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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.
There is correct English just as there is correct Python or correct French. American Africans (and their "wigger" admirers) who deviate from this ideal are wrong only in so far they claim the language the speak is English.
Is it low status? If I mock Ebonics will the elites laugh with me, or pillory me? Because in a country where non-standard dialects really are looked down upon, even far-leftist politicians openly mock them.
If we lived in a world in which a student speaking correct Ebonics (but wrong English) the teacher would mock them, and would be given 0 points if they answered thusly, I would agree. But today's teachers in America tolerate Ebonics even when it is presented as English.
Do you mean AAVE?
If they didn't care about approval, in the case of the "lawyer dawg", the Ebonics native speaker would have said it was his insufficient grasp of English that cost him an attorney, and wouldn't have appealed.
And if you went to the era before unification of Italy the distance between languages spoken on Italian peninsula would have been even greater. My point wasn't every Italian speaks the same language (I even mentioned that no two people do), but that state intervention can reduce the differences.
There is no academy of the English language.
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Which Python version is the correct one?
2.7 obvs
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The comparison to Python is useful. One big project in NLP back in the day was defining a formal grammar for English, analogous to one for a programming language. Countless careers were spent on this paradigm.
That project failed, spectacularly. Human language empirically doesn't follow a formal grammar. All it is is a dense, giant mass of statistical correlations that agents pick up through positive reenforcement through interactions with other agents. Try writing a grammar of English in a couple of megabytes of ANTLR files, and you are doomed to fail.
Of course, you can train some classification model on some subset of English data labeled as proper and the rest improper. But you'll find that the stricter you make it, the more you'll find good and even great English rejected.
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Ah, maybe you can clear that up for me. Is the correct English SAE? Or is it British English (RP? Midlands pronunciation? East Anglian?)? Or Scottish English? Or Australian English? Which one is the one true English?
Do a few job interviews in Ebonics and see how many offers you get.
Indeed, and the differences are already highly reduced. We're litigating 'ask' vs 'aks' in this thread. Try talking to a Sicilian in Ligurian and tell me which difference is larger.
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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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