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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37002 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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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.

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