1. Don't take this the wrong way, but I couldn't care less (or "could care less," however you please) about correcting your "grammar." My job is to describe the way people actually talk, make generalizations and predictions and maybe, sometimes, try to explain why things are the way they are. My job is definitely NOT to prescribe or influence how anybody talks, and in many cases, I'm not even remotely interested in knowing why people do what they do.
2. Here are a few (slightly simplified) generalizations linguists assume. (We don't even debate these things; we really just assume them by now.)
- No dialect/language is "superior" or "inferior" to any other. We don't even know how you'd measure that.
- A language and a dialect are the same thing.
- Natural (human) language was not and cannot be consciously invented by humans. It just happens.
- It's incredibly unlikely that anyone can (successfully) "decide" to change either grammar, vocabulary, meaning, or sounds of a language.
- Every language has inherent grammar rules that every speaker of that language instinctively knows.
- The grammar and the lexicon are defined by what speakers (subconsciously) know when they know a language, and not the other way around.
- No native speaker of a language can have "bad grammar," and no language's grammar is inherently bad.
- "Grammaticality" and "correctness" are judged by a speaker's intuitions and/or the language community, not some standard in a book. (I know this sounds shockingly relativistic, but can you explain to me what absolute linguistic truth would look like?)
- Language structure isn't "logical" in the formal sense of the word, and there's no reason why it should be. (i.e., although a double negative equals a positive in mathematics or formal logic, this doesn't have to be the case in language.)
- Just because your language doesn't "have a word for" some concept doesn't mean you are literally unable think in those categories. (Okay, this is slightly contested. But only really marginally.)
3. Things that are fascinating to non-linguists (i.e. similarities between cognate languages, like French and Spanish) tend to be pretty uninteresting to linguists; things that are viewed as incorrect or deviant by non-linguists (like ending a sentence with a preposition or saying "can't nobody help") tend to be just a little interesting to linguists; and things that are mundane, irrelevant or unnoticeable to non-linguists tend to be the things that most interest linguists.
Yet again, I feel like Stephen Fry here:
Thanks for your time. ;]
7 comments:
Because, as a non-linguist, a good portion of this post went over my head I'm going to latch on to the shallowest thing I can: Have you seen Stephen Fry's new show "Kingdom"? It's no "Fry and Laurie". It's not even supposed to be funny but he's incredibly endearing in it. Check. It. Out.
Thanks for posting that. I've just being writing an essay on attitudes to creole language Singlish in Singapore so it is interesting to read a linguists perspective on the legitimacy of dialects. The politics of a dialect being considered a proper language can be really interesting.
Thanks for this - really helpful and interesting.
I loved this! I was a linguistics minor in college (and want to go to grad school for linguistics) so I totally get what you're saying :)
All I can really say, and I do mean it when I say it, is this post has cleared some dust off some grammatical confusion mistakenly believing that language could be fit into concisely precise containable drawers or folders or boxes or even empty kleenex boxes and sorted into colors, stripes, designs or patterns, but as you, Fry and Laurie so eloquently explained, language indeed cannot be contained. And that's a beautiful thing.Indeed no, I cannot explain what "absolute lingustic truth" would look like!
Thank you, Carissa and Happy, joyful Linguisticalations to you!
This band wagon drives me nuts. Bad grammar is when you mean to say one thing and then say something else without even knowing that you didn't say what you meant. That's objectively bad grammar.
It is also tacky and lazy and it makes it impossible to accurately communicate which is crucial to fulfilling many biblical responsibilities.
Ha! Carissa, you have been hit by the 22 Words curse!
Abraham cross posts your post in some clever, clipped fashion and you have to write three PhD dissertations in defense!
Maybe it will become a verb. You've been 22 Word-ed.
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