Dean: While I recommend all of Pinker's books, for this discussion you really do want to read Words and Rules : The Ingredients of Language. It is unlike his other books in that it's not really written for a general audience, but it's easy enough to get through.
For some reason, copies of the book are priced around $400 at Amazon. This is absurd. Go to another second-hand book dealer.
For some reason, copies of the book are priced around $400 at Amazon.
Pinker is good, but he's not nearly that good.
Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.
Poppyschnoddle!!
Shakespeare would not a rule break merely to further the ambitions of his aspirations in prose or verse, that to him seemed a mere fancy of a greater and yet unimagined end! Or being taken at the tide, would he, all things by dearth of innovation reconsidered, o'erflood the tongues of men to speak out what is hidden in the secret, cavernous heart of man by unnatural, sallied manner of mere bungling and wholly insufficient words?
If so then it seems condign and instinctual to me that language is far less now than it will ever in some unknown future be, so that we who employ it, sickly or well, may be far more than we might ever seem at the moment of our indited and ill-confined misconceptions which we frame as the art of all we know by little letters made somehow real, and yet as intransient as ourselves...
(There's a joke in there somewhere people. I just know there is.)
The essay was more rant than substance. And the type of thinking displayed in essay is more dangerous than helpful.
The substance: Some grammatical rules serve no communicative purpose as far as he can tell. (Some of his examples are arguable.)
The rant:
So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.
Prescriptive rules are a guide to using language as a means to communicate higher ideas
Or in his own words (at the end of essay):
The aspect of language use that is most worth changing is the clarity and style of written prose. Expository writing for the benefit of absent strangers requires language to express far more complex trains of thought than it was biologically designed to do. This makes writing a difficult craft that must be mastered through practice, instruction, feedback, and probably most important, intensive exposure to good examples.
If he were a sober (conservative?; humble?) thinker, he would have started his essay on this note.
Rant: The People should be liberated to write however they please. Some aspects of how people express themselves in some settings are worth trying to change.
Firstly, people are so liberated. In his own words:
All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all.
I have no doubt that these writers benefited greatly in that they were well versed in that which they were flouting.
The London dialect had become an important world language, and scholars began to criticize it as they would any institution, in part to question the authority of the aristocracy. Latin was considered the language of enlightenment and learning and it was offered as an ideal of precision and logic to which English should aspire.
Latin was "the language of enlightenment and learning". And, therefore, probably had developed into a more effective means for the communication of higher ideas than English had. So though he dismisses, wholesale, the efforts of those scholars to learn and apply to English communicative factors that had developed into Latin and, indeed, reduces their motivations to pettiness, I am inclined to doubt him.
He wishes to have a discussion about which rules to discard and which to keep--it would never occur
to the professor that some rules just might have communicative values that he can not perceive--but who will be responsible for delineating the demarcation, and who will be responsible for applying it? The education majors teaching English in the public schools or the ivory tower know-it-alls? No thanks.
He also doesn't seem to value standard language as an effective means to traverse cultural divides
when communicating ideas.
I have a question for the professor: Though you want perfect teachers who teach only good rules, what teacher do you value more, a 'liberator' who eschews proscriptive grammar or a traditional English 'Maven'.
There are always good reasons to up end solid institutions. And everybody thinks he will only throw out the bath water.
Surfer slang and valley-speak are dialects, I think. Think of what Henry Higgins in 'My Fair Lady' was doing at first, recording different dialects of English. Think of Mark Twain writing in dialect. Read it and it is incomprehensible, but have someone speak Huck Finn's lines, and it makes sense.
Huck, the surfer, and the valley girl may seem inarticulate to another person unfamiliar with the dialect, but the speakers of those dialects communicate with each other.
In written language "I ain't no grammarian." is a double negative, the second cancelling the first, but in spoken speech the second negative in emphasis to the first, not a contradiction.
Written and spoken are two different things altogether. I realized that when I read the first transcript where I spoke and the court reporter took me down, word for word. I knew what I meant, the witness answered as I meant, but to read it? My God! How inarticulate I sounded.
The other day I saw a clip of Bill Buckley speaking on the Panama Canal Treaty. I heard him start, then stop and begin again. I heard him use place-holder sounds. I am not knocking him, it was a wonderful speech at a debate, I understood what he was saying. But it wasn't written speech, or read from a prepared text.
Prepared text is the key - first draft, second draft, draft to the nth power - is different than extemporaneous speech. Written speech is not spoken speech, it has different rules and follows a different course.
Best, I think, not to confuse the two.*
*blog comments are the written equivalent to spoken speech ;)
Jack - nice reference on Shakespeare. Oh for all those who suffer at the slings and arrows of outraged grammarians! To suffer in silence and hidden shame or take arms against an army of academians arrayed from the corners of the earth, and then smite them with a heedless glee! And in so smiting, endeth the pain that plagues all men who after their third drink are asked to stand and say "a few appropriate words".
I have no doubt that these writers benefited greatly in that they were well versed in that which they were flouting.
You gotta real point with that point.
