OOTS #1275 - The Discussion Thread

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Yeah exactly, it only happens before a stressed /a/. If memory serves, the accepted explanation is that there's no actual substitution, but rather that the late Latin feminine singular article illa evolved differently before these words, losing the -a (> el) instead of the i- (> la, the usual development).

I love that kind of small detail that I'd never even have thought to consider. Thank you so much.

GW

[Dasick]

Language, like science snd society, advances one funeral at a time.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Is it because people cease to be part of it, and so it changes? Or is it because say, some famous scientist or writer dies and everyone has a chance to understand how much that person impacted those areas?

I feel like my use of language has been constantly changing all my life. And language around me has been changing as well. And actually just using the forum and adhering to it's rules changes the way I use language more so than how I normally use it. Both because it's a forum, because of the people here, and the rules themselves. For the better I think (I know, imagine my worse :P )

[Peelee]

I'm not sure what you mean here. Is it because people cease to be part of it, and so it changes? Or is it because say, some famous scientist or writer dies and everyone has a chance to understand how much that person impacted those areas?

I feel like my use of language has been constantly changing all my life. And language around me has been changing as well. And actually just using the forum and adhering to it's rules changes the way I use language more so than how I normally use it. Both because it's a forum, because of the people here, and the rules themselves. For the better I think (I know, imagine my worse :P )

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Now apply that to alterations to the "rules" of English.

[Fyraltari]

If anything I can accuse [the Académie française] of being temporarily challenged descriptivists

Careful, you might give a couple of them a heart attack just by saying that.

[hroþila]

K at this point I'm going to need someone to explain to me what "rules-driven" means in this conversation.

[Tzardok]

K at this point I'm going to need someone to explain to me what "rules-driven" means in this conversation.

Careful. That's prescriptivist talk, asking for a formal definition instead of divining from context.

[Peelee]

Careful. That's prescriptivist talk, asking for a formal definition instead of diving from context.

I only dive from boards.

[Tzardok]

I only dive from boards.

Touché. *rofl*

[Dasick]

Now apply that to alterations to the "rules" of English.

Yeah I don't really agree with that. Planck is just calling his opponents dense morons incapable of changing their minds cause he thinks he's smarter than them.

People's capacity to change their minds definitely diminishes the older they are, but it's still possible, and it's a lot more frequent than people think. We think it's difficult because it's a slow and gradual process, so when we hit someone with the perfect zinger or argument or whatever and it doesn't stick immediately, it feels like it's not very effective. I know quite a lot of people who change their minds quite drastically on a number of things over the years, myself included, and I can trace some of these changes to one or the other thing being said or done.

It's worth pointing out that, at least if feels like, belief in flat earth, or having anti-vaccination stances, are things that are on the rise, despite there being a chunk of time of say, bout couple generations, when those beliefs were almost eradicated. For example, Soviet Union had a very shall we say, forceful vaccination as well as education system, since it's inception, and it lasted about 80 years. Russia as a whole is full of people skeptical of vaccination. There's a large overlap between people who grew up in the Soviet educational system, didn't even hear of an alternative viewpoint until it started collapsing, and people who are skeptical of vaccination (that is, it's not just the youth who was born after the collapse driving the skepticism). So the falling educational standards aren't the only explanation.

Careful, you might give a couple of them a heart attack just by saying that.

Haha, right, and we don't want that, that would be bad, right?

K at this point I'm going to need someone to explain to me what "rules-driven" means in this conversation.

Languages have rules. Rules have exceptions. Imagine a ratio of rules to exceptions, bigger ratio is more rules driven, smaller ratio is less rules driven. Lack of rules governing situations, or rules which work either way, are part of the "exception"

[Peelee]

Yeah I don't really agree with that. Planck is just calling his opponents dense morons incapable of changing their minds cause he thinks he's smarter than them.

Aside from the fact that he was most likely smarter than his opponents, it seems not everyone agrees with your assessment - a quick google search shows that MIT, the Nobel Commission, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and hey, even chemistryworld.com and Opthalmology Times why not, all cite research studies that show ol' Maxie's claim was pretty accurate.

