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Comment by hnal943 | Hacker News Reader

Eh, if language is primarily about communication, there are many benefits to standardization. It feels like a cop-out to just say that everyone gets to make up their own rules of grammar. People also used to make up their own spellings, but standardizing increased the efficacy of communication.

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There are benefits to standardization, but only if it is a decent standardization. As the article points out, language is about communicating ideas. A standardization that makes this task harder is probably worse than a non-standardized way that makes it easier.

I have never seen a situation where using a less common spelling or grammar was more distracting than the pedantic tangent it produced.

That may be true among native speakers with a roughly similar background, but it's not necessarily true in terms of language varieties and non-native speakers (most likely because the non-native speakers may only recognize one form, or spelling, or construction, or lexeme, and not be able to guess how an alternative is related).

I have; I see it very regularly, in fact. I'm sure you'd see it more often as well if you worked in translation engineering...

I've experienced confusion reading corporate documents which contained poor grammar or orthography.

As an example of the latter, based loosely on a real example:

  It is preferred to take the server to run-level 1 then to reboot.

So, I telinit 1 followed by shutdown -r now ...?

In operational-readiness documents there really must not be any leeway for confusion or ambiguity, yet I've encountered many such examples. The usual retort of 'language evolves!' doesn't hold true in circumstances where a common, unequivocal meaning is required.

You'd think programmers would be aware of that, writing strictly-defined grammar all day long!

That's a fantastic example, thank you.

Wouldn't those standards be called "idioms"?

What's the value of a community writing them down in a book and teaching them rote like, en mass, when they already know them and hand them down organically to their kids?

Attempting to do so quickly devolves into "right/wrong" thinking. Which is the exact opposite of what this article and volumes of academic research suggest is reality.

If you encounter a language barrier, figure it out with those folks. Oh noes, human interaction! Just read this book instead and come back to me when you're on a level.

OK, so I'm being glib, but the point is obvious; just talk to people.

Imagine being a historian reading through illegible primary sources. It's hard to talk to the people to find out what they mean when they are dead.

Really, you're saying that written communication should just be ineffective if every missive needs to be followed with a conversation to be understood.

But there's a key difference between language and writing: while writing is taught formally, language is learnt by imitation. If that's how we've evolved to use language, I don't see how standardisation could even make sense.

Regarding language being about communication, I think a subtlety is often missed: what are we communicating? our choice of linguistic conventions communicates a lot about the community we identify with, our status, age, etc.

I think that would require a consensus among experts to adopt a language specification. That would also be a good time to clean out any artifactual warts.

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