Pedants' Paradise

[Serial_Apologist]

Standardising language is not necessarily fossilising it. It just prevent chaos. Adhering to the language of the educated classes may be a better starting place than the uneducated classes. That could be called snobbery, but let's not go there.

I think being able to communicate what one means as straightforwardly and unambiguously as possible is more important than knowing supposedly correct ways to hold a knife and fork!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

... and languages that have no written form, or which have only acquired a written form recently - do the speakers thereof not speak "correctly", even without the benefit of writing?

Welsh is a good example of a language that was not written down as early or as much as other languages. I spent some time learning Welsh in the early 1970s, and it's truly complex in its grammar, though more phonetic than English (a foregone conclusion ).

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I think being able to communicate what one means as straightforwardly and unambiguously as possible is more important than knowing supposedly correct ways to hold a knife and fork!

[vinteuil]

I spent some time learning Welsh in the early 1970s, and it's truly complex in its grammar...

.. are not all languages 'truly complex in their grammar'?

[Serial_Apologist]

... but in what way has any of this to do with forms which some people wish to assert as 'correct' or 'incorrect', when the only real indication is usage?

Surely that's tautological: wouldn't one say that the "usefulness" of language consists in its usage?

I don't think the written form is helpful. Some languages have distinctly different written and spoken forms - French, for example. Notions of 'correctness' in the spoken form don't flow from what might be regarded as 'correct' in the written.

I would have assumed that the flow went both ways - initially from the spoken to the written, and then to and fro between the two. One objection to language standardisation that relates to EA's comment about snobbery and jean's response is that the process originates from and is then maintained by ruling elites seeking either to impose linguistic norms educationally on the rest of the population in order to use language usage as one definition of superiority among others, including manners, so that they can then distinguish who is worthy of admission into the higher echelons of society and thus defend their own social elevation. But practicality dictates that there is always going to be some authority that is either self-selected or "democratically" chosen to determine how much of any given language should be standardised, for the literal sake of comprehensibility, I would have thought.

[vinteuil]

... language usage as one definition of superiority among others, including manners, so that they can then distinguish who is worthy of admission into the higher echelons of society and thus defend their own social elevation. ht.

... it is certainly the case that language use is one of the most subtle and decisive class-markers.

Shaw's 1916 Preface to Pygmalion -

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him."








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[ahinton]

... it is certainly the case that language use is one of the most subtle and decisive class-markers

And was it not the Duc de la Rochefoucauld who said that language was given to Man to conceal his thoughts?...

[vinteuil]

And was it not the Duc de la Rochefoucauld who said that language was given to Man to conceal his thoughts?...

from the web:

"Generally this is ascribed to Talleyrand, but it's a tiny bit complicated.

Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
[ La parole a été donnée à l' homme pour déguiser sa pensée]
- attributed to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord by Barrere in "Memoirs"


but also -

Where Nature’s end of language is declin’d,
And men talk only to conceal the mind.
~ Edward Young, Love of Fame. Satire ii. Line 207

Speech was made to open man to man, and not to hide him; to promote commerce, and not betray it.
~ Lloyd: State Worthies (1665; edited by Whitworth), vol. i. p. 503.

Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.
~ Robert South: Sermon, April 30, 1676.

The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
~ Oliver Goldsmith: The Bee, No. 3. (Oct. 20, 1759.)

Ils ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leurs injustices, et emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées (Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts).
~ Francis M. Voltaire: Dialogue xiv. Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766)"





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[Eine Alpensinfonie]

You just have!

OK. Sorry. Clearly education is a waste of time.

[french frank]

Standardising language is not necessarily fossilising it.

Different term but comes to the same thing if the 'standards' don't change.

Fossilise: 'to lose the capacity to absorb or reflect new ideas or practices'.

The thing is that when changes threaten to bring about 'chaos', other changes are introduced to avert it. Think what happened to the Latin case system when people failed to pronounce the final syllable clearly and, in some languages, it just dropped - as in French. Chaos was avoided.

My own practice is to more or less stick to the rules as I learnt them, but I notice/adapt to the changes in other people's usage without necessarily censuring them.

[Sir Velo]

Standardising language is not necessarily fossilising it. It just prevent chaos. Adhering to the language of the educated classes may be a better starting place than the uneducated classes.

Presumably you mean like being able to differentiate between credibility and credence?

[kernelbogey]

2976: ... it is certainly the case that language use is one of the most subtle and decisive class-markers.

I think this is important. Nowadays, I'd say that people who are practised in speaking in complete sentences, and who use constructions such as 'to whom' are signalling their education - a form of class distinction, especially in the last few decades where exaggerated colloquialism became fashionable, for example with a 'mockney' accent.

[french frank]

Nowadays, I'd say that people who are practised in speaking in complete sentences, and who use constructions such as 'to whom' are signalling their education - a form of class distinction, especially in the last few decades where exaggerated colloquialism became fashionable, for example with a 'mockney' accent.

Though it could be that some people are deliberately rejecting the concept of 'class distinction' as being an inherently bad thing.

[kernelbogey]

On reflection, I think I mean that it is similar to jargon - indicating a kind of closed club to which you are admitted only by using the correct language. So not deliberartely a class indicator, though others might see it as such.

[ahinton]

from the web:

"Generally this is ascribed to Talleyrand, but it's a tiny bit complicated.

Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
[ La parole a été donnée à l' homme pour déguiser sa pensée]
- attributed to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord by Barrere in "Memoirs"


but also -

Where Nature’s end of language is declin’d,
And men talk only to conceal the mind.
~ Edward Young, Love of Fame. Satire ii. Line 207

Speech was made to open man to man, and not to hide him; to promote commerce, and not betray it.
~ Lloyd: State Worthies (1665; edited by Whitworth), vol. i. p. 503.

Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.
~ Robert South: Sermon, April 30, 1676.

The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
~ Oliver Goldsmith: The Bee, No. 3. (Oct. 20, 1759.)

Ils ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leurs injustices, et emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées (Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts).
~ Francis M. Voltaire: Dialogue xiv. Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766)".

I knew so well that I could rely on you to provide chapters and verses that I put out that little invitation! Many thanks for all the clarification that I expected from you!

Another not entirely unconnected example (especialy given Elliott Carter's background in French) is David Schiff commenting on the Elegy for cello and piano that Carter wrote in the early 1940s and then transcribed for string quartet as concealing more than it reveals about how the composer was to write for string quartet in the future (and, incidentally, I recommended that a public radio station in New York include this quartet work in its all-day 10th anniversary of 9/11 broadcast and they did it but in the original cello and piano version played by Fred Sherry)...