While I get the point they’re making, I have a counterargument:
Ngqnund urnidng bptgx durunbde druxng.
What, you didn’t understand that? Are you dissing be just because you didn’t bother to learn new words?
Show me two people who can speak to each other like that, and sure. And if they want to say I’m behind the times because I didn’t learn their lingo, then that’s fine and valid, too. There are two of them, what do I care their opinion on my linguistic ability?
As more people start to use these words, though, not being able to understand them does me harm. And at that point, the natural conclusion will be that I learn and, in some cases, adopt the new lingo. It’s the only real way it CAN go - what incentive do they have to not use their lingo? Others understand them fine.
Great post. Fnrb wijjk blerb phtooie wagawaga nkkjqqz frup walawala madooie.
Edit: What do you mean you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about?
People don’t say “that’s not a word” unless they understand. If they don’t understand they say “What?”. The point was that linguistics is the study of how language is used to communicate. “Cristofascist” is going to get added to a dictionary, but “nkkjqqz” isn’t, even though they’re both made up; one conveys meaning, the other doesn’t.
“a language that doesn’t adapt to an ever changing society is bound to be lost”, sure, but adapt too quickly and you lose the ability to communicate between groups of people.
There needs to be some compromise where new words are adopted, and changed words are accepted, without flooding the language with garbage. For example, English should still be taught in schools, and English teachers should still have the freedom of correcting the writing kids produce, and taking points off for “mistakes”.
Like, if you go pure descriptivist, “it’s” and “its” can now mean the same thing. There is no ability to distinguish between their, they’re and there. A business email describing a product as “cheugy, no cap” is perfectly acceptable and it’s up to the reader to figure it out, because every word is a real word and perfectly valid, and every grammar deviation is acceptable because languages evolve.
Even on social media, I think it’s fair to push back on “mistakes” that make it hard to understand something. An error that might take a poster 1 second to fix, might cost the world minutes, as thousands of people each take a few seconds to puzzle out what the OP meant to write.
Languages are about communication, and that can suffer whether the language police are too rigid and forbid any deviation, are too easily bribed and allow for anything.
Certain registers of a language do have different rules, but those also change and are still kinda whatever that part of society agrees with. Business letters that I learned to write in gradeschool in the '80s aren’t necessarily the same as I would write or expect to receive today. Ubiquitous, fast electronic communication also through a wrench into things a bit.
So why teach English at all? People could just make it all up theirself.
are you asking why english should be taught in non-english native countries, or in anglophone countries? Because the former should hopefully be obvious, being able to understand and use english is pretty useful these days…
The latter, teaching languages to people who already know them, is something i’m more iffy about.
I think it’s dumb to make it mandatory, instead we should have optional general linguistics courses and encourage people to read.
Maybe as part of history class you can learn about how your native language was spoken in the past, as well!
I would argue the main benefits are to teach people how to effectively switch registers as the context demands, and to expose them to a range of language they likely wouldn’t ordinarily encounter in their daily lives. English teachers could do to lose the judgmental aspect of “This is the one true way to speak English, the way you talk amongst yourselves is wrong and you need do stop,” but there’s a definite value in teaching students, “This is a way to write/speak clearly and effectively that will be understood by quite nearly every other educated English speaker you might encounter.”
As far as exposure to a broader range of language than one normally encounters in their life, I saw the importance of this first hand with many of my coworkers who were heritage speakers of Spanish. It’s not my native language, but it was my primary work language for a good 5 years, and I wound up getting put on interpretation duties for our safety meetings over a native speaker with pretty limited formal education in Spanish. For topics to do with daily life, family, friends, etc, this guy would be able to speak much more naturally than I could. I might not say something that was exactly wrong, but perhaps I would be too formal or make odd word choices he wouldn’t. The problem was, he completely lacked any technical and professional vocabulary, and had no concept of what words/phrases were unique to his own country and what alternatives might be more widely understood.
We would have safety meetings once a night, and they would have topics like, “When a forklift has its forks in the air, don’t walk beneath it, as hydraulic failure could lead to injury or death.”. He translated that one night as “Cuando la vaina del pasillo tiene esa vaina de en frente en el aire, no pasen por debajo de la vaina. Es peligroso.” Basically “When the thing in the hall has the thing in front in the air, don’t walk under the thing. It’s dangerous.” Best case, he might say “El forlift,” but he would never land on “el montacargas,” or even think to look it up. Some of his wilder attempts at interpretation didn’t work for anyone, and the ones where he just used a Spanglish version of technical terms only worked for other coworkers who already knew at least a bit of English, and probably didn’t really need the translation that much to begin with. Unfortunately, we had a fair number of employees who were monolingual Spanish speakers that he found himself just completely unable to communicate with effectively.
Granted, not everyone takes full advantage of it, but English classes do (or at least should) expose you to a broad range of the language, as it’s used in various contexts and forms, while also furnishing students with the ability to expand upon that and adapt to new contexts on their own in the future. Failure to do so leaves students with stunted linguistic and communicative abilities.
Ok, that was long but your last sentence says it all. The OP seems to be arguing that there IS NO SUCH THING as stunted linguistic and communicative abilities.
Maybe I’m just old but I find it difficult sometimes to understand people who prefer to use words seemingly at random and pay no attention to any rules I’ve learned. I like to think I have a pretty good grasp of American English but when I’m not certain about something and I try to look up the proper way to phrase it, I find five different answers from five different sources all quoting, I guess, from the accepted grammar of the time in which they were taught. I used to just go to my old English text book, but now it just seems it of date. If you don’t want to just slang your way through life it’s difficult to follow the rules when they’re don’t seem to be any.
This is how descriptivists try to cope with the fact that they’re academics who claim that some random guy who has never seen a dictionary knows better than academics do.
Tell me this, why don’t “but” and “put” sound similar?
What about “height” and “weight”, what’s the rule here? And what makes a letter silent in a word? If any of these rules have exceptions, then why are there exceptions?
They are “descriptives” that’s literally in the name. Mocking them is equivalent to mocking historians for only knowing the past and not being able to predict the future.
Even descriptivists accept there has to be some degree of balance. Yes, language evolves, that doesn’t mean I can start calling my shoes bhurghs and expect anyone to know what I’m talking about.
But if it catches on…
Except there’s quite a few descriptivists online that take that very stance.