Ooh, linguistic ignorance!

[conuly]

Fun!

I'm going to be sick. There's no more justification for being prejudicided against speakers of a non-Standard dialect than to be prejudiced against practicioners of a minority religion, but here it comes again! And yet, when I point out that it doesn't mean that this woman is retarded, I get yelled at, and words get put in my mouth. Because, of course, it's so much easier to contest what I didn't say than what I actually *did* say.

I need to hie me to Jenn's. I'll talk later. Djusk' a.

Comments

[threnody.livejournal.com]

1) Yes, children master *that which they are taught at home* by the time they go to school. That is not always the correct way, which is why grammar is taught in schools in the first place.

2) Double negatives and other things along the same line were common among people who could not afford or who were otherwise unable to attend school. It doesn't mean they were right.

3) All dialects are a corruption. English in it's purest form is probably what you'd find on legal forms. But, all dialects that I know of still adhere to a standard grammar.

4) If they didn't all adhere to the same basic rules, groups would change rules here and there, and eventually what we'd have would be ten million dialects so very different that one wouldn't be able to understand another. Standardised English is what makes me be able to speak to any other English speaker in the world with a minimum of issues. I'm not sure how much more explanation is needed for this to make sense.

[conuly]

Yes, children master *that which they are taught at home* by the time they go to school. That is not always the correct way, which is why grammar is taught in schools in the first place.

But there *is* no correct dialect or incorrect dialect. And grammar *isn't* taught at schools. Just trust me on this one. Or, if you can't, I'll send you a copy of an actual English grammar book, one that explains the real rules of grammar. It'll be an eye-opener.

Double negatives and other things along the same line were common among people who could not afford or who were otherwise unable to attend school. It doesn't mean they were right.

No, it was common among the educated class. All classes, in fact. That's why it was part of the standard.

All dialects are a corruption. English in it's purest form is probably what you'd find on legal forms. But, all dialects that I know of still adhere to a standard grammar.

*laughs*

So, you think all dialects come from Legal English?

Let's see... a short history of the English language... Historical Linguistics really isn't my thing, but I'll give it a shot.

We don't know about the origins of language itself. We have a few theories, but we really can't reconstruct language that far back. The earliest we can reconstruct at all is Proto-Indo-European.

English is an Indo-European language. That means it's related to all other Indo-European languages, such as the Romance Languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese), Hindi, and the other Germanic languages (Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Norwegian).

Of course, people do change language. That's how you know a language is living, it keeps evolving. Languages which don't evolve are dead.

Now, I know you don't consider French and Spanish and Italian to only be incomprehensible forms of Latin, right? Similarly, we can't consider English to be a bastardized form of proto-Germanic, or of Anglo-Saxon.

Of course languages do continue to evolve. So Modern English (what we're speaking) is a child of Early Modern English (what Shakespeare spoke) which is a child of Middle English (um... Chaucer, maybe?) which is a child of Early English (Or maybe this was Chaucer... pretty sure it's Beowulf) which is a child of Anglo-Saxon.

So, depending on where your cut-off point is, the *latest* form of "Pure English" would have to be Shakespearian English. Which I notice you do not speak.

I'm not done. You may not consider English to be a bastardized form of any of its ancestral languages (at least I hope not), but do you consider it to be a bastardized form of its sibling languages? For example, is English nothing more than poorly spoken German? Are Spanish and Italian mere children of French?

Well, of course not. We can see the parent languages of these. English and German are part of the same language family (the germanic languages) as are French, Italian, and Spanish (the Romance languages).

Similarly, the different dialects of English are siblings to each other. Standard English isn't a parent of (most) dialects of English, it's a brother to them. So if anything is bastardized, they're all bastardized off the same source.

If they didn't all adhere to the same basic rules, groups would change rules here and there, and eventually what we'd have would be ten million dialects so very different that one wouldn't be able to understand another. Standardised English is what makes me be able to speak to any other English speaker in the world with a minimum of issues. I'm not sure how much more explanation is needed for this to make sense.

Well, the language will change whether you like it or not. Why is it a bad thing for the language to become more than one language? In other areas, people expect to need to be multilingual, they don't see this as a problem. Why should you only have to know one language?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Double negatives and other things along the same line were common among people who could not afford or who were otherwise unable to attend school. It doesn't mean they were right.

No, it was common among the educated class. All classes, in fact. That's why it was part of the standard.

This is wrong. You have a strong-ish argument. Why ruin it by making things up?

[conuly]

Is it wrong? This is what I was taught. Can you provide a reference?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I'm not familiar with any online linguistic sources. I know that the double negative was an innovation in (probably) 17th Century English, among the working classes in London. It wasn't particularly prevalent though until the 19th century in the central London working class dialect (ie Cockney).

Of course as we all know, today's working class accent is tomorrow's SE, so there's every chance that with the advent of Estuary English, the double negative will slowly become more and more acceptable until it begins to be written into BBC newsreels.

That doesn't mean we have to sit back and just take it.

[conuly]

That doesn't mean we have to sit back and just take it.

Why? I like the double negative. It's all fluffy and cuddly, and it's orange. Which, as you can see, is one of my favorite colors.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

The implication I get here is that you have synaesthesia.

Is this "true" or are you joking?

A little off-topic perhaps, but...

[conuly]

Joking. I find it's a useful thing to do when people are taking things too seriously (I do that all the time, actually. I was just getting ready to switch to talking about something else when you guys showed up. Nice, but a bit annoying. I hate being wrong gah!).

And you know what synaesthesia is! *hugs*

[conuly]

Oh, I see. I'm getting Lowth confused with the Victorians, aren't I? Gah. My apologies.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

???

I cannot believe you just did that. You have, on no less than three occasions, stated as fact that the double negative was once part of Standard English. This is wrong, wrong wrong, and then you just pass it off as a mix up? How can you demand sources and citations from other people when you don't actually check your own before saying something so fundimental to your argument?

Zero points.

[conuly]

That's not really fundamental to my argument, though. My argument is: people shouldn't judge others on things which are, at most, tangentially important. Whether or not this feature or that was part of standard English (and I would certainly say that being part of Shakespeare or the KJV counts) doesn't change "judge not others on things which are inconsequential".

And I can demand sources and citations from others because I want to learn. *shrugs* If you don't want to provide, that's good. If other people want 'em from me, I'll do my best to find 'em. Or, if I can't, I'll apologise. What else do you expect? This isn't an essay, or a thesis. It's my journal. I should hope people reading it know enough to research anything I say.

An aside on what was apparently inconsequential to you.

[ratmist.livejournal.com]

If you really wanted to learn, you could've picked up beautiful pearls of wisdom from Threnody's above posts. Instead, you pontificated and ignored the points of her posts completely. No wonder she removed you from her friends list. I find it sadly ironic.

Re: An aside on what was apparently inconsequential to you.

[conuly]

What pearls of wisdom, exactly? Since I clearly missed them, you should really restate them.

Re: An aside on what was apparently inconsequential to you.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Well, considering the perfunctory fobbing off she got from you to her long, involved, meaty and well-placed argument on your most recent entry, I think perhaps you should look for yourself rather than burdening her further to waste time on someone so clearly incapable of listening to anyone other than her own voice.

Re: An aside on what was apparently inconsequential to you.

[conuly]

Second most recent. And I do intend to read that more carefully, after I have had time to calm down, warm up, and eat. It's 21 degrees in my room. You need to wait for the fuel guys to come to expect me to be serious about anything.