But hey, you have anecdotal data of knowing some people who adapt and like to tell people in a field that they are wrong about their field, so gee, it's hard to gauge which side is probably right.

ETA:

for example, many/most of us are too old for "google" as a verb to have existed when we first learned English, but most of us are comfortable using it thusly now.

All else aside, i wholeheartedly support this as I tend to be a fan of genericide.

[The MunchKING]

All else aside, i wholeheartedly support this as I tend to be a fan of genericide.

Genericide? You want to kill all the generic people?? Or generals? Their armies won't like that either way.

[JonahFalcon]

I don't know if anyone noticed, but "spells" is a 6 letter word.

[Dasick]

Aside from the fact that he was most likely smarter than his opponents, it seems not everyone agrees with your assessment - a quick google search shows that MIT, the Nobel Commission, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and hey, even chemistryworld.com and Opthalmology Times why not, all cite research studies that show ol' Maxie's claim was pretty accurate.

But hey, you have anecdotal data of knowing some people who adapt and like to tell people in a field that they are wrong about their field, so gee, it's hard to gauge which side is probably right.

Quick googling as the youths say, has lead me to a wiki page.

There's an interesting rebuttal section

Spoiler: rebuttal

Show

Whether age influences the readiness to accept new ideas has been empirically criticised. In the case of acceptance of evolution in the years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, age was a minor factor.[2] On a more specialized scale, it also was a weak factor in accepting cliometrics.[7] A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists.[8] However, a more recent study on life science researchers found that following the deaths of preeminent researchers, publications by their collaborators rapidly declined while the activity of non-collaborators and the number of new researchers entering their field rose.[9]

This is the paper linked in the Wiki article to support it.

Seems to talk about how when a "star" in a field dies, it attracts people into the discipline from other disciplines who have a tendency to gain prominence. Which, is kinda related to Plank's claim if you squint your eyes I guess?

Spoiler: from the paper

Show

Perhaps for the sort of scientific revolutions that Planck—the pioneer of quantum mechanics—likely had in mind, but the proposition that established scientists are slower than novices in accepting paradigm-shifting ideas has received little empirical support whenever it has been put to the test (Hull et al. 1978; Gorham 1991; Levin et al. 1995). Paradigm shifts are rare, however, and their very nature suggests that once they emerge, it is exceedingly costly to resist or ignore them. In contrast, “normal” scientific advance

So maybe the spirit of what Plank said is correct in some degree, but not the way he said it. Huh, life is more complex and nuanced than what you can fit in a witty truism. Just like how I didn't deny that the more one learns, the harder it is for that one to change one's mind

For the record - linguists study language and how it changes. I made an argument as to why a language should change a certain way. Which is not unrelated to what linguists do (after all the better you understand how languages change, the better equipped you are to understand how to change it in some way), but it is not what they primarily do. If Hyoi wants to say that my proposed changes or direction don't lead to what I want from a language, I'm all ears, but again, I'm pretty sure that what I want from a language ('maximized ability to communicate across time and demographics') isn't something anyone can object to on reasonable grounds

[Fyraltari]

language might be communicating more than just the raw content of the words used (for example, it might be signaling membership in a specific social group. This goes both ways: allegedly "inefficient" structures might be worth the cost due to the group identity marking, and allegedly "efficient" structures might actually just be marking membership in a higher-status group.

Those are called sociolects, right?

[Coppercloud]

I don't know if anyone noticed, but "spells" is a 6 letter word.

I don't know whether or not you were trolling, but regardless your post was like a breath of fresh air. Forum way too wordy for chief grukgruk sometimes.

[Dasick]

Potential objections:

I kinda wish this forum had a like button or something. I don't agree with what you're saying, but I like the way you're disagreeing.

-communicating within your time/demographic might prioritized over communicating outside it.

Well, the idea is that with clear, consistent, seldomly changed rules, that doesn't have to be much of a conflict, no?

-language might be communicating more than just the raw content of the words used (for example, it might be signaling membership in a specific social group. This goes both ways: allegedly "inefficient" structures might be worth the cost due to the group identity marking, and allegedly "efficient" structures might actually just be marking membership in a higher-status group.

