On 8 Nov 2005, at 11.59, Rowan Collins wrote:
Wow! A quick glance through some of the disputes
involved here reveals
a whole level of linguistic conservatism I had not previously
It's literalism and discretism, not conservatism.
encountered. Some of the assertions made
('Temporisation, French Latin
for "timesening"', "English infinitives [...] end in -an")
suggest a
view of the language as not only set in stone, but defined by rigid,
complex rules. Thus, "loan words" are simply "foreign" (as also
argued
re. the plural of "virus"), and usages not conforming to grammatical
rules "incorrect", however common and accepted they may be.
I've been writing up a Rosetta stone between Latin, Greek (It pains me
to write that--it's either Graic or Hellenic in elided Latin, or graEc
or hAllAnEc in elided English.), and English combining forms for people
(everyone) who are ignorant that English can be used as a scientific or
logic language.
Now, I freely admit that I hold a strongly
descriptivist view, so it
seems to me fairly obvious that language is a dynamic, constantly
evolving, construct, and that "correctness", "grammar", etc, are all
constructs created *after the fact* to better describe and understand
it. And it follows, in my mind, that rules which are *never* (not even
rarely) applied are simply erroneous, however logical or historically
accurate.
Since "erroneous" means nothing more than "straysome" or
"strayish",
you are trivially riht. Original languages do not overwrite
themselves: They are /forgotten/. They are not changed because
speakers are making conscious choices that their words are better, but
because they are too lazy or ignorant to learn or use the older words
which are more diverse, full, and accurate than theirs. So they
wrongfully claim that "English is easy." or "There's no perfect
translation in English." or "There's no such word, particle, part of
speech, mood, case, conjugation, declension, expression, slang, or
whatever in English." Then they, foreigners muchly, belittle English
because of /their/ ignorance of its threads.
I know that mine is, in its way, an extreme position,
and there is
some grounds for arguing that a "correct form" must exist at any time,
and by definition cannot change arbitrarily; in which case there must
be a lag between changes occurring and becoming "acceptable" and
"correct". But even so, it is self-evident that language *does*
change, and that English *has* changed, so that the "rules" do have to
be updated *sometimes*.
The rules should if the changes should, not if the changes do. And
only if there is something /wrong/ with the earlier rules. Otherwise,
the language should grow like any person or nation would and not, like
a cancer, grow everywhich way so that it eats and poops itself and eats
that.
In my opinion, the language this user seems to be
advocating is a kind
of grammatically-defined "pure" Anglo-Saxon, which is not what most of
us would recognise as "contemporary English" (i.e. "early 21st-century
Modern English") at all. So, given that the edits were on the "English
Wikipedia", I'd say they were, at best, misplaced.
Anglo-Saxon? No, it's English. What people speak today is a mutt of
English, Latin-French-English, and Greek-Latin-English. And I'd write
"pure" as "sheer". A lone language has only one word for the same
meaning. Other words with the same meaning are from other languages,
by space or time. But none of writing this is making me feel better
for being wrongfully kicked off Wikipedia by a liar for doing what I
hold is riht.
Nobody said anything about it being about yourself;
what was being
alluded to here is that there is no article ownership on Wikipedia, so
there is no such thing as "your article", only "an article you have
contributed to". That doesn't mean you can't be proud of your work,
but it does mean you have no more claim to or rights over a particular
article than anyone else.
I didn't say that it /wasn't/ others' article. I said it was my
article. Logic goes over most people's head.
The question is, right (or "riht"; was that
deliberate?) according to
what authority, other than yourself? More generally, can it really be
true that 100% (or 99.9999%) of English speakers are using English
"wrong"? Or are they simply mistaken in thinking they speak English -
in which case the argument becomes one over who gets to choose what
the word "English" means, the millions of people who communicate in
what they call "English" every day, or the minority of "experts" who
call something else "English" instead.
Were we talking about English? I was using a Greek word.
On 9 Nov 2005, at 11.20, Matt Brown wrote:
On 11/8/05, Autymn D. C. <lysdexia(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I consider many possibilities beforehand. They
were and are provably
> wrong.
Then PROVE them wrong. You don't do so - instead,
you merely state
that you are right and others wrong, and insist that everyone else is
too stupid to understand the right anyway.
I proved them wrong, with explanations, in the user and article talk
pages. They can look up the references I told.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You
insist that your
grammatical usage is correct and everyone else's wrong - not just the
Wikipedia editors you are personally dealing with, but the overwhelming
majority of users of the English language. That is, to my mind, an
extraordinary claim.
What in specific haven't I proven?
-Aut
1^2 = -1^2
(1^2)^.5 =^.5 (-1^2)^.5
±1 :: ±-1
±1 = ±1; ±-1 = ±-1