To break a rule, or split a gemstone, truly brilliantly, you must first comprehend it thoroughly. Otherwise you do not employ a thing innovatively or artfully, merely haphazardly.
take arms against an army of academians arrayed from the corners of the earth, and then smite them with a heedless glee!
Would that it were so, my friend!
Would that it were so!
*blog comments are the written equivalent to spoken speech ;)
This both horrifies and amuses me, all at once. And if true then that goes double for me two.
Without the struggle between written versus spoken speech we would not have the joy of reading Wodehouse's tales of Bertie and Jeeves. Such a gray world that would be.
He really didn't need to, Jack. He did have the time to pester the shrimp at Bognor Regis, after all.
"And I meant that to hurt."
God bless old P.G.; what a facility he had - he could make the words dance.
2.28.2008 7:43pm
Commenting on Dean's World is a privilege, not a right. Dean is your host, you are his guest, and you should behave in that fashion. Dean is not your babysitter, nor is he your punching bag. Please remember this. In general, you are free to disagree with anyone on any subject you wish, but abusive behavior will not be tolerated.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.
For some reason, copies of the book are priced around $400 at Amazon. This is absurd. Go to another second-hand book dealer.
Pinker is good, but he's not nearly that good.
Poppyschnoddle!!
Shakespeare would not a rule break merely to further the ambitions of his aspirations in prose or verse, that to him seemed a mere fancy of a greater and yet unimagined end! Or being taken at the tide, would he, all things by dearth of innovation reconsidered, o'erflood the tongues of men to speak out what is hidden in the secret, cavernous heart of man by unnatural, sallied manner of mere bungling and wholly insufficient words?
If so then it seems condign and instinctual to me that language is far less now than it will ever in some unknown future be, so that we who employ it, sickly or well, may be far more than we might ever seem at the moment of our indited and ill-confined misconceptions which we frame as the art of all we know by little letters made somehow real, and yet as intransient as ourselves...
(There's a joke in there somewhere people. I just know there is.)
The substance: Some grammatical rules serve no communicative purpose as far as he can tell. (Some of his examples are arguable.)
The rant:
So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.
Prescriptive rules are a guide to using language as a means to communicate higher ideas
If he were a sober (conservative?; humble?) thinker, he would have started his essay on this note.
Rant: The People should be liberated to write however they please. Some aspects of how people express themselves in some settings are worth trying to change.
Firstly, people are so liberated. In his own words:
I have no doubt that these writers benefited greatly in that they were well versed in that which they were flouting.
The London dialect had become an important world language, and scholars began to criticize it as they would any institution, in part to question the authority of the aristocracy. Latin was considered the language of enlightenment and learning and it was offered as an ideal of precision and logic to which English should aspire.
Latin was "the language of enlightenment and learning". And, therefore, probably had developed into a more effective means for the communication of higher ideas than English had. So though he dismisses, wholesale, the efforts of those scholars to learn and apply to English communicative factors that had developed into Latin and, indeed, reduces their motivations to pettiness, I am inclined to doubt him.
He wishes to have a discussion about which rules to discard and which to keep--it would never occur
to the professor that some rules just might have communicative values that he can not perceive--but who will be responsible for delineating the demarcation, and who will be responsible for applying it? The education majors teaching English in the public schools or the ivory tower know-it-alls? No thanks.
He also doesn't seem to value standard language as an effective means to traverse cultural divides
when communicating ideas.
I have a question for the professor: Though you want perfect teachers who teach only good rules, what teacher do you value more, a 'liberator' who eschews proscriptive grammar or a traditional English 'Maven'.
There are always good reasons to up end solid institutions. And everybody thinks he will only throw out the bath water.
Huck, the surfer, and the valley girl may seem inarticulate to another person unfamiliar with the dialect, but the speakers of those dialects communicate with each other.
In written language "I ain't no grammarian." is a double negative, the second cancelling the first, but in spoken speech the second negative in emphasis to the first, not a contradiction.
Written and spoken are two different things altogether. I realized that when I read the first transcript where I spoke and the court reporter took me down, word for word. I knew what I meant, the witness answered as I meant, but to read it? My God! How inarticulate I sounded.
The other day I saw a clip of Bill Buckley speaking on the Panama Canal Treaty. I heard him start, then stop and begin again. I heard him use place-holder sounds. I am not knocking him, it was a wonderful speech at a debate, I understood what he was saying. But it wasn't written speech, or read from a prepared text.
Prepared text is the key - first draft, second draft, draft to the nth power - is different than extemporaneous speech. Written speech is not spoken speech, it has different rules and follows a different course.
Best, I think, not to confuse the two.*
*blog comments are the written equivalent to spoken speech ;)
You gotta real point with that point.
To break a rule, or split a gemstone, truly brilliantly, you must first comprehend it thoroughly. Otherwise you do not employ a thing innovatively or artfully, merely haphazardly.
Would that it were so, my friend!
Would that it were so!
This both horrifies and amuses me, all at once. And if true then that goes double for me two.
Without the struggle between written versus spoken speech we would not have the joy of reading Wodehouse's tales of Bertie and Jeeves. Such a gray world that would be.
"And I meant that to hurt."
God bless old P.G.; what a facility he had - he could make the words dance.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.