Taking descriptivism to a higher level

[nancylebov]

smallship1 is a proud proscriptivist.

I prefer to get outside the system--here's my comment:

Alternate theory: Language keeps changing, but needs to be kept stable enough to be useful.

It's both good and natural to have people pulling in both directions, according to what usages feel plausible to them.

I'm not sure how much language change comes from great writers, how much from slang, and how much from mainstream drift.

Second thought: I'm not sure how much the important resistance to change comes from people who invoke rules and stability and how much is from people who just don't use the changes they don't like.

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I understand what you're saying, but if that were totally true, then "The experience was not unhelpful" would be considered redundant, but it's not, because taking out the "not" changes (reverses) the meaning. The wordiness is one reason why, for instance, George Orwell really dislikes such utterances, but it's not why "I ain't got no" (a double negative) is considered incorrect.

I probably confused things with Eminem's example, but darn, it's just SO GREAT in its multiplicity of negatives.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

"The experience was not unhelpful" doesn't mean exactly the same thing as "The experience was helpful". The former leaves open the possibility that the experience could have been helpful, but actually didn't make any difference. It might even imply that pretty strongly.

I think I want Lojban.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

People who think you can get a superior language by systematically planning the grammar according to a rigorously defined conceptual scheme strike me as the spiritual kin of people who think you can get a superior economy by having a board of experts make all the important economic decisions. It's just fine if you think you can arrive at a static solution that will be completely and permanently right, but it's seriously suboptimal if you want to leave things open to the dynamic emergence of superior solutions, including solutions to problems we haven't even thought of yet.

I tend to look at natural languages as a vast garden of wild grammars. A little judicious pruning and weeding may be worthwhile, but I don't want anything as formalist as 18th century French landscaping.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I can see your point. The Lojban approach to word roots (randomly picked from existing languages, weighted by number of speakers) especially gets on my nerves.

Still, English isn't especially good at some logical distinctions.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Contrary to both George Orwell and womzilla, I have argued that "I am not unhappy" is indeed different from "I am happy" in useful ways. OTOH, reading passages on standardized tests often are difficult in ways that include a tangled nest of "not"s, so I can see Orwell's point, too. It may just be better to say, "I am neither happy nor unhappy," "I am feeling better but not yet happy," and so on.