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How do people here land on the subject of "prescriptive linguistics"? I personally find myself getting irritated at people putting down prescriptive linguistics. For the past 10 years, anyone who tells someone they're not using certain words correctly gets shut down as a prescriptive linguist. I'm reminded of an SSC post
I feel like the same applies for "prescriptive linguistics", it's basically a cudgel, a way of telling someone to die in a fire.
Charitably, people justify this argument by saying that linguistics is a descriptive science, so there's no place to be prescriptive. In their mind, linguistics is meant to just describe how people use language, not tell people how to use it.
Uncharitably, I think this sounds like a general push towards post modernism, a pushback on the notion that there's any correct way to do anything. They're not just against prescriptive linguists, they're against prescriptive anything.
In an anti-prescriptivist mindset, someone may use prescriptive linguistics as a cudgel to shut down alternate ways of expression, and (of course) enforce colonial and white supremecist standards on unprivileged minorities. This especially comes up in conversations about double negatives, which are commonly used in various low-class English variants, like ebonics.
I might push back on anti-prescriptivists by saying, many people who try to enforce grammar rules not a linguistic scientists, but people who are trying to enforce sense in their worlds. Therefore, they're not prescriptive linguists; they're not even linguists! They're people living in the world and using language as a tool, and they want that tool to be as effective as possible.
It's not their sacred duty to simply understand language no matter what, so don't call them a prescriptive linguist. When I tell someone not to use the word "literally" as emphasis, it's because I'm finding that the word literally is less useful than it used to be, and I want to combat that. Nowadays there is no word that accurately works in as an antonym for "figuratively"; the meaning is muddled and unclear because people have watered down the definition of literally to be something else.
I also sense there may be political aspects to the use of the word "prescriptive linguistics". relating to Noam Chomsky's history in the field and his political affiliations, but I don't know enough about that to comment. I'm interested if anyone here has info on this.
Not to sound like a silly fence sitter but to me this is obviously one of those "it takes both types" things.
Obviously language evolves or we'd all be speaking Proto-Indo-European or whatever came before that.
Obviously people need to be taught the right and wrong way to use the present language or it would be impossible to communicate.
Some people are inclined to push the boundaries of meaning and those people will never give a fuck when you tell them they used a word wrong.
Other people are inclined to feel indignant about every improper usage and those people will be teachers creating smart, sharp, well-spoken citizens.
The language will drift regardless.
idk it all seems necessary
I think there's a few subcategories of of boundary pushers that play very different roles.
There are people who deliberately make up a new word, or adapt an existing word or phrase to a new use. Science in particular is a common example. These people need to be able to communicate their ideas, generally new ideas about things people have never thought of before so there isn't a word for it, so language has to change or their ideas can't be communicated, or would be communicated very inefficiently with entire phrases. Pushback is not really needed here unless they make some really stupid choices.
There are people who modify or use words to mean things as slang out of some combination of convenience, usefulness, and laziness. Kleenex does not mean the same thing as "tissue", "Coke" does not mean the same thing as "soda" or "pop", someone who is "cool" is not actually cold, something that is "hella lit" is not burning with the fires of hell. Basically every contraction ever is just a shorter faster way of saying two words that go together so frequently that you don't need to say the whole thing in order for someone to figure out what you meant. It's laziness, but it's efficient laziness. Here, I think, is where your explanation makes the most sense. Some people will advance such slang, some people will push back on it, and hopefully the good ones that serve their purpose well will survive while the dumber ones will fail to become popular and die.
Then there are people who just learn and use language incorrectly. "Let me axe you a question", "supposably", "could care less". There's a thing they're trying to say, it's language that already exists, they just heard it wrong or remembered it wrong or pronounced it wrong. Unlike the above case where the user is generally aware of what the old language was and chooses to use the knew language, people in this category are not usually doing it on purpose. It's just a mistake. We don't treat five year olds learning how to speak as guides and copy their language, we correct them and teach them how the language is actually used. Similarly, we don't treat people with the language skills of five year olds as guides and copy their language, we correct them and teach them how the language is actually used. The only reason prescriptivists might not be useful here is that adults are hard to teach, and your prescriptivism is likely to fall on deaf ears, but they're absolutely right to enforce to the extent that it is possible here.
If we're looking at things from a coarse scale then all the boundary pushers can push forward, and the prescriptivists push back, and then the more useful things get more people pushing forward and fewer people pushing back and survive, and both forces are useful. But if we zoom into these categories, the third category is not serving any purpose. Vanishingly few if any of their mistakes are actually useful language changes, in many cases they make things more confusing and ambiguous. Most of their mistakes are destined to die because nobody wants to copy them, and the few that do survive end up making the language worse and harder to understand for future generations. Granted, there isn't an unambiguous line at the boundary between deliberate slang and mistake slang, but there are examples that clearly fall into one or the other. Meaning a substantial portion of "boundary pushers" are just useless and the prescriptivists who oppose them are just right, even if the dynamic you point out is occurring at higher levels.
What makes more wrong to "axe" a question than to say "it's"? Contractions did not always exist and most languages I'm familiar with don't have them, certainly not to the extent English does. It's clearly the legacy of people hearing, remembering, and pronouncing "it is" wrong.
