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Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English'
Pikoro writes: A recent article in the Wall Street Journal explains why the concept of a "proper" English isn't realistic. Quoting: "It's a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers can't express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. ... As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. ... We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language. ... That’s how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is “correct” usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct. The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.
However, it has nothing to do with purity. English is famously a language which mugs other languages for their vocabulary. But just because it is impure and inconsistent doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Why would they? They term "lingua franca" (italian for "language of the Frankish") originated during the renaissance to describe a "universal" language spoken throughout the mediterranean and used for commerce and trade. It is composed of mostly Italian (80%) with some greek, portuguese, arabic, spanish, old french, occitan. In this context, the term "Franca" (Frankish) does not describe "France". The term "Franca" was used by Greeks, Arabs and others to describe Western Europe.
Should be: Why They're Ain't Any Such Thing as "Proper English."
Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.
It's a bit of a conflict of interest for a writer to say there are "no rules", when in fact there are. And English doesn't actually change anywhere near as fast as many of these folks claim. Fads come and go, while the underlying rules persist, generation after generation.
If that were not true, you would not be able to make sense of Shakespeare today. But you can, except for the occasional stray word. You still get the meaning.
Someone mod that up. It's better than TFA.
Speaking of, from TFA:
He's got the dialect part correct. But he left out things like slang and local idioms and so forth.
"educated" ... that's the problem.
If you are "educated" then wouldn't you know the correct usage?
So he's falling back on whatever the majority (as he sees it) uses as being ... not incorrect.
But in the end, he's wrong. You can mix Yoda-speak/LOLcat with the latest slang and your friends will probably understand you.
But it will probably not impress when you use it on your resume.
There are rules. They are just changing.
Language is a tool for communication. As long as it's understood, it doesn't matter the grammar. English, as the defacto world language, is changing really rapidly durbto the influx of second language learners. Too lazy to look up the article now, but I once read an article about how Ebglish be so much more simplified in 100 years. Things like "he run", "I have drove ", and so on will be essentially standards becquse they are used frequently by ESL learners.
That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.
Actually, in Europe (at least where I live) we do study British English in schools. But then people learn American English because of America's cultural supremacy.
Before a bunch of French speaking Vikings invaded in 1066, before Nordic speaking Vikings degraded the language.
THAT is proper English!
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Yes, there are rules. For instance, it's acceptable to use apostrophes to show plurals of single lower-case letters. Right, Jane? Flag as Inappropriate
No. Single quotes are used for that.
Do you honestly think I (and Slashdot management) don't know who you are?
Go away. Stay away.
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Sure, we all laughed at "all your base are belong to us", but there's a difference between chuckling at some examples of Engrish versus some sort of language snobbery. I suppose the Japanese or Chinese version of those sorts of jokes are when Westerners get kanji tattoos that don't quite mean what they thought. I think it's fine as long as it doesn't get mean-spirited or personal.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
"So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme."
Motes and beams, people!
If you're going to moan about "improper" English, it's best not to make lots of errors yourself:
- you started your sentence with "So". The word you ought to have used was "Thus".
- you missed out the comma that should have followed the "So"
- the expression is "in the extreme", not "to the extreme"
- even had you used "in the extreme", it would still have made for an awkward and inelegant sentence, compared to the obvious alternate of "... is extremely impolite."
I personally don't think any of this matters much; however, given that you claim to care about correct English usage, it surely behooves you to check, double-check and triple-check your own writing before posting.
It made me try much harder with spelling, and rely less on automatic spelling corrections, and also gave me a new insight into the Bible!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I went to Cambridge, so while I will use an Oxford comma, I only do so where it helps avoid ambiguity, which was not the case here.
In any event, did you miss the first part of my sentence? I don't care. But the OP said that they did.
At least it doesn't act like it does. For example, it is notoriously unwilling to allow us have our cake and eat it too.
In this case Nature doesn't permit our language to have both unlimited adaptability and unlimited stability. A language moves with the mass of people who employ it every day, adapting to changes of mores, media, and needs without need of some kind of central coordinating authority. Which is near miraculous if you think about it. The downside is you need an interpreter to follow Shakespeare's dialog.
The trade-off for having effortlessly adaptable, good-enough communication is that at no point in time is it perfectly satisfactory. It is understandably galling to someone who prides himself on his mastery of a language to have that language re-made by the largely ignorant masses. But that ideal language of his (usually) school days is itself the handiwork of generations of largely ignorant masses, who while typically hopeless at precision of expression are nonetheless geniuses at linguistic adaptation.
"Prescriptivists" are fighting a pointless battle, because their objective (preserving the language as they learned it) simply isn't possible. The best guides to optimal written usage are style manuals crafted by people who in the practical business of editing written communication. These are like taking a moving average of the chaos of recent language changes.
In the end we all have to accept that whatever our favorite edition of our language is, it will eventually make us sound like old fogies to younger people (some of us managed that while still in our teens), and like foreigners to future generations.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think non-native English users make all sorts of errors, while native speakers make the constistent errors that are all over the internet.
The errors that people for whom English is a second language mage cannot properly be characterized as 'all over'; they are almost invariably errors that result from adults, who lack the flexibility to learn new languages readily, running past the end of their knowledge of English and by reflex applying the grammar and lexicon rules of their own language to English. Where there have been populations that spoke another language that became integrated into the English-speaking population -- the Welsh, Irish, Scots, and Vikings, among others -- aspects of grammar from their own languages got absorbed into English, cases where English grammar were overly complicated got elided. For example, Celtic languages have a 'meaningless do' -- where, in other Germanic languages you would say 'saw you him today?', in Welsh it would be 'did you see him today?'; similarly, nouns lost the forest of cases, genders, and plurals that other Germanic languages retained. And this ignores the vocabulary changes from words the speakers of other languages brought; for example, the perfectly good 'ingang' has long since been buried by the Norman French 'entrance', while other Anglo-Saxonisms got relegated to a 'lower-class' status by French and Latinate words by association with the social class that used them -- 'ask', 'question', and 'interrogate', for example, or 'quick' vs. 'rapid', 'look' vs. 'regard', 'daze' vs. 'stupefy', 'room' vs. 'chamber', 'learning' vs. 'erudition'.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James D. Nicoll