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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.
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
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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.
"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").
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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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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”)
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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.
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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.
Homophones are not incorrect. There are about a billion of them in English.
Looks like it's a tie game for it's vs axe so far.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
None of this is an edict of nature. That's the whole point, and why there isn't one universally correct set of rules.
The statist perspective here is simply wrong. We're talking about a dialect that is already low status in society - you can't regularize it any more by edict because we are already living in that world. The people who speak BVE simply don't care about your approval (although obviously many of them can switch to SAE when they need to).
And in Germany to this day there are extreme regional differences, even when comparing the vernacular in nearby cities like Dusseldorf and Cologne. Sure, everyone speaks High German too, but just about everyone in the US speaks SAE as well.
I'm glad you brought up Italy because they actually have a hodgepodge of local languages infinitely more bewildering than someone 'axing' you a question. You can't make people completely sever their connection to the language that they heard from their family and parents growing up, even if the high modernist government doesn't speak it.
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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.
In the modern world, this is true for nobody relevant to the question.
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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"!
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It would be funny to respond “your so right”
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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
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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:
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%”.
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Just remember it as 9 guys beating the 10th one to death. Not exactly a mnemonic but pretty memorable.
Signal processing folk in shambles
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