I touched a bit on it above "That people choose not to do so, or that they choose to modify the language specifically to increase the cultural drift (see youth slang) are separate issues"

To me it seems like that people want to signal membership in a specific social group is endemic of a problem in itself. That young people feel disdain for the older people and want to speak a different form of language. That lower class people feel like the higher class people are too snooty, too disconnected from them and their needs, and vice versa, the higher class people, elites really, turning their noses at the lowborn peasants. Some other issues which I don't wanna get into

I wonder if there's any ideas about how changes in how language is formed and how it diverges something you've heard being studied, with connection to large scale conflicts? When I think of say, regional dialects of the English, I can't help but notice that the major ones have seen some serious conflict with one another, and I'm not so sure if the resulting divergence is not part of the conflict

I wonder if the desire to protect or signal one's identity is somehow connected to a feeling of being threatened somehow, of there being issues that you feel aren't heard.

-the range of times/demographics you routinely communicate with might just be too narrow to make changing your habitual language patterns worth the effort (especially if you have the ability to switch to a more formal register at need).

That's fair enough and I like I said, it's more of an implementation issue. Like, we might be able to make English "better" as I define it, but it might not be worth the resources to do so.

[brian 333]

"My bad," is my current pet peve. Your bad what? It is not even a sentence. A subject noun and an adjective without an object to modify hardly satisfies any rules of grammar in any language. You have a bad something, but you never say what happened to it.

As I interpret the sentence fragment, I realize it is being used where an apology should be. But it is not an apology. At best it is an admission of guilt without any hint of regret or remorse, and it does not imply that the 'bad' will not be repeated.

If we are assuming an unspoken object, such as 'mistake,' then a better construction would be (That was) My mistake. Now the speaker is taking ownership of the mistake, and there is an assumed subject and verb, 'That was.'

When someone says 'My bad,' to me I usually want to immediately claim adjectives too. If you get 'bad,' I claim 'red.' My red. You can't play with my red. Or fast. "My fast." Or, "My tall!"

But I remember saying, "Dig that groovy fox!"
(For those too young to know, the phrase means, "Did you see that person of high moral character, whom I desire to engage in challenging video games via the internet.)

So, the English language evolves, and it evolves to suit the needs of the speakers who use it. And if that's true, then why bother with rules at all? The answer is simple: consistency.

English Speakers in Canberra and The Conjo can communicate in spite of the gulf between the two dialects. And readers can comprehend what was written centuries ago by someone in Kansas..

Rules of English serve a formal environment. The rules create a degree of consistency that renders the language comprehensible around the world, across many hundred nations.

So, the rules exist to stabilize and unify the language. They do not exist to dictate spoken word. As long as I like, I can continue to "Dig groovy foxes." And rappers can continue to do what they do.

But I bet when they sign contracts, those contracts are written in precise, formal English, because later on someone may want to hold someone to the letter of that contract, and it needs to be comprehensible to people who do not listen to rap.

[Lunapilot]

So, the English language evolves, and it evolves to suit the needs of the speakers who use it.

On a slight tangent, the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence by programs such as ChatGPT or Google's Bard will mean that more of the English language (and others!) will be created by algorithms and the underlying bias of their programmers. These programs don't actually know the meaning of words just the statistical probability of them being used etc. Over time, an increasing amount of the data that they are trained on, will have been generated by similar programs, so the evolution of the language could diverge faster than if only humans were using it....

This post was written by a human! :)

[Elanasaurus]

But I bet when they sign contracts, those contracts are written in precise, formal English, because later on someone may want to hold someone to the letter of that contract, and it needs to be comprehensible to people who do not listen to rap.

This is why i liked a prescriptive view of rules. It seems that there's a "correct" (or what you call precise and formal) way to use English. But we usually don't have to follow that "correct" way. A purely descriptive view wouldn't prescribe that people use any particular style in a given situation. But a descriptive view, that uses rules to describe prescriptions, makes sense to me

[WindStruck]

Kind of hard to believe that 8 pages of this thread have mostly been about English grammar rules, interpretation, and counting how many letters are in words...

[enq]

Kind of hard to believe that 8 pages of this thread have mostly been about English grammar rules, interpretation, and counting how many letters are in words...

