A nice breath of fresh air amid the typical rampant prescriptivism of the English Major Armadillo meme.

(via polygl0t)

alifepresalted:

limechoux:

Okay yes, there has been a bit of a prescriptivist witch hunt going on, and that’s wrong. There are parts of our language that really do NEED to stay in tact, lest our language lose all sense of coherency.

But if you’re calling me an idiot for saying “What with?” as opposed to “With what?” and ending my sentence with a preposition…

you’re just an ass. 

No, see, this is not true either. People will maintain what linguistic rules are necessary to sustain communication, or ‘coherency’, with those people they must communicate with. And individual speech communities are perfectly capable of deciding what parts of ‘our’ language NEED to stay intact at any given time, and there’s no particular reason that any given facet of our language won’t change dramatically in the future, without in any way damaging the speech community’s ability to communicate needs, thoughts, desires, and emotions to one another. And if homogeneity was in any way necessary in language, we wouldn’t have this many languages.

You’re right about the clause-ending prepositions, though. Fuck Dryden and fuck all his sycophants.

Word! Languages naturally diverge from one another all the time, which is why English and German aren’t the same language anymore — and the same thing goes for Spanish and Portuguese, or Creek and Miccosukee, or whatever your favorite pair of related but distinct languages is. Over time, two groups that are not regularly interacting with one another are naturally going to see their languages diverge. And that’s fine, because if the groups are not in regular contact, they obviously don’t need to maintain that level of similarity in their speech patterns.

Basically: languages gonna do what languages gonna do, and what languages do is change over time. It’s wrong to call someone an idiot for anything that’s grammatical in their dialect.

GPOY

(via ghotioutofwater)

parrotbeak:

Every time someone says “X debuted first in Y”, I want to slap them as silly as their understanding of the word “debut” is.

Every time someone posts subjective opinions like this on the #linguistics tag, I want to wonder what on earth they think linguistics is, because it’s certainly not what any linguist does.

flywater:

lesserjoke:

flywater:

waitingforturnips:

lesserjoke:

exploriens asked you:

Is there any appropriate time where “alot” is acceptable? I say no. I have never, ever, seen a situation where “alot” is appropriate in place of “a lot.” I’ve been taught since making the mistake of spelling “alot” that it is two words, and I see two words there to make a phrase. “Alot” is only seen when people make a typo or don’t know better, like I and many people were/should have been taught. So I was hoping to get clarification on your H&aH ALOT post, please.

It’s acceptable whenever it’s used. Regardless of what you’ve been taught, language varies and a certain way of spelling/saying something isn’t incorrect just because some people spell/say it differently. It’s not a mistake; it’s a faithful output of someone’s internal language.

It’s a shame that the education system perpetuates the myth of nonstandard language’s inferiority, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with spelling a common phrase as a single word. That’s what you should have been taught, if the people in charge of designing and implementing early language education had actually had linguistics training. (It’s reasonable to educate children in the standard, but when that education teaches you that nonstandard forms are inherently incorrect, your educator is misinformed.)

There’s even historical precedent for the space being taken out. Plenty of single-word items in the standard language today first entered English as multi-word phrases. “Alone,” for example, was “al one” in Middle English, and “tomorrow” was more commonly spelled as “to morrow” as recently as 1800. It’s perfectly natural for people to reanalyze two words that collocate as representing a single word, and it seems pretty clear that that’s what’s happening for some people with “alot.”

As with all language forms: it may not be how you say it, and it may not be what’s printed in dictionaries. But it’s perfectly valid for the people who do use it, and it may very well represent what the common form will be in the future. And no one deserves your scorn or your allegations of inferiority for it.

Language changes, and there’s no reason why spelling shouldn’t be updated to reflect those changes. I spell “a lot” as two words out of habit, but I’m pretty sure I analyse it as one word regardless of that.

Condemning non-standard spelling that reflects perfectly natural and normal linguistic change demonstrates ignorance of how language actually works. I used to think the same thing before I began studying linguistics. Basically our education system is at fault for conflating language and literacy, which are two very different things. Literacy is taught, but language is natural and can’t be controlled no matter how much people complain about supposed “incorrect” usage. Literacy should reflect natural language, not dictate it. And personally I think literacy is only useful and relevant insofar as it represents the way that people actually use language, rather than trying to enforce outdated and arbitrary standards.

so we’re all just supposed to spell things however the fuck we want to?  ever read old english poetry?  good luck with that.

