Comment on Linguistic Perscriptivists
Comment105@lemm.ee 4 weeks agoYou don’t consider the simplification of Chinese “language”, nor the ordering of Nynorsk, or the creation of the Korean alphabet.
You don’t think the efforts of thousands of teachers across a nation teaching prescriptive grammar constitutes language. You seem to consider it forceful meddling in a natural evolution that should be left to do what it does undisturbed by judgmental nerds.
JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
People are taught how to write in an academic style in school.
There’s different applications for writing. Some examples in include but are not limited to academic, creative, and conversational/casual writing. Education tends to focus on academic(correct grammar, writing essays, doing research papers) followed by creative writing which is storytelling and poetry.
Expecting people to write academically in casual settings is weird. If I write a letter or email to my friend it’s going to include slang and have looser grammar.
Casual and academic writing have their place and time. Suggesting casual writing is inferior is just silly. If people always wrote everything like some formal essay it’d be fucking boring. No humor, no colorful language. Just boring ass academic writing everywhere.
Plus, believe it or not some of my most brilliant professors had a very casual way of speaking and writing. Academic use of language does not indicate intelligence. It just means they know how to write in an academic setting. Nothing more, nothing less.
Reddfugee42@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
There are some cases in history where academic writing (seen in government and religious documents) differs so greatly from the actual language of the people (which those very same government employees and clergy use when outside of their professional environments) that the two languages are more like distant cousins.
Of course, it’s the popular language which evolves into the language of today, while leaving the ancient, once “proper” language behind where it belongs.
And then, that region’s language prescriptivists of today say that the version they were taught is the right one, all over again 😅