When I came to Germany and I talk with Germans a lot about languages, some say "I can't learn languages, even my German isn't that great (which is their native language)". Or some said "Some Germans have worse German that yours". They think that just because they had a bad grade in school or make some "mistakes" while writing that their language skill is somehow not good. They're the native speakers, they can talk, that's the language. I can't believe the Education System made them think that native speakers need to be good at "writing" to be "real" speakers of the Language.
My Dutch teacher was also like 'you know I think that whatever you say, how ungrammatical, can be considerd Dutch. But intil the language bureau allows it I'll have to mark wrong Dutch. He wad fully aware of how languages evolve. Then I got a new teacher and he's fine but always looks disappointed at my friendgroup when we start conversing in English and seems more strict on rules
It's a bit more complicated than that... German is a very flexible language with a rich vocabulary pool and countless dialects. No one speaks true Standard High German and as it was said in the video what native speakers say IS the language. That means that speakers of a dialect often use phrases that are considered incorrect but in their mind it's just how it is and as long as an utterance is understood there is no problem. And that's true for generally known phrases as well. For example "Das macht Sinn" is considered wrong although the corpora tells a different story. The phrase is used by all demographic groups and in almost all dialects. The elitist's explanation "It's always been 'Das ergibt Sinn'" might be true but doesn't acknowledge language shift which happens naturally and can't be controlled by "perscriptionists". I digress... Germans always say that Germans can't speak their own language because of its history. And at the same time Germans are indeed very capable of learning languages. In 2016 a study compared European and American languages learners. Germany was pretty average with about 82% speakers of at least one foreign language (mostly English but also French and Spanish which are mandatory in Gymnasium) in Europe while the US had about 20% (mostly Spanish). When you learn another language you also learn a lot about your own mother tongue. So we "know" e.g. that we often use the genitive and dative cases incorrectly. There are even sayings like "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod" which literally translates to "The dative is the death of the genitive".
Well, I live in France, and I have been amazed by linguistics for quite some time now, so you can imagine my relationship with l’Académie Française lol. One thing I love about France is that literally everyone who has a tiny bit of education in linguistics absolutely despises l’Académie, and continuously make fun of old people getting pressed when a single letter from a foreign language gets borrowed. I am in the middle of my linguistics degree in Paris, and seeing every single one of my professors continuously dunking on l’Académie always brings a smile to my face ;)
They still serve a purpose imo: to avoid confusion. When descriptivists just change the definition of a word, it can cause people to lose the ability to properly communicate as people mean different things with the same word. To have a single source of truth is handy in those cases... see how people try to obfuscate political debates regarding racism by changing the definition to that of institutional racism, to which the other person using the dictionary definition is insulted by. In Dutch, de Nederlandse Taalunie fulfils a similar role l'Academie Francaise, but it serves another purpose as well. Dutch is an artificial language created from several dialects, and therefore nobody truly spoke it natively. Without it, we would still have trouble communicating with the Dutch language area as dialects can diverge quite a lot. It's good to have a central institute saying what "proper Dutch" is, so we can communicate effectively with Dutch speakers using entirely different words or even grammar rules natively. They also simplify spelling from time to time so Dutch doesn't become as horrible as English is with regards to spelling vs pronunciation.
Another one that drives me nuts is when people say you can't split infinitives in English, and they claim that "to" is inherently part of the infinitive. Neither is true. I literally once saw someone on a forum unironically say: "It's a rule of English to never split the infinitive." Splitting the infinitive is so common and natural in modern English (and maybe has been for ages, idk) that they used it themselves without realizing it even while TALKING ABOUT split infinitives.
