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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   934 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A native speaker is one who learned a language as a child.

People have been able to tell if kids are speaking grammatically since long before there were grammar books, so the relevance is not clear to me.

A native speaker is one who learned a language as a child

That's way too loose of a definition. I learned English as a child, and while I consider myself fluent, I'm definitely not a native speaker.

People have been able to tell if kids are speaking grammatically since long before there were grammar books, so the relevance is not clear to me.

My point is just that the kind of deconstruction games that are used to argue against prescriptivism can be used to argue against descriptivism as well. I think each of those frameworks has a grain of truth to it, trying to make sense of the world with just one of them will lead to absurd results.

That's way too loose of a definition. I learned English as a child, and while I consider myself fluent, I'm definitely not a native speaker.

When I say "as a child", I mean in the critical period. I don't mean as a twelve year old.

My point is just that the kind of deconstruction games that are used to argue against prescriptivism can be used to argue against descriptivism as well. I think each of those frameworks has a grain of truth to it, trying to make sense of the world with just one of them will lead to absurd results.

It's simply a fact that language rules are an emergent phenomenon determined by the, let's say, ummah made up of speakers of each language or dialect, and when Internet people say a particular construction is "incorrect English" they usually mean "incorrect SAE" even though it's grammatical in some other dialect. None of this should be construed to imply that there aren't tremendous benefits to being fluent in SAE or the local standard dialect. If you've got an argument against this, let's hear it.

When I say "as a child", I mean in the critical period. I don't mean as a twelve year old.

I started picking it up when I was 5, or something. Then, when I was 7, Cartoon Network made a sudden appearance on the TV, and the people who were rebroadcasting it didn't have the resources to translate it, so my English really picked up at the time. All the vidya I was playing since I was old enough to hold a controller was also untranslated. It helped a bit with reading.

It's simply a fact that language rules are an emergent phenomenon determined by the, let's say, ummah made up of speakers of each language or dialect

Yeah, every category is. Transcription errors exist even on a biomolecular level, and we can tell they're errors because we can trace what they're meant to be transcribing.

Sometimes, it's harmless enough. Sometimes it's even adaptive, and you get evolution, but the descriptivist approach is akin to saying "cancer is, like, just another way of being, man".

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