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Comment by samirillian | Hacker News Reader

Well this guy on Wikipedia, who clearly cares more then you do, for one. Dictionaries, style guides, people like Orwell, the French do have a ministry to maintain the language.

I've answered your question, now I have one for you: Did you even glance at the link?

I'm sorry, these epistemologically relativist arguments lead to utterly absurd conclusions. How does wikipedia work at all? How can we ever make judgements about anything?

It's bad Cartesianism. Just because we can't know something absolutely doesn't mean we can't know anything. Just because language changes doesn't mean there's no such thing as correct and incorrect usage.

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> Dictionaries

Dictionaries generally explicitly do not define what is correct, they describe what is in use (often with notes about the contexts of common use).

> style guides

Style guides do not define what is correct for the language, they define what is correct for those adopting the style, they are intentionally by design more limited than what is acceptable in the language to serve, for adopting institutions, the function of providing a common style (that’s why they are called style guides, rather than language guides.)

Noah Webster, of the US Webster's Dictionary was a language reformer and created a prescriptive dictionary intended to "correctly instruct" people about what he believed the correct use and spelling of English to be.

He introduced American spelling and American English.

By constrast the Oxford English Dictionary was created by lexicographers intent on mapping the usage of English across space and time, they created multiple entries for each form | usage of root words and added copious notes (in the full multi volume OED editions) regarding first usage, alternate spellings, regional changes, etc.

The OED is a descriptive dictionary.

> Noah Webster [...] created a prescriptive dictionary intended to "correctly instruct" [...]

Webster lived 200 years ago, and today prescriptivism is rejected by the overwhelming majority of linguists, because it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what language is. Prescriptivism is about as well supported as phrenology, and shares many of its discriminatory goals. It was something people made up, that turned out to not make any actual sense, and that was subsequently abandoned by almost everyone.

Webster can instruct people on how to correctly write "Webster Language". But he cannot instruct people on how to correctly write English. English is whatever its users say and write. No other sensible definition exists.

> Noah Webster, of the US Webster’s Dictionary was a language reformer and created a prescriptive dictionary intended to “correctly instruct” people about what he believed the correct use and spelling of English to be

Yes, he was.

And while some of his reforms caught on and remain in use to this day, his approach to dictionaries generally did not. When I said dictionaries do not do that, the verb tense was significant.

I don't think anyone is saying that "anything goes" and there's no right or wrong ways of writing, they're just arguing that your narrow definition of "correct" is too narrow to be useful for anything other than gatekeeping.

My main point is only that comparing this to newspeak is totally backwards.

How does wikipedia work? How does language work? Linguists have firmly determined that it does not work by a coterie of elites handing down decisions about correctness, regardless of what france pretends their "immortels" do.

That also doesn't mean "anything goes" either, obviously, since we do clearly speak a mutually comprehensible dialect through no intentional coordination. It's an interesting subject! You could stand to have some curiosity about its actual mechanics, there's a lot to be learned that is invisible to you if you've already decided how it should work.

You literally didn't answer my one question, yet you keep asking more. Even Socrates answered questions when asked.

I could engage your other points, but why bother

You want me to answer questions like "how do we make judgements about things?" I don't think this is that sort of venue sorry.

Okay now you're just trolling me. The question that starts with "I have a question for you." Did you look at the Orwell link.

> Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Language is indeed consciously shaped. Look at the history of Italian. It doesn't just happen, and Wikipedia definitely doesn't just happen.

And if you disagree with Orwell, fine, just don't trot him out in support of your points. Which was my original point.

> Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

That's what language is. That's how language works.

I love Orwell, but he was flat wrong in that essay. He was playing at being a linguist and showing his ignorance.

Oh I think you're talking to two different people here, sorry. I never mentioned orwell.

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