As a Russian speaker, the prescriptivist attitude is so deep within the language users’ mindset, it’s infuriating. All everyone cares about is telling people what the correct use is and there’s not even a hint of descriptivism on site anywhere unless you search for it. It was only after I learned English and went on the internet to learned about linguistics that I realized the flaws of the prescriptivist way of thinking. Even still, I have to stop myself from explaining basics of linguistics every time someone says “what’s the correct way to say this” or “you’re using that word/grammar piece incorrectly” cuz the notion of descriptivism is so far removed from the mindset of average Russian speakers most of the time so it takes a ground-up approach to make people step back from the deeply ingrained prescriptivism. For any Russian speakers out there, the most prominent example that comes to my mind is the enforcement of “нет чего/кого-либо” instead of “нетУ чего/кого-либо”. People use the latter all the time without any second thought. It’s completely grammatically consistent, there’s a historical precedent for its use, and in most cases it makes more sense to use “нету” instead of “нет”, so there’s no real reason to enforce against it but people still do. Any teacher or a grammar snob will be quick to correct you for the “improper speech” especially in formal settings and there are so many example like that where people are very quick to try to correct you and no one thinks “well maybe what I was taught in school is not an end-all be-all”.
Хотел вот про это щас написать, я даже удивлен что в инглише этих прекрасных гениев языка кто-то слушает. Но самый вредительский бред конечно с ударениями у нас, абсолютная шиза. Английский со школы учил и давно подметил что у них никто этим практически не занимается и вот тогда ещё закрались сомнения что абсолютно все равно как правильно "звонить" говорить
@@jesusnavin5017 омг столько споров у меня было из-за "звонИт" и "звОнит". Иногда задумываюсь, если бы все эти люди хоть немного постараются и подумают немного, может мы смогли бы понять что зря нервы тратим на такие придирчивые аргументы. Literally anything else would be more productive
Не знаю застали ли вы ЕГЭ, но там есть задание по орфоэпике и там нужно выучить "правильное" ударение для слов: Оберег, фетИш, облегчИть... Хотя я 100% уверен едва ли кто-то говорит Оберег
Есть мысли откуда растут корни у такого засилья прескриптивизма в русском языке? Сдаётся мне всё началось со времён ликбеза и массого открытия школ вузов. Бывшим малограмотным нужно было дать правила, как правильно писать и говорить.
I’m from germany and here (in favour of prescriptivism) we are taught that our dialects are the wrong and that you are supposed to speak hochdeutsch in school, which is currently leading to the disappearance of these dialects because many people stop teaching them to their children because there is a myth that children who grow up spekaing a dialect will hwve difficulties in school. I know also many cases of people (young folks) that used to speak a dialect as children but then stopped in favour of Hochdeutsch. I as a consistent speaker of one if these dialects sometimes get comments about how I’m supposed to speak Hochdeutsch in school and sometimes even peers comment abt my way of speaking. My fuckin ex even wanted me to speak Hochdeutsch with her because my dialect sounded wrong in her ear. This lincuistical situation is fucking trash dude utter garbage by the love of god I hate prescriptivism and hochdeutsch it brings out the arrogance of society.
I agree and sympathize with you but I think it's relatively good that prescriptivism is (to some extent) supported by policy. I take it for a fact that people who have more difficulty understanding each other are more prone to... have conflicts. Universalism promotes peace and for there to be universalism, there needs to be a "standard" to be universalized. I think Germany is internally more peaceful now than it was some centuries ago, when the principalities were not so keen on cooperation. On the flipside, though, this "internal cohesion" does sadly make the "linguistic sphere" more hostile to other spheres -- i.e. internal "peace/harmony" results in external "hostility/discord". I see this as a sort of terrible dilemma. The only real solution I can think of is that... the UN should pick a common language for all the world to learn (I propose tongue-in-cheek Toki Pona), and other than that, all languages, dialects and idiolects and so on should be freed from prescriptivist thinking and thrive without judgement. Actually, yeah, I think that's the important point: One should see the prescriptivist mode as a tool, as a pragmatic vessel, not as truth. That'd be the cure to the "arrogance of society". Easier said than done, though, of course. Tut mir leid, ich wollte nur all dies sagen, weil ohne Hochdeutsch ich überhaupt erst nicht Deutsch zu lernen wagen würde. Doch ich stimme diesem zu: Ein einfacherer Dialekt wäre angenehmer gewesen! Vielleicht einer ohne Genera oder Kasus.
