response 25 of 65:

Sep 25 23:04 UTC 1991

A fair amount of formalspeak is pretty silly and awkwards too.  And not
uncommonly, the proscribed forms turn out to have better roots in
english than the perscribed forms.  Shakespeare used double negatives
quite cheerfully.  "Ain't" turns out to be quite old.  At best,
formalspeak represents a sort of idealized form of 19th century
oldspeak.  At worst, formalspeak can result in some truely opaque and
turgid prose, lifeless, without beauty, and devoid of meaningful
information content.

I think the most useful plan is to teach kids to cope with a wide
variety of different -speak's, to recognize and appreciate the
differences, and to give them the ability to use more than one solution
to use in different contexts, according to which one will work the best.
The language you use to sell yourself on a resume is probably not what
you should use to give a report to your boss that tries to say little
with much, which in turn is probably not what you should use to write a
love letter, which is not what you need to decipher advertisements in
Newsweek.  And none of those is going to help you should you choose to
watch "Are You Being Served?" on PBS-30/Toledo 11pm weekdays.  (Which
interestingly has the only real claim on the name ``English''.)

response 27 of 65:

Sep 26 14:30 UTC 1991

Yes, but wouldn't communication be SO much easier if everyone spoke
standard, rather than training kids and adults alike to keep adapting to
an ever increasing number of different dialects?

response 29 of 65:

Sep 26 21:21 UTC 1991

While I do adapt my use of language to the audience, no one is going
to be adept at all the various dialects, not even you, Laurel.  That
being the case, it is useful to have some standard language.
Seriously, think what the law would be like if you didn't have a
baseline legal language.

(re #27: It's probably a mistake to write any kind of report that
tries to say little with much.)

response 31 of 65:

Sep 27 08:12 UTC 1991

Sometimes it seems as if "baseline legal language" is used as a barrier
to effective communications.  I'd hardly use that as a good example of
why a standard is necessary.  (For those who object to this
characterization of legalese, I offer the example of old egyptian
hierglyphics, which very late (before it died out altogether) evolved
into an almost completely non-understandable mish-mash of gibberish
before the last few preservers of the heritage were completely
overwhelmed by new ideas.)

The real problem here is formalspeak represents an attempt to create a
single, static, and unchanging form of the language, that will be the
same everywhere and for all time.  Unfortunately, the spoken language is
still evolving, and while it's not really fragmenting into lots of small
pieces (as suggested above), there are indeed many different streams of
english that haven't merged into one despite the best efforts of the
american advertiser.  And that means the standard is under considerable
pressure to evolve to "keep up with the times".  Some of that pressure
is just "sloppy-isms", violations of rules in the standard that probably
weren't necessary in the first place, and are rapidly disappearing
today.  Dangling prepositions are one example.  Some of that represents
new social ideas and so forth.  Try using the word "man" or "he" today.

response 33 of 65:

Sep 27 12:49 UTC 1991

The law would be MUCH more pleasant without the stupid legalisms, honestly.
There is a big movement towards "plain English" in pleadings, documents,
etc. to make it easier for non-lawyers to deal with the legal system.

response 35 of 65:

Sep 28 07:18 UTC 1991

I said "evolving", not "improving".  Evolution is a dynamic process, but
in nature, you can find thousands of species that have been "evolving"
for millions of years that look "identical" to what's in the fossil
record.  But "evolution" does provide for the possibility of change in
response to changing environment, and ensures that, in most cases, the
result of that process of change will be better suited than the old
language.  In this limited sense, evolution does represent indeed
represent improvement.  Chances are, whatever language Cro-Magnon man
used was every bit as rich and varied as any modern tongue.  Chances
are, too, that it would be a rather poor language to describe how to
make bread in a 20th century kitchen.  (Vocabulary would likely be only
the first of many problems.)  On the other hand, it might well be a much
better language for oral tales or discussing complicated kinship
relationships.  We might think English is "improved", but from the
perspective of Cro-Magnon, it might well appear to be most degenerate
and awful, and worse in quality in every way, from English.

response 37 of 65:

Sep 28 16:56 UTC 1991

        Language changes to fit the needs of the people using it.  Language
will always change, because people will always change.
        It's meaningless to say whether language improves or declines in
usefulness, because there's no standard by which to judge the evaluation.
20th century English wouldn't be better for Americans of the 19th century;
they didn't need to talk about television, computers or nuclear power.
They needed to talk about things most of us don't need to talk about any
more.  I think we can get our points across now about as well as they
could get theirs across then.

response 39 of 65:

Sep 28 20:21 UTC 1991

re #35:  Interesting idea about Cro-Magnon language, although I doubt
that is was as rich and varied as modern languages.  Language arises
from experience, and I bet modern humans have a much more varied and
rich life than Cro-Magnons.

