Hacker News Reader

Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> there is truly no correct way to say something

Yes, there is. Linguistic descriptivism is a stale 1960s academic fad wrapped up in a revolutionary energy that's dead and cringe now. Like that era's other insane postmodernisms, it rejects reality and reality has rejected it right back.

"Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.

View on HN

>when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions

And who will be the keepers (or should I say gate-keepers) of this glorious collection? And will they prevent Tolkien from spelling plural of dwarf as dwarves? Will they force Cormac McCarthy to use quotation marks?

Well said. Linguistic descriptivism is completely incoherent because it can't actually tell you anything. All a descriptivist can do is say "yep, you sure are using the word that way" which isn't remotely useful or interesting.

Do you think any scientific inquiry in any field is useful or interesting?

Important to note that no working linguists hold this view and it is entirely outside the consensus mainstream of the discipline. This view is popular on HN but it is about as scientifically reputable as lysenkoism and not much more useful.

Think what you will, but language does not require your permission to change. Modern English will be as alien to our descendants as Shakespearian English is to us.

> "Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster ~when we out speech draws from a a collection of words~, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.

It’s okay. I still understood you.

Sorry, but you are completely misunderstanding what “descriptivism” means, why it’s the viewpoint taken in serious linguistics, and how common it is there (i.e. absolutely 100% universal among everyone who studies language scientifically).

> absolutely 100% universal among everyone who studies language scientifically

They are all wrong.

Well, why?

The point of science is to understand natural phenomena, not to pass value judgments on them. Biologists’ job is not to decide which out of dogs and cats is “correct”. Why should linguistics be any different?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com