The problem is that germany( if u were referring to the Holy Roman Empire) was more divided due to political reasons less so because of linguistical reasons. Our society in general is very divided, and differences in language support that division, but do not cause it. Imo it’s just another dividing factor in our divided world. I don’t think that everyone speaking the same language would be a necessary solution, but a possible one that still doesn’t fix things. There is for example no strong divide between Bavaria and Lower Saxony, but a strong one between east and west which wasn’t caused due to language. Nevertheless I support that Standard german would be useful even in a society which is not deeply divided in and of itself, but it should not hold a status anywhere near the one is holds atm. Also prescriptivism still sucks ass in an only standard german environment cuz there are differences in speech between the written and vernacular, for example many regions people replace the word „als“ with „wie“ i. e. „Ich bin besser wie du“ instead of „Ich bin besser *als* du“ and to regard it as false is just fckn unnecessary
@@climatechangeisrealyoubast3231 I don't think it's enough either, but I'm pretty convinced that everyone in the world being able to understand what each other is saying is a necessary prerequisite for world peace. Of course, there's no way to test something like that, but I feel pretty secure in that assumption, given how difficult (if not impossible) lasting, ultimate peace looks in the first place. As for prescriptivism: I dislike it as much as the next person, but I think it's a necessary and natural force. To the extent that anything is *taught*, one needs to be prescriptive about it. And these prescriptions must come from "a limited space", since including everything is impossible -- you wouldn't even know where to draw the boundaries. If Chomskyan thinking is correct, we're all speaking the same basic langauge (universal grammar) anyway. Unfortunately, lines do have to be drawn somewhere if you want to teach a language (as opposed to let people naturally absorb/acquire it). So I see the als/wie situation as "prescriptivism done wrong" rather than "the inherent evil of prescriptivism". As I said above, I think it's much more about the attitude: When someone regards a language usage as "false", that's just (as you said) unnecessary and forceful. One could just say "that's not considered standard today", without any judgment attached -- wish that were more common. I also agree that the "standard" should strive to remain as comprehensive and flexible as possible (endorsing both "wie" and "als" in comparisons for example), but I think it's important to remember that there's no limit to flexibility. Mutual intelligibility is a gradient. You'd get what I mean, if I said "iss bim better wie dich", but I doubt you'd consider that to be equally worthy of being seen as "not false". So yeah, I don't really have a solution, other than: Let there be a standard world language (which is carefully prescribed and kept up to date) and let all the other languages in the world reign free without any prescriptivist imposition -- they shouldn't be taught in school but only acquired passively (since teaching limits them). Let the universal language take the burden of prescription (as it facilitates peace and critical communication) and let other languages be free spaces of play. That's all I can think of, when it comes to solutions that are neither temporary nor localized.
In Denmark you're still told by teachers not to write "fordi at", where "at" is a fully unnessecary word that people put in, but people just do it anyway. Weird thing about being told not to do it is, the supreme body on the Danish language allows "fordi at"; they also describe themselves as descriptivists (so they are the good version of the French academy: they're descriptivist, and they're not French).
Hello, I'm Danish and jsut out of curiosity, what is our "supreme body on the Danish language". Because if I can find a place they claim "fordi at" is grammatically correct, I have a lot of people I want to contact.
@@boardbill5852 i mean it is to be used and manipulated at the whims of mankind as that is why it exists we could change the language if we want or make our own form of it but we would need to classify it differently or get most all of the people to agree like if we wanted to make the prepositions more like a romance language we could if everyone agreed but most people do it like its always been
They probably think that a random individual some hundred years ago sat down at a desk and created the language that they are supposedly "correcting" in its final form that is to be static and unchanging for as long as its populations of native speakers last. I wonder where prescriptivists would draw the line between "correct" and "incorrect" grammar in the history of the evolution of the language they are "correcting."
