The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.Photograph by Helen Cook / Flickr One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than […]
Which is why it’s one of the hardest languages to learn, there wasn’t even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it’s a slang language.
Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?
Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They’ve basically always been tilting at windmills.
Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it’s something that’s been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.
Ah, yes, that’s why the French still speak perfect Latin.
Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They’re useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.
But we generally haven’t been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.
Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?
Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They’ve basically always been tilting at windmills.
Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it’s something that’s been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.
Is that what people aren’t understanding?
When a language had nobles that knew the rules for the language, those rules were documented and maintained, even tho commoners didn’t use it.
Later, when education caught on, the commoners were taught correct grammar, spelling, and usage. Not what earlier generations of commoners used.
It’s not that they enforced grammar at the time, it’s that we know about those languages is primarily from nobles writing shit down in that language.
No one was writing English for centuries
Ah, yes, that’s why the French still speak perfect Latin.
Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They’re useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.
But we generally haven’t been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.