Redundancy: Axe already has a meaning. It's primarily a noun, a tool/weapon that chops things. It's only a verb when you mean hitting something with an axe, in which case it's very much not very friendly to axe someone. Any language change that overlaps other meanings receives a penalty. I suppose the contraction "it's" overlaps the possessive "its", and being able to tell the difference matters: it will almost always be clear whether you meant to ask something or hit someone with an axe, so this isn't a huge point against it, but it is a point.
Efficiency. "It's" is faster and easier to say than "it is". I very highly doubt that the legacy is actually people hearing, remembering, and pronouncing "it is" wrong, so much as being lazy and pronouncing it quickly. People who are entirely aware of what "it is" means might choose to say "it's" to save time. Meanwhile, "Axe" and "Ask" are approximately the same length to speak or write, and I think "axe" actually takes slightly more time/effort in the middle of a sentence because it doesn't flow as well. Nobody would ever use "axe" on purpose unless it's to fit in with other people who already do it by mistake.
Momentum. I am not an etymologist, I don't know exactly when/why/how "it's" became a thing, but by this point it is clearly established, while "axe" is not. Maybe it was a mistake at the time when "it's" became a thing and if people had resisted it then we could have less ambiguity about "its" (and might be allowed to use an apostrophe like we do with every other possessive). I'm not sure. But at this point it has been established and people understand it and use it. The primary purpose of language is to communicate with each other, consensus is incredibly useful in that regard, so all changes are immediately suspect and need to have positive reasons to justify themselves. If the majority of people said "axe" and some people started saying "ask" instead, I would oppose that on the same grounds.
Let's keep in mind here that the claim is that it's incorrect to say "axe" instead of "ask". Reasons that boil down to "I don't like it" don't make it correct, because clearly there are people who like it.
Homophones are not incorrect. There are about a billion of them in English.
Looks like it's a tie game for it's vs axe so far.
As far as I can tell, "'it's' is lazy but 'axe' is ignorant" is purely mood affiliation on your part. Not to mention I don't see why laziness is a more pardonable sin than ignorance, if we're going to keep a ledger.
Your opinion on how well it flows doesn't make it incorrect, unless you're willing to bite the bullet and acknowledge that "flat" is more correct than "apartment".
That it's a mistake is what you are trying to prove, so you can't assume it in order to prove it. Yes, 'axe' is used among people who speak Ebonics - there are words unique to every dialect, that doesn't make them wrong.
Ironically, 'ax' is about as old as 'ask' (see Chaucer 'Yow loveres axe I now this questioun.'). In old English the word for 'ask' was both 'acsian' and 'ascian'.
To pile on the irony even higher, you are essentially making an appeal from descriptivism. "It's wrong because people don't say it" well yes, it's wrong in standard English, it's not wrong in every dialect because there are dialects where it is, in fact, firmly established.
There are a class of cellular automata which follow some form of the rule "look at what your neighbors are doing, then copy the state that is most common among them". There are variations of this: sometimes the copying is probabilistic rather than deterministic so the most common is simply the most likely to be copied. If you attach some game theory or other fitness function you can get an evolutionary system where higher scoring traits are more likely to be copied and you can watch natural selection play out across the model.
What these tend to have in common is that under a broad range of parameters they eventually result in consensus. Even if all of the initial strategies are completely arbitrary, just numbered differently, you still by random chance have one of them end up more prevalent and then it snowballs out of control until it is universal or near-universal.
In the case of language, that would be useful. My point is not that the oldest form of language is the most correct. My point is more that the most common use is the most useful, unless some objective concern such as use efficiency or uniqueness can overcome that. Having minor dialectic enclaves within a language are burdensome and confusing. Therefore, the burden is on all new changes to prove themselves worthy of the cost of breaking consensus. If I lived in Chaucer's time and everyone said "axe", if that was just what that word meant, I would likewise oppose changing it to "ask" for no reason. But if 95% of people say "ask" and 5% of people say "axe" then, unless they've got a really good reason, it is useful to pressure them to conform and bring the language back together instead of splintering it, or trying to convert the remaining 95% their way.
The point is that you are not bringing the language back together - this is a form of the word that goes back to old English. There have always and will always be variation in language and dialects.
The idea that we'll bring the language back together and everyone will speak the same way is a total pipe dream that has never occurred in the history of human civilization since the tower fell.
I am not even arguing against the claim that 'axe' is not correct in SAE. But pronouncing it as universally incorrect or due to ignorance simply has no bearing on reality. It doesn't become incorrect just because it's dialect.
Did the American Africans inherit it from the lineage, or is it the case of independent invention? If it is the latter, the fact that some Anglos a millenium ago used is irrelevant.
All or nothing fallacy. No two people "speak the same way", preferences in style differ, in phrasing, but languages as things common to a group still exist. The current distance between normal English and African American English isn't an edict of nature, it can be reduced.
Many nation building projects included picking one language among many and teaching it to the people of the entire country: France, Italy, Poland... There are still dialects, but the diversity of language in each of these countries has been reduced in comparison to the state before standardization.
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Going with your cellular automata analogy, you're missing that people don't have knowledge of the global landscape, only their local neighborhood. If everyone around you says aks, shouldn't you then also say aks?
With most language, historically it's been characterized by something closer to genetic drift than driven by anything like a fitness function (there are some universal trends: language traits that compress too much information or too little are both disfavored). Homogeneity has real benefits, but it also takes energy to create and maintain. Control isn't free.
In the modern world, this is true for nobody relevant to the question.
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