Ooh, linguistic ignorance!
Dec. 26th, 2004 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 02:33 pm (UTC)How many times can you say "people master their grammar by the age of six" without
forgetting which word ends in -arwithout crying?no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 02:44 pm (UTC)If they're still at it when I get on again, I'm posting in
Or maybe not, that might cause even *more* drama.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 05:01 pm (UTC)I could never cut down when I was smoking. Kudos to her that she did as much as she did.
It sounds to me like she intends giving up.
I gave up when James was 8 months old(with the aid of the patch) & my kids all think cigarette smoke is gross.
I smoked outside, too. Unfortunately, that didn't stop the kids getting sick on the smoke that lingered on me.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 05:24 pm (UTC)I thought the perspective of someone thats been there might help, Iunno.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-27 06:00 am (UTC)I can understand slang, and honestly, no one I know uses 100% proper English all the time (lest they come out sounding like Storm). But if I was speaking to a newspaper/whatever, a public forum, I would sure as hell make sure that my speech fell into the realm of acceptable English language. Knowing the difference between right and wrong and chosing to use the non-standard version is an informed choice. Refusing to learn the difference between right and wrong is just plain stupid.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-27 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-27 04:19 pm (UTC)Standard English is called that because there is a Standard that everyone is held up to. You start messing with that, and all hell breaks loose.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-27 04:36 pm (UTC)But I very, very much doubt that you will find *any* school that would say using double negatives is correct.
Grammar isn't something you learn in a school. In fact, children typically *master* their native grammar before they're old enough for school.
Standard English is called that because there is a Standard that everyone is held up to. You start messing with that, and all hell breaks loose.
How do you know? Please explain this to me. It doesn't make sense to me.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-27 08:50 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-27 09:38 pm (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 05:01 pm (UTC)This is wrong. You have a strong-ish argument. Why ruin it by making things up?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 05:13 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 06:00 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 07:01 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-28 07:05 pm (UTC)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.
An aside on what was apparently inconsequential to you.
Date: 2004-12-28 07:06 pm (UTC)Re: An aside on what was apparently inconsequential to you.
Date: 2004-12-28 07:11 pm (UTC)