You can perhaps argue that English as we use it is not as rich and
varied, but that does not mean the language itself is so limited.

response 41 of 65:

Sep 29 06:25 UTC 1991

Marcus is correct in his assertation about vocabulary size of languages.
Cultural anthropologists and language specialists say that most every
language has a base vocabulary of roughly the same size.  Vocabularies
are expanded due to increased technology.  More words are needed to 
simply describe new things.

response 43 of 65:

Sep 29 13:39 UTC 1991

Using the word "Chinese" is only problematic if you seek a totally
scientific definition for something, which unfortunately does not work
with language most of the time.  The Chinese refer to the different
"flavours" (to use Marcus' terminology) of their language as "dialects",
although they are mutually unintelligible.  Norwegian and Danish are
completely mutually intelligible, but their speakers choose to refer
to them as separate "languages".  Many varieties of German, such as the
Swiss dialects and the dialect spoken in Hamburg, are not mutually
intelligible, while either of them is mutually intelligible with Yiddish,
which is supposedly a separate language.

So when is what you speak a dialect and when is it a separate language?
It is a dialect if the native speakers choose to call it such, and it
is a language if they choose the opposite.  It certainly makes
dialectology interesting.

response 45 of 65:

Sep 30 07:21 UTC 1991

Hm, a lot of that boils down to "nationalism" and in turn
"standardization".  Central bureaucracies seem to hate the idea of
localisms or other languages, and the hate usually seems to go well
beyond any natural interest in making things as convenient and fair to
all concerned.

Usually, of course, the language they settle on is the language of the
central authority, or some other convenient "standard" -- modern English
is pretty much directly descended from the dialect spoken in London,
although back in England you can still find a limited amount of regional
dialect, especially in rural areas.

Sweden & Denmark used to be part of one united whole, and when that was
true, as you travelled from Copenhagen to Stockholm, there was a gradual
change in speech, the natives in "sweden" closer to Copenhagen speaking
more like the "danes".  Now that sweden is a separate country, the
natives in southern sweden are speaking more and more like "standard"
swedish, that spoken in Stockholm, and less and less like the Danes.  In
this case, at least, it doesn't actually seem to be due to any direct
act of the gov't, as much as a variety of random factors including
school, radio, & immigration of swedes from more northern parts.

Germany, on the other hand, instead of splitting up, has been until very
recent times quite fragmented.  The various peoples there started out
speaking a language related to old english, etc., and the dialects
aren't necessarily much more closely related than that.  Hence it's not
much surprise they can't understand each other today--they've only been
politically united for about the past 120 years.  Sweden & Denmark, or
most of Italy, had an enormous advantage not shared by Germany -- sea
transportation that made it convenient for people to travel around.
Transportation in the interior of Germany, by contrast, must have been
dangerous and expensive for almost everybody, until recent times.

response 47 of 65:

Sep 3 02:27 UTC 1992

My regrets for jumping into this after everyone's said so maany different
things.

Did anyone notice the appropriateness to this item of Griz's response #8
to item 9 of this conference?

I live in Milan, MI.  If prescriptivism means being willing to say those
who speak differently are wrong (rather than just different), so be it;
if someone calls my town "mee-LAHN" he, she, or it is *wrong*.  (In Downstate
Illinois there are towns Cairo (KAY-roe) and Vienna (vi-ENny, 1st vowel
rhymes with "eye".  Same comments.)

Recommended reading on this topic includes:
 - Humpty Dumpty's discourses in Lewis Carrol (I get the books mixed up,
   so I pass on title beyond Alice)
 - An anecdote about Abe Lincoln which is obscure enough to recount:
   In the course of some discussion or other, Lincoln said something like
   this:  If we agree to call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
   When everybody agreed to the answer "five", Lincoln said: the answer is
   still four.  Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Plainly, extravagant claims (and just plain dumb ones, too) have been made
about what is right or what is wrong use of language.  (Linguistically right
or wrong.)  Also plainly, words & grammatical patterns get their meanings
not from any legislative body but from the actual linguistic patterns of
actual people.  Neither of these is directly incompatible with the claim
that some (but not all) usages are wrong, in some definite, objective
sense.

In the discussion way back a year ago here, I don't think there was much
debate about the defensibility (in the abstract) of claims that some usage
is better than others - for particular limited purposes, or for the
general purposes we assign to language.  Assuming that to be the case,
what more might someone actually demand of a claim that usage is right/correct
or wrong/incorrect?  (I have some ideas, which will likely appear if anyone
is silly enough to go over this all again.)

P.S.: I said I have ideas, not that I have this all worked out.  Also, I
take it that there was general agreement that the existence of different
dialects militates against some  claims that  some  usages are
wrong.  (The couple of people who may have disagreed are encouraged to
jump in on that topic - I just can't tell if everyone agreed.)  And plainly
correct usage (allow for the moment please) changes over time.  Examples
obvious but will be supplied on request anyway.

Thanks for listening.  I have some things on other parts of this item, but
they'll have to wait.

response 49 of 65:

Sep 3 16:02 UTC 1992

(This Ann Arborite pronounces Cairo, Illinois as CAY-ro and Cairo, Egypt
KI-ro (long I).)