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@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