In Spain there is a phenomenon that is "leísmo" . This means that in some occasions, specially in the masculine, the dative case pronoun "le" is used instead of the accusative "lo" and "la". My variety of Spanish has a very strong leísmo, and I don't really know when not to use it. Welp, this has caused several teachers well into high school mark me down for using leísmo. The best part? The Royal Spanish Accademy, the main governing body for Spanish, recently accepted leísmo, but only in some versions. So now it's only "allowed" in several very specific contexts.
First comment after a year. I’m native polish and have a few things to share. 1. when you say sth like “I like it” (or any other action that we see as happening to oneself) the pronoun is always in Dative. However prescriptivists force the Accusative when the pronoun begins the sentence, which sounds super wrong to me. 2. In polish /w/ is often dropped or realised as labialisation. This is also hated. 3. In polish there’s a lot of a-o changes in verbs. The nasal diphthongs ą And ę (realised sth like ong, eng) derive from vowels. The o in ą started changing to a sometimes and u have the same story. 4. This one annoys me a lot. Historically /ɕt͡ɕs/ cluster became /js/. A lot of nouns were affected by this for example miasto-miejski (palatalisation caused it to be mieśćski earlier.) This also affected the word for 600: Sześćset, realised as /ʂejsɛt/. Other numbers 700 , 800, 900 are number 7/8/9 + -set and this changed in 600. The prescriptivists looked at this and made a bullshit rule to pronounce the śćs. That cluster is illegal in Polish, it just simply doesn’t appear. 5. Treating dialects and even languages (for example Silesian) as accents. This is pretty self-explainatory. 6. Hatred towards modern feminine job forms. These forms were invented (I think), but they quickly spread and the younger people use them all the time, even the bigoted ones. Most prescriptivists are against these forms, saying they sound funny and are “unpronounceable” which is very not true (I mean, come on, it’s polish”). This turned out longer than I thought lol.
Number 6 made me extremely curious. I'm from Brazil so my native is Portuguese which as most romance languages has gendered basically everything specially when it's linked to people like professions. So if I understand correctly Polish is gaining gendered professions while English has groups of people trying to get rid of theirs by force. To someone with an interest in natural languages this is fascinating.
@@getsandom Polish proffessions are almost always masculine and follow masculine declensions. Some proffessions already had female version for example cook/chef "kucharz/kucharka". More recently such forms also were introduced for basically any proffesion. This is not a new form, it just spread to like all proffesions which is a very good thing in my opinion. There's still an issue with nonbianry people, who ususally stick to one form, or switch both masculine and feminine. We have gendered verbs so its even more complex lmao
@@actualdog2265 when you said that “śćs” changes to “js” I was like well that’s an interesting change in realization, but then when you brought up 600, I realized that we also do the same thing in Russian. For 60, шестьдесят, people don’t pronounces it [ʂɨzʲdʲɪˈsʲat] colloquially. We simplify the [zʲdʲɪsʲ] construction to something like [jɪsʲ] so it sounds more like [ʂɨ(j)ɪˈsʲat]. We do similar simplifications for 50, 70, 80 as well. Funny how I always thought Polish was weird-sounding as a Slavic language speaker myself but there are still some uncanny similarities in these kinds of weird places.
@@kkuwura it may be the case that thats not a result of a general sound chnage, but a shortening of common words. My dialect(?) shortens Dwadzieścia to Dwajścia which is non-standard
This brings me back to when someone would ask my 10th grade English teacher "Can I go to the bathroom?" and she would always respond with "I don't know, can you?" with the "correct" version of the question being "May I go to the bathroom?" It's absolutely absurd to me that there's an elite view that the word "can" cannot be used when asking permission. As an American English speaker, I doubt I have used "may" since that class as everyone I knows uses "can." I do not like that a large amount of English teachers I have are prescriptivist like my teacher was, especially considering the fact that it is an English class, and English, like every language on the planet, changes over time. It just felt like a weird way to get a power trip by preventing kids from using the bathroom before they asked her the "proper" way. I just remembered when typing that last sentence, if we used the word "kids" in an essay, she would circle every occurrence and write "Kids are goats!" in the margin and deduct points. No one in my class had heard of this definition of kids before. When we tried asking her what that meant, she would only reply "kids means goats." I also had a college biology professor who spent 10 minutes of a lecture complaining about how younger generations are destroying English by using the word "like" in conversations as an interjection. Meanwhile he used the word "umm" a large amount of times while explaining this. It certainly wasn't relevant to protein folding.
