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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I also like how several linguists attempt to call out this usage as wrong:

> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

You can't really reign in language.

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Linguists don’t say varieties are right or wrong (even though they might have private aesthetic opinions like everyone else). That would be like a biologist saying dogs are the correct version of mammals and cats are wrong and/or don’t exist.

Biologists actually say the opposite of that!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-are-perfect-...

Just because someone has a degree and a job in the field doesn't mean they understand how science works. Prescriptive biology is even sillier than prescriptive linguistics.

I think her tongue is planted firmly in cheek.

There do exist prescriptivist linguists, who do exactly that: they try to divine "correct" from "incorrect" usage of language.

> There do exist prescriptivist linguists

That is not true, at least in mainstream serious academia. Prescriptive linguistics doesn’t exist any more than prescriptive biology or astronomy.

Maybe in the USA. But bodies like the French Academy and many similar ones in other countries very much do issue opinions on correct grammatical (and vocabulary) usage. And members of these institutions are very much considered the top of their field in their countries.

The members of the French Academy are not linguists. They are mostly writers or academics from other fields (history, philosophy, etc). If you can read French, check here: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/les-quarante...

> And members of these institutions are very much considered the top of their field in their countries.

Maybe, but their field isn't linguistics.

*rein in

Some things like this are nevertheless generally known to be wrong despite usage

Though you also can't reign, in language.

And this is why I cringe whenever somebody tries to defend Perl's syntax by perlsplaining "But Larry Wall is a linguist!"

The people they’re citing are either authors of usage guides or linguists who are simply noting that the usage has been deemed incorrect by some of the former.

These are not linguists doing that. No self-respecting linguists will waste time doing prescriptivism. These are two linguistic articles about this constructs that are quoting amateur language usage manuals. The oldest one is a boys magazine[1] published in 1864 discussing "the Queen's English"[2]. The newest one (Crews et al.) seems to be an obscure usage manual for writers[3].

As demonstrated here, "try and" is older and more "original" than "try to", if not contemporary with it. Any other reason why would "try to" be more "correct" cannot even make sense as anything more than a purely uneducated opinion. When you dig deep into most examples of perspectivism you'll usually run into the same story too. "Incorrect" forms often predate the "correct" forms and are often employed by respected writers (such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen). And even if they don't, there isn't really any scientific ground to brand one form as incorrect.

Linguists do not generally engage in linguist prescriptivism. As far as I'm concerned (and I believe most linguists would agree), this is stylistic opinion at best and pseudoscience at worst. Still, it's not linguists can do anything to stop amateurs from publishing prescriptive language usage manuals, so you'll always have people who claim that "try and" or "ain't" or "me and my friend went for a walk" are incorrect.

[1] https://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_periodical.php?j...

[2] Yes, this is Edmund Routledge whose father is the namesake of the present scholarly publisher, but they were just publishing popular books back in the 19th century.

[3] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Frederick-Crews/dp/0070136386

If a modern linguist call any usage as wrong, I would ask for his diploma and check if I have to close his university, because clearly they shouldn't teach linguistics 101, let alone bring someone towards a PhD. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Then linguistics is worthless. Descriptivism can't actually tell you anything; all someone can say is "yep, you sure are using that word that way". Fortunately prescriptivists still exist despite people's best efforts to give it a bad name.

Linguistics can explain why and how the language evolve, who caused this evolution. I don't know any modern linguist (as in doctor in linguistics) who ever wrote 'you should say this and not that', because all of them knows that languages change. The only 'prescriptivists' are bad philosophers and English majors.

How can you learn about how people spoke and the patterns that dictate how that changed over time if all you care about is what is considered technically correct at the moment?

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