Yeah, I'm disappointed we're not even at 2 digits yet.

Should I have spelled the 2 out as two? Discuss!

[MoiMagnus]

"My bad," is my current pet peve. Your bad what? It is not even a sentence.

Neither were "Sorry", "Thanks" and "Good Morning" before they became so omnipresent that peoples accepted them as full sentences.

[Fyraltari]

Kind of hard to believe that 8 pages of this thread have mostly been about English grammar rules, interpretation, and counting how many letters are in words...

"Join date: Jan 2012"
How is this still surprising to you?

[enq]

Neither were "Sorry", "Thanks" and "Good Morning" before they became so omnipresent that peoples accepted them as full sentences.

I'd say I accept them as interjections.

[KorvinStarmast]

I don't know if anyone noticed, but "spells" is a 6 letter word.

If the quinton does not care, why should I? He's the one who made the deal.

Kind of hard to believe that 8 pages of this thread have mostly been about English grammar rules, interpretation, and counting how many letters are in words...

Why is that hard to believe? At least it wasn't another verdammt Star Wars digression.

Neither were "Sorry", "Thanks" and "Good Morning" before they became so omnipresent that peoples accepted them as full sentences.

As opposed to Slurry, Tanks, and Good Mourning?

[OvisCaedo]

Why is that hard to believe? At least it wasn't another verdammt Star Wars digression.

Are we due for one of those again? We haven't had one since the previous thread!

[Grey_Wolf_c]

But I bet when they sign contracts, those contracts are written in precise, formal English, because later on someone may want to hold someone to the letter of that contract, and it needs to be comprehensible to people who do not listen to rap.

And you'd be wrong. Contracts are NOT written in "precise, formal English", they are written in slang. Legal slang, to precise, sometime called "legalese" which is a established mixture of Latin and English, much of it calcified out of sheer necessity. There has been a movement to "make legal writing more understandable to the regular user" (what with all the contracts we have to claim to have read in a regular basis) and it will fail, because at the end of the day, regular English changes too much, and has too many ambiguities, which can cost you if it goes to trial, so they'd rather have calcified language that they all can refer to as having a single meaning than any kind of true English, formal or not. (I'm in favour of the "TLDR at the top in regular English" approach, FWIW, but that's not the same as the whole thing)

Same as with medical professionals, really. They'd rather grandfather in Ancient Latin and Greek terms redefined to mean something precise in medicine than use modern words whose meanings are fuzzy. But neither of those is "formal" English, they are both slang.

This is why i liked a prescriptive view of rules. It seems that there's a "correct" (or what you call precise and formal) way to use English. But we usually don't have to follow that "correct" way. A purely descriptive view wouldn't prescribe that people use any particular style in a given situation. But a descriptive view, that uses rules to describe prescriptions, makes sense to me

Prescriptions might make sense until you realise they are useless. They can't be imposed. You cannot have an actual grammar police. People will continue to evolve the language whether you like it or not and the rules either move with the people, or become useless. No amount of shaking fists at people who dare split infinitives will ever stop people from splitting infinitives when needed. Same for every other rule someone attempts to impose. It just makes them look somewhat ridiculous for even trying.

Grey Wolf

[Wintermoot]

I don't know if anyone noticed, but "spells" is a 6 letter word.

As a profound traditionalist, the Quintin uses "old common" instead of common common. So like Colour vs Color, he spells some words with extra unnecessary letters. So he thinks of spells as "spaells" which is seven letters.

[dancrilis]

You cannot have an actual grammar police.

Well you could - you just likely wouldn't want to live anywhere that has one, but a brance of law enforcement whose rule is to note all media for mistakes and arrests, tries, convicts and punishes the person in error is certainly possible.

[enq]

No amount of shaking fists at people who dare split infinitives will ever stop people from splitting infinitives when needed. Same for every other rule someone attempts to impose. It just makes them look somewhat ridiculous for even trying.

It sure would be convenient to not have to separate am, is and are, but this convenience hasn't led to English speakers settling for just one of them (or at least getting rid of am). Your English teacher would (at least) frown at you and you would have a hard time getting taken seriously in English discourse. Is this not a rule being imposed?