Cloudy wrote:
Damn, sorry for listening in, but you guys are right up there with RHINO. I am so intimidated by you smart guys, that I think I will just sit back and try to learn from what you have to say. Yeah, I might throw a question up here every once in a while, but it will really be just a question. I never dreamed that the "ScaRatings" would have had so many people, who knew so much about the English language. I know when I have met my betters, so I will pretty much just listen to you guys from now on.
Well, maybe I should take RHINO, AKBAR, and FrankC on in debating the fine points of the English language, but I won't. I would rather make a fool of myself somewhere else on the "ScaRatings", where I might have a chance of being right. If I fail at being right elsewhere, at least I might succeed at being funny, or perhaps even being entertaining to some.
Keep it up guys, I'm learning from you. Thanks.
Aw, hell, Cloudy; don't include me in any lofty lists. I just enjoy language. I found a nice little blurb about the whole prescriptivism versus descriptivism:
Quote:
Descriptivists and Prescriptivists
Jacob Kaplan-Moss
January 13, 2009
In the world of grammarians there are two competing camps: descriptivists and prescriptivists. Edward Finegan of the University of Southern California sums up the difference:
Descriptive grammarians ask the question, “What is English (or another language) like — what are its forms and how do they function in various situations?” By contrast, prescriptive grammarians ask “What should English be like — what forms should people use and what functions should they serve?”
In the prescriptivist camp falls Lynne Truss, The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks, and your high school English teacher. Prescriptivists aim to help us use the English language properly. The intention is noble: if we all speak the same language, we can communicate much more effectively. But it’s a bit Quixotic: if language was static, we’d all still write like Chaucer.
The descriptivist camp, on the other hand, simply aims describe how the language is used today. This camp is perhaps best embodied by the Urban Dictionary, a lexicon open to input from anyone. Unfortunately, this purely descriptive approach to language implies that language doesn’t matter as long as intent can be communicated; generations of poets would beg to differ.
Neither camp is “right” — both parties are needed to keep language moving forward at the right speed. Think of it as like a nuclear reactor: too much descriptivism and the language will melt down into a radioactive mess; too much prescriptivism and the lights go out.
I am a bit odd in that I embrace the idea of the living language and recognize the inevitability and desirablitity of its evolution, but I still wince a little, for instance, when the author above writes, "if language was static," instead of, "if language
were static."