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Comment by fifnir | Hacker News Reader

It's so self evident that I don't know where to begin...

Language has rules (They were taught to us in school). They might change over time but they still exist.

I'm sure that many "could of"s have been made official over the eons in all languages, (thanks to general ignorance/incompetence/refusal to learn) but that doesn't mean we should respect "couldofers" (see? I made up a word, I'm not that rigid) as if they're the next Shakespeare...

Iz their know point at witch "human caltoural fenonemon" stops and blatant misuse starts? Would you not draw the line somewhere?

I draw it at "you're/your/couldof" etc and it infuriates me because, not only these people offload a significant part of the work of communication to me, but they have the nerve to consider themselves somehow superior.

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> Language has rules (They were taught to us in school). They might change over time but they still exist.

Those rules are discovered, not handed down from authorities, and the rules you were taught in school are largely not the real rules English speakers abide by. The real rules are learned the way every native language is learned: Through imitation and conversation with other native speakers, the caretakers and the peers.

> Iz their know point at witch "human caltoural fenonemon" stops and blatant misuse starts? Would you not draw the line somewhere?

First, we're talking about language, not orthography. If you want to see some bizarre orthography, read Chaucer. Or Shakespeare. Or Lewis and Clark, who managed to spell "mosquito" multiple ways on the same page, in full view of each other.

Second, native speakers do make mistakes, but if a "mistake" is persistent enough to bother you, well, it probably isn't a mistake, but a dialectical feature, and saying a dialect is wrong or inferior is contrary to the science of linguistics. You wouldn't claim to have a new rule for electrons and then rant about how the electrons refuse to follow it because they're uncultured and uneducated.

And saying a dialect is "wrong" is very often a proxy for saying some people are too poor or the wrong color to "speak right" in the mind of the complainer. Witness the idiocy spewed about African-American Vernacular English, commonly called "Ebonics" by the people who try to mark it as uneducated.

Yes, you were taught a set of language rules in school. By what objective standard are those rules correct? "Because I learned them in school" isn't a good answer.

I also learned in school that it's necessary to raise one's hand before speaking, to ask an authority figure's permission before using the bathroom, and to write math proofs in a two-column format. The point is that plenty of things you learn in school are just social conventions that are useful in certain situations, not reflections of any objective reality.

I'm not arguing against the existence of a language standard -- I'm arguing against its validity.

As for your intentional misspellings, that is a strawman -- nobody actually writes or talks like that, so you're actually deviating from the cultural phenomenon, there. If people did actually commonly write "iz" for "is", and "know" for "no" (and the rest of your examples), then that sentence would take no effort to understand, and yes, I'd be fine with it.

The standard for correct rules: when two people communicate they emerge at the end with a shared mental model of the subject.

People make up languages all the time. You can write your own rules to make the above grammar be instructions on getting to my village. You could write a different set of rules that make it an order to make my roast duck for dinner. (you can have fun coming up with even more bizarre things that it could mean under some rule system)

> The standard for correct rules: when two people communicate they emerge at the end with a shared mental model of the subject.

By this standard, using "their", "there", and "they're" or "your" and "you're" completely randomly is fine -- it's almost impossible for it to cause misunderstanding.

In fact this is false. Even though in verbal speech they are the same, in written they are different. I have known people who didn't understand something written because the wrong word was written, once someone read it out loud they understood it.

Of course there is no reason the above people couldn't get used to one spelling if they changed the rules. We just need to have universal agreement to change the rules. (I have no clue how you would do that)

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