Grammar and the Prescriptive Attitude

Hallo,

I like the way Otto Jespersen (in 'Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin') aptly
summarised the nature of language changes by comparing it with one of the theories of the
Manchester School of Economics:

'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only
no artificial hindrances are put in the way of free exchange, for
demand and supply will regulate everything better than any
Government would be able to.'

Korin

A learner's side humble opinion

A problem of English learners like me who have learned and are learning English through printed matters is that they tend to think spoken/informal English should be as grammatical (in prescriptive sense) as written English. Grammar was originally rules made for writings, not for speaking, and no matter what language it may be, native speakers (and even non-native speakers) wouldn't care much about whether what they utter is in agreement with the rules written in grammar books or not.

In the world of google, many native speakers seem to write in an atmosphere as if they are speaking, and so the writing is often away from the grammar rules. When learners access such writings, they would worry in a way like; "This is not the same as I have learned in school!, Why? Why is it so?" When I was a school boy, we English learners (especially beginners like me) couldn't have such worries because the only English we could access was written English (most of them had passed grammar checks, I think). But now, be it happy or unhappy, we can access to native speaker's soundless spoken English through Internet, and some ambitious earnest learners are trying to check the grammar rules they learned by using extracts of such online English. For example, I saw some person asked in the forum how to change such a phrase 'I couldn't care less!' grammatically into a reported sentence. I can easily guess it would be a kind of nonsense exercise to native speakers. But I also can guess the questioners had no bad intention in asking such things. I guess it comes just from the fact that they didn't know formality levels (regions?) of phrases used online. I can imagine also some of such earnest learners might be teasing English teachers in their school with (prescriptively wrong) sentences they have got through Internet. I'm not an English teacher, but I really sympathize teachers who are teaching English in school everywhere in the world at this time when every student can access spoken/online English through Internet. What learners here should know is that spoken/online English and written English are someway similar but different things, and that the trivial/sophiscated grammar rules taught in school are made mostly for writing articles for pedagogic use.

paco

In another view, we might say ESL students are encouraged by online English. Some ESL students would hesitate to write English fearing grammatical mistakes.

paco

I do not consider advertising some forms as artificial hindrance. If you are a popular writer, you can use them, or even overuse them. At the end of the day, it's up to your readers if they start using your forms or not. You advocate split infinitives in your grammar book as long as you clearly state that 'traditional' form of the infinitive is also grammatically accurate,
and the form you recommend is only the question of your personal grammatical/stylistic taste.

In all these cases speakers of a language are not forced to use one particular form. No form is imposed by any institution. Generally, at least that's what I believe, a language reflects the needs of its speakers, and changes according to them.

If today, for example, someone began an unbelievably successfull compaign to promote
the language of Shakespeare, perhaps, the English speakers would be likely to switch to the Early Modern English (That would be interesting: Lovest thou me, darling?). If the campaign was successfull and worked, you couldn't claim that some artificial hindrance had been imposed on the speakers.

You can't force the speakers to do anything as long as you want to be successfull. What you can do is to make them believe that they need to use particular forms, but that's the other story...

Korin