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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37110 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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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.

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