I’m not sure if this was directed at me, or Claire, or just rhetorically. But yes, I have read Old English poetry. It’s difficult and it requires study, just like reading in any foreign language would be. The language has changed immensely since then, because that’s what language does. Of course, it’s not just the spelling that changed. Even if we spelled every word the same today as we did in Old English, the older language would still be impossible to understand without study. Language changes, and there’s no stopping that.

it wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, its just a thought.  The problem with Old English poetry is that there is no consistency…no one spelled anything the same way, even within the same work of literature, and their grammatical tools were all over the place.  Obviously its able to be read (yes with study) but its much more difficult than it has to be.  I agree that language changes over time, words are added, older words are dropped…I know that I use words like “wanna” “dunno” and “gimme” when I text, but I would never assume that they would be acceptable whenever they’re used because they are not proper words. “Nonstandard” language implies that there is a standard language. I see that you spell things perfectly and your grammar is impeccable, because you know that in a formal argument, formal language is applied.  You would never submit an academic paper or a business proposal using words like “alot” because it’s informal and grammatically incorrect. 

“Nonstandard” implies that a certain variety is more typical, or is given more exposure and higher privilege. But “nonstandard” does not imply incorrectness. So, no, I have to object to your argument on several grounds.

Let’s deal with the Old English issue first. Here you’re conflating modern speakers’ difficulty in understanding the Old English language with a supposed difficulty of contemporary speakers to understand those texts when they were written. We have zero records indicating that Old English authors had a hard time understanding one another’s writing, and that’s even if we accept your premise that easy comprehension is a defining feature of grammatical language. And I don’t. By that logic, the last speaker of a dying language would be unable to produce any grammatical utterances, and that’s plainly a ridiculous thing to claim. There may be an argument in favor of forms that yield higher comprehension, but it is NOT a matter of correctness or grammaticality. Not to mention, there are plenty of ambiguous forms in the standard language that no one ever seems to object to. Until you’re ready to declare that homonyms and homophones aren’t proper language, you have no justification for applying that rubric to forms outside the standard.

Next, my spelling and grammar are of a privileged variety, but they are no more perfect than anyone else’s. Just like males aren’t more perfect than people of another gender and Christianity isn’t more perfect than other religions, there’s nothing about my language that’s superior except that society subjectively considers it to be. And given how the language variety that’s assigned this privilege is the variety spoken by those with the most power in our society, it’s highly problematic to accept that superiority at face-value.

You err in saying that I talk this way “because [I] know that in a formal argument, formal language is applied.” I talk this way because I generally talk this way. My language is a reflection of my identity, and I speak the way that comes naturally to me. Again, it happens to be the case that this variety is privileged in our society, but that doesn’t mean that I should be taken more seriously for speaking it. I would hope that you would judge someone’s conversational contributions on the strength of their arguments and not the language variety they speak.

Finally, you’re confusing cause and effect when you say that people use more standard forms in professional settings because they know things like “alot” are incorrect. People don’t avoid nonstandard language in papers and proposals because it’s grammatically incorrect; those forms are considered incorrect because people are shunned for using them. And that’s not a valid justification for continuing the practice. Opposing nonstandard forms because they are widely opposed by society is a circular condition that perpetuates the injustice of the situation. If you’ll excuse the analogy, that’s a little like refusing to hire female workers at your business because you don’t think society would accept women in the workplace.

The bottom line, though, is what Claire and I have already mentioned: language changes, and it’s natural for common two-word phrases to become one-word phrases in the standard variety. It happened already to words like “alone” and “tomorrow.” “Alot” is a likely candidate for this process, and “alright” is further ahead in that process but still considered unacceptable by many. Even if you refuse to concede that language reflects identity and everyone’s language deserves to be respected, it’s hard to contest that “alot” is the result of a regular process that’s been repeated throughout the history of the English language.

Google Ngram Viewer display of the relative popularity of the spellings “tomorrow” and “to morrow” in written English in the scanned Google Books corpus, 1800 to 2000. Gosh, it’s almost as if language can change over time!

flywater:

waitingforturnips:

lesserjoke:

exploriens asked you:

Is there any appropriate time where “alot” is acceptable? I say no. I have never, ever, seen a situation where “alot” is appropriate in place of “a lot.” I’ve been taught since making the mistake of spelling “alot” that it is two words, and I see two words there to make a phrase. “Alot” is only seen when people make a typo or don’t know better, like I and many people were/should have been taught. So I was hoping to get clarification on your H&aH ALOT post, please.

It’s acceptable whenever it’s used. Regardless of what you’ve been taught, language varies and a certain way of spelling/saying something isn’t incorrect just because some people spell/say it differently. It’s not a mistake; it’s a faithful output of someone’s internal language.

It’s a shame that the education system perpetuates the myth of nonstandard language’s inferiority, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with spelling a common phrase as a single word. That’s what you should have been taught, if the people in charge of designing and implementing early language education had actually had linguistics training. (It’s reasonable to educate children in the standard, but when that education teaches you that nonstandard forms are inherently incorrect, your educator is misinformed.)

There’s even historical precedent for the space being taken out. Plenty of single-word items in the standard language today first entered English as multi-word phrases. “Alone,” for example, was “al one” in Middle English, and “tomorrow” was more commonly spelled as “to morrow” as recently as 1800. It’s perfectly natural for people to reanalyze two words that collocate as representing a single word, and it seems pretty clear that that’s what’s happening for some people with “alot.”

As with all language forms: it may not be how you say it, and it may not be what’s printed in dictionaries. But it’s perfectly valid for the people who do use it, and it may very well represent what the common form will be in the future. And no one deserves your scorn or your allegations of inferiority for it.

Language changes, and there’s no reason why spelling shouldn’t be updated to reflect those changes. I spell “a lot” as two words out of habit, but I’m pretty sure I analyse it as one word regardless of that.

Condemning non-standard spelling that reflects perfectly natural and normal linguistic change demonstrates ignorance of how language actually works. I used to think the same thing before I began studying linguistics. Basically our education system is at fault for conflating language and literacy, which are two very different things. Literacy is taught, but language is natural and can’t be controlled no matter how much people complain about supposed “incorrect” usage. Literacy should reflect natural language, not dictate it. And personally I think literacy is only useful and relevant insofar as it represents the way that people actually use language, rather than trying to enforce outdated and arbitrary standards.

so we’re all just supposed to spell things however the fuck we want to?  ever read old english poetry?  good luck with that.

I’m not sure if this was directed at me, or Claire, or just rhetorically. But yes, I have read Old English poetry. It’s difficult and it requires study, just like reading in any foreign language would be. The language has changed immensely since then, because that’s what language does. Of course, it’s not just the spelling that changed. Even if we spelled every word the same today as we did in Old English, the older language would still be impossible to understand without study. Language changes, and there’s no stopping that.

babyslothsandpuppysizedelephants:

lesserjoke:

I have a lot of alot feels. It bugs me to no end to see humor writers like Hyperbole and a Half or the Oatmeal being praised for their linguistic intolerance.

Confession also…. sometimes I honestly wish I had never found out about linguistics and descriptivism and stuff, because now I see people I respect a lot being prescriptivist and ignorant, and knowing that my annoyance towards them is actually justified by linguistic science should make me feel better, but it just makes me angrier, because they’re so high and mighty and they’re wrong. And I feel like nothing I say will convince them otherwise because I’m not considered very smart. It’s selfish, and most of the time I’m glad I know about awesome blogs like yours, and I don’t really like to think of myself as the kind of person who would choose ignorant bliss over learning, but meh. I have a lot of alot feels, too. 

As much as I love language, and as much as I love knowing that I’ve helped educate even a few people about respecting linguistic variation… sometimes I feel the exact same way. Language intolerance really is everywhere, and once you’ve found out about it, you really can’t stop seeing it. I’d like to think that someday everyone might be more accepting of nonstandard forms, but we’ve got a lot of work to do before that day can come.