Comment on đ Octopus is Octopus đ
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca â¨20⊠â¨hours⊠ago
Student: âlanguage is prescriptive not descriptiveâ
Teacher: âyou fail 3rd grade spellingâ
And I absolutely support keeping people back who believe English should be guided and evolved through âLikesâ.
different languages and institutions have different viewpoints. Turkish and French are more prescriptive, english and spanish more descriptive*
Spanish from Spain has an official dictionary that dictates what is correct and isnât. You canât be more prescriptive than that. Sure, that dictionary adds words based on usage, even ones that are clear misspellings of the ârealâ word, but they are marked as so.
The RAE is not a prescriptive institution at all. They fight people on social media over that. Theyâre not shaming anyone for spelling a word different, just describing what the language users are doing.
antonim@lemmy.world â¨20⊠â¨hours⊠ago
Putting aside the technicalities (it is not language that is prescriptive or descriptive, but linguistics), thatâs a widespread position among perfectly literate people, including professional linguists. Nothing to do with the number of âlikesâ.
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works â¨10⊠â¨hours⊠ago
Sure, languages evolve I guess but this isnât really that IMO.
The whole idea of etymology is that you can figure out what a word means from its roots. If you throw all that out, you give up the scaffolding that makes words make any sense. Same goes for grammatical rules. It seems like the argument for descriptivism is âletâs not be elitist when people become less competent with the rules of a languageâ, and while thatâs a fine ideal, yer usin ma words wrong!
I suspect there is also a body of professional linguists who oppose your point for the same reasons.
antonim@lemmy.world â¨1⊠â¨hour⊠ago
That was the idea in ancient Greece when the name of the endavour/field was created (etymon = âtrueâ). In the 19th century when linguistics became a serious science it was effectively becoming abandoned, and quite clearly criticised by 20th century linguists. Wordsâ meanings and forms shift inevitably, theyâve always been shifting, and trying to pick one single stage of this process as the right one is basically like saying that the earth is flat because from any individual vantage point it looks flat to you.
No, you donât. 99% of people donât know the etymology of 99% of the words they use. Not even linguists have definitive answers for the etymology of words such as âboyâ and âdogâ. Wordsâ meanings are actually established by usage, by tradition as itâs handed down to us, with some leeway in how we accept and modify the tradition. (These mechanisms are many and affect various levels of language.) Note that cultures that donât have scientific etymology still have perfectly functional languages.
Thatâs one of the arguments, but as you can see I donât think itâs crucial.
There are some professional linguists who are active as prescriptivists. Their number varies depending on the country, in Anglophone countries their number is miniscule. In countries with a more pronounced prescriptivist tradition (as in mine, Iâm from Croatia) their number declines through time as academia accepts and integrates modern linguistic theories, and the remaining prescriptivistsâ positions soften. And I canât help but notice that many of the current prescriptivists are shoddy linguists and politically motivated.
The prescriptivists are actually quite thin on the justifications for their approach. They wonât theoretically or empirically defend prescriptivism, arguments for it amount to vague and unscientific claims of a need for order and clarity in language (which exist regardless of prescriptivist intervention), and such stuff. But even they usually donât dare to go so far as to claim etymology is the source of correct meanings, because they know that holding such a position would immediately lead into absurdity and extremism. Leaf through an etymological dictionary and try to stick to the oldest meaning described there. Youâll quickly realise that the source of correct meanings canât be the words and forms from 500, 1000, or 4000 years ago.
A book recommendation, if youâre interested: L. Bauer and P. Trudgill, Language Myths.
dustyData@lemmy.world â¨10⊠â¨hours⊠ago
You sound like the kind of person who beat up black people because they donât speak good enough according to you.