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Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit interested in why all the European countries standardized on STOP for that sign. Apparently that's mandated by the convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign... which has wide support in Europe and sporadically other places.

It's impressive/weird to me that the convention got all the countries to use the english word on the stop sign, for consistency.

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While I don't know the answer, I would guess it has something to do with it not just being the English word. It's also the Dutch word (spelled exactly the same) and, based on some random clicking in Google Translate, Croation, Norwegian and Czech. It's a secondary translation in a bunch of other languages. I don't know how much of that changed after the road signs, but it looks like a good international basis.

it is not norwegian, as we would write STOPP in norwegian. In that sense, it's annoying, it's a word you understand, but the sign is also "misspelled".

Same in German. I remember teachers lecturing us in school about this. "Stop" certainly has become an acceptable spelling in colloquial German for some people because of this, much to the despair of language purists. Even the Duden (German standard reference dictionary) seems to have adopted it even if with some caveats:

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/stop

> Even the Duden

Good. The purpose of a dictionary is to record how language is used, not to gatekeep or social engineer what is "proper" language and what isn't.

Linguistic prescriptivism is the purview of bigots and school teachers.

I hate the extremists at the descriptivist end of the spectrum. I have no desire to return to four hundred years ago where everyone spelled words as one pleased, and comprehension suffers for it.

I'm skeptical that anyone wants to de-standardize spelling. Maybe its like the abortion debate. There isn't a pro-abortion side except in the minds of the "pro-life" people. Descriptivists by definition study/report how language is used rather than agitate for any changes so if such people do exist they would be a different kind of prescriptivist.

I think it's a common category error. The job of an academic linguist is mostly (as I understand it) to study language as-found, but I've met a few people who take that to mean "linguists -- the experts on language -- say we shouldn't try to 'correct' differences."

It comes in a few flavours. Sometimes an assumption that linguists as people are never prescriptive. Sometimes as an argument for the respectability of established dialect (not to say this conclusion is wrong, only the argument.)

There is plenty of (mostly non-professional IME) "normative descriptivism" floating around.

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