[WikiEN-l] disputing block: 69.108.172.162, lysdexia

[Rowan Collins]

On 08/11/05, Autymn D. C. <lysdexia at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Rdsmith4 is misrepresenting and libelling me, and abusing his
> joke-of-a-power again by blocking me again after I had insisted and
> enforced that an article be put in an accurate grammatic mood to fit
> the context, which was not real but ideal.

Wow! A quick glance through some of the disputes involved here reveals
a whole level of linguistic conservatism I had not previously
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.

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.

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*.

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.

I know this is all fairly tangential to anything, but it just
intrigued me to think about it a little...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]