Science Memes

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Linguistic Perscriptivists (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I knew after the first FOUR WORDS of your comment that you don't know what you're talking about. Language literally evolves organically, constantly.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They don't know we're in the 4th iteration of English.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

The English they think is perfectly correct proper English would make the language prescriptivist from a couple centuries ago puke and kick them in the groin

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Took me much longer. I was like "this has to be a joke about intelligent design or something". Only at the very end I realized it's serious

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

You 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 the language prescriptively according to the designs of the state constitutes language. You seem to consider it forceful meddling in a natural evolution that should be left to just do what it does, unrestrained and undisturbed by judgmental nerds.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months 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 😅