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Lawyer Banned for Threatening File-Sharers
S. Hare brings us a report from TorrentFreak about a lawyer working for a Swiss anti-piracy group who was recently given a 6-month ban for her attempts to intimidate file-sharers though letters threatening fines and court fees. Elizabeth Martin demanded 400 Euros each from "hundreds of thousands of file-sharers," and suggested that they would have to face large settlements if they did not comply. The Paris Bar Council took exception to this and instituted the ban. Martin worked for Logistep, a company who has had trouble following laws in the past.
"The disciplinary board decided that 'By choosing to reproduce aggressive foreign methods, intended to force payments, the interested party also violated [the code] which specifies that the lawyer cannot unfairly represent a situation or seriousness of threat.' In addition, the lawyer also violated the code by cashing payments into a private account, not the usual dedicated litigation account, known as a 'Carpa'. Martin also refused to reveal how many payments had been received from file-sharers."
Yes, but as we've known since Saussure and his concept of l'arbitraire du signe, the rules are ever-shifting and based on mutual intelligibility, which can stretch much more than you give it credit for.
Definitions are established by usage, and dictionaries do not set the meaning of a word, they merely reflect the meanings given to it by the community. Any dictionary maker will readily admit to this. If people start using "who" with non-animates, as they have already been doing in some varieties of English for decades or centuries, dictionaries will eventually reflect this usage.
Assigning grammatical animacy to non-animate items is a common development in languages. It's already happened once in the history of English (when Proto-Indo-European innovated animate terms for water and fire).
And mutual intelligibility does not exist without generally accepted commonalities. You are arguing in circles.
:o)
What you call "prescriptivism" is the basis of those accepted commonalities... in fact it is those, and nothing more. You made that point yourself. You can deride it all you want, but you cannot eliminate it without also eliminating those necessary commonalities. If you think it is folly to have mutually understandable languages, more power to you. You can go invent your own and try to communicate with others using it. I have no reason to care.
But I am not the one here who is arguing in logical circles... you are. And there is very little in this world that is more "masturbatory" than that particular brand of circle-jerk.
Have a nice day.
Get some actual training in linguistics and then come back, OK?
By everything that you've said, Shakespeare was a hopeless illiterate. Without him, the modern vocabulary would be significantly smaller, as well as totally lacking in contractions. Changes in grammar do not happen over night, the majority of the populace doesn't wake up one morning and say, 'Oh, I think we should all talk like this today.' It has to start somewhere. Anyways, you're the one that started arguing in circles, pretty much ignoring the arguments provided against you in order to drive home your supposed point that this was WRONG. Well, scratch the circles, actually, you're just arguing like a brick wall, everything just bounces off.