On 08/11/05, Autymn D. C. lysdexia@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]