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