@Watch your Language Yeah she was a bit overly pedantic. I wish I knew more about prescriptive/descriptive linguistics back then and had said something, but I guess instead she'll just continue with her intense prescriptivism.
My favourite experience as a British native English speaker explaining to a Swede that no we don't have an organisation that governs the English Language and governs spelling and we survive. German where the mass education movement matched in with nation building - German being a loose mixture of dialects - a strong prescriptive movement in German language teaching occurred and it still is in control of teaching in the early years.
in brazilian portuguese the word "problema" (problem) is sometimes pronounced "pobrema" and whenever prescriptivists hear the phrase "eu tenho um pobrema" (i have a problem) they're like no you have 2 lol love your channel :D
Prescriptivism is huge in Germany and I have to deal with that nonsense on a regular basis. There's a dude called Bastian Sick who created a fuss about it some 15 years ago with his book 'Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod' where he did the usual lamenting of 'oh nobody knows how to properly speak our sacred German language anymore and in the future it will all go to shit'. He has surprisingly had a lot of success and is largely treated like some sort of authority. I think the most common complaints are: - Saying 'das einzigste' instead of 'das einzige' (the only one). It's a superlative and it's supposedly 'illogical' to form a superlative from the adjective for 'only'. By that logic, English 'children' should also be wrong since it's etymologically a doubly marked plural. - using the preposition wegen 'because of' with the dative instead of the genitive. There are very few prepositions in German that still govern the genitive, and the genitive case as a whole is on its way out in colloquial German. So the shift is a natural part of grammaticalization. Most Germans, regardless of where they're from, will say 'wegen dem schlechten Wetter' colloquially, but because of education, many correct themselves to say 'wegen des schlechten Wetters'. To me, it just makes them sound like twats. - and finally, the dumbest of them all. There's a German expression 'Sinn machen', equivalent to English 'make sense', and that's wrong, according to Bastian Sick. You should replace it with 'Sinn ergeben'. The reasoning is that 'Sinn' is an abstract noun that you cannot 'make'? Even though 'machen' is a semantically bleached verb and there are countless other expressions like 'Eindruck machen' (to impress someone) that nobody complains about. Bastian Sick even states that the Indo-European root for make, *magh, had a meaning of 'knead', so it should only be used with concrete meanings. Also, the German expression was supposedly borrowed from English, and I guess that's a bad thing? Which also implies that English people have been in the wrong for 'making sense' all along?
I don't think prescriptivism is as common as you make it seem. Those with actual "authority" over High German like Duden rarely prescribe, they just suggest. Nitpicking and correcting others is very popular among Germans, tho. It's more of a cultural thing than an academic one, I feel. But what do I know, I've never even set foot into a university. Das Einzigste, was hier keinen Sinn macht, ist anderen vorzuschreiben, wie sie zu sprechen haben. Das machen Pedanten nur wegen ihrem Ego.
> " and the genitive case as a whole is on its way out in colloquial German." Not a native speaker, but been learning for 3 years and speak it everyday living here. In my experience the genitive case is still very widely used in it's partitive and to a bit of a lesser extent the possessive function even in the most colloqial german. Only when I talk with people whose high german is very heavily influenced by their dialect (using mir instead of wir, dropping off n's) do I notice a complete absense of the case, but this is usually *older* people. In my experience it's only the usage with prepositions that is declining, and of course as a verb argument it's gone in colloqial speech.
ooh this is all very interesting, especially with how the phrase 'der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod' is often used in anglophone pop linguistic spaces at least in my experience. I've often seen that specific phrase used as part of a descriptivist explanation for the loss of the genitive case. Goes to show how divorced something can get from its author, this for example would be a complete 180 lol