you're willing to bite the bullet and acknowledge that "flat" is more correct than "apartment".

Nobody would ever use "axe" on purpose unless it's to fit in with other people who already do it by mistake.

That it's a mistake is what you are trying to prove, so you can't assume it in order to prove it. Yes, 'axe' is used among people who speak Ebonics - there are words unique to every dialect, that doesn't make them wrong.

Momentum. I am not an etymologist, I don't know exactly when/why/how "it's" became a thing, but by this point it is clearly established, while "axe" is not.

Ironically, 'ax' is about as old as 'ask' (see Chaucer 'Yow loveres axe I now this questioun.'). In old English the word for 'ask' was both 'acsian' and 'ascian'.

To pile on the irony even higher, you are essentially making an appeal from descriptivism. "It's wrong because people don't say it" well yes, it's wrong in standard English, it's not wrong in every dialect because there are dialects where it is, in fact, firmly established.

There are a class of cellular automata which follow some form of the rule "look at what your neighbors are doing, then copy the state that is most common among them". There are variations of this: sometimes the copying is probabilistic rather than deterministic so the most common is simply the most likely to be copied. If you attach some game theory or other fitness function you can get an evolutionary system where higher scoring traits are more likely to be copied and you can watch natural selection play out across the model.

What these tend to have in common is that under a broad range of parameters they eventually result in consensus. Even if all of the initial strategies are completely arbitrary, just numbered differently, you still by random chance have one of them end up more prevalent and then it snowballs out of control until it is universal or near-universal.

In the case of language, that would be useful. My point is not that the oldest form of language is the most correct. My point is more that the most common use is the most useful, unless some objective concern such as use efficiency or uniqueness can overcome that. Having minor dialectic enclaves within a language are burdensome and confusing. Therefore, the burden is on all new changes to prove themselves worthy of the cost of breaking consensus. If I lived in Chaucer's time and everyone said "axe", if that was just what that word meant, I would likewise oppose changing it to "ask" for no reason. But if 95% of people say "ask" and 5% of people say "axe" then, unless they've got a really good reason, it is useful to pressure them to conform and bring the language back together instead of splintering it, or trying to convert the remaining 95% their way.

The point is that you are not bringing the language back together - this is a form of the word that goes back to old English. There have always and will always be variation in language and dialects.

The idea that we'll bring the language back together and everyone will speak the same way is a total pipe dream that has never occurred in the history of human civilization since the tower fell.

I am not even arguing against the claim that 'axe' is not correct in SAE. But pronouncing it as universally incorrect or due to ignorance simply has no bearing on reality. It doesn't become incorrect just because it's dialect.

The point is that you are not bringing the language back together - this is a form of the word that goes back to old English.

Did the American Africans inherit it from the lineage, or is it the case of independent invention? If it is the latter, the fact that some Anglos a millenium ago used is irrelevant.

The idea that we'll bring the language back together and everyone will speak the same way is a total pipe dream that has never occurred in the history of human civilization.

All or nothing fallacy. No two people "speak the same way", preferences in style differ, in phrasing, but languages as things common to a group still exist. The current distance between normal English and African American English isn't an edict of nature, it can be reduced.

Many nation building projects included picking one language among many and teaching it to the people of the entire country: France, Italy, Poland... There are still dialects, but the diversity of language in each of these countries has been reduced in comparison to the state before standardization.

More comments

Going with your cellular automata analogy, you're missing that people don't have knowledge of the global landscape, only their local neighborhood. If everyone around you says aks, shouldn't you then also say aks?

With most language, historically it's been characterized by something closer to genetic drift than driven by anything like a fitness function (there are some universal trends: language traits that compress too much information or too little are both disfavored). Homogeneity has real benefits, but it also takes energy to create and maintain. Control isn't free.

Going with your cellular automata analogy, you're missing that people don't have knowledge of the global landscape, only their local neighborhood.

In the modern world, this is true for nobody relevant to the question.

I would probably agree with you, though certain things that muddy the meaning of language make my blood boil (like "literally").

To me, you don't sound like a fence sitter, because IME, non prescriptivists are ironically very prescriptive about others being non-prescriptive.

Take a look at this reddit thread for an example. Anyone defending the concept of a correctness of language seems to have to use a lot of apologetics up front, and the replies to these people tend to be "no, youre wrong".

One that got on my nerves in my undergrad was people using "excessive" to mean "a great deal". It means "too much"!

It would be funny to respond “your so right”

I would probably agree with you, though certain things that muddy the meaning of language make my blood boil (like "literally").

Ha, yeah that and "exponentially" for me.

But I recently discovered that "infinitely" has been used in older writings to mean something like "it never seems to end" or "I can't count it" so I stopped being mad at people who use that in a non-mathematical sense.

Also “decimated” in the meaning of “largely destroyed” rather than “reduced in size somewhat” (by 10%, literally).

I can never remember whether decimated was originally supposed to mean "reduced to 10%" or "reduced by 10%". If the latter, then the common usage of decimated is pretty off, of course. But if the former, then it's not too different in meaning. Perhaps that's where the colloquial usage crept in to begin with.

I think the confusion comes from decimation being really really really bad as a punishment. It's intentionally losing 10% of your men, and it's a vicious psychological punishment on the rest. As a result it has this connotation of absolute disaster and came into common usage that way. Much moreso than "losing 10%." It doesn't really make much sense to use it to refer to 10% attrition generally, but rather to a situation in which 10% are lost and the rest are horribly traumatized by guilt.

Killing the 10th man actually erased the guilt of having mutinied/retreated, without having to mess around assigning individual responsibility. Pretty clever system for a society that's trying to field large armies without a professional military, which is why it was only a thing during the Republic expansion

I'm sure that's where the confusion comes from, but it's easy to remember the correct meaning when you know the origin of the word. Quoting Wikipedia:

In the military of ancient Rome, decimation (from Latin decimatio 'removal of a tenth') was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. The discipline was used by senior commanders in the Roman army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as cowardice, mutiny, desertion, and insubordination, and for pacification of rebellious legions. The procedure was an attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the realities of managing a large group of offenders.

A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten. Each group drew lots (sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot of the shortest straw fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning, clubbing, or stabbing.

It wouldn't make a lot of sense to kill 90% of your soldiers as a form of punishment, if the goal is to improve the discipline among the remainder. You would be left with so few that you might as well have killed all of them, and that's before considering the practical matter that if you condemn 90% of the group to death, those who are designated to die and have nothing left to lose would likely fight and overpower the lucky 10%.

In short, this punishment can only work with a minority being killed. That's why decimation means “reduced by 10%”, not “reduced to 10%”.

Just remember it as 9 guys beating the 10th one to death. Not exactly a mnemonic but pretty memorable.

Signal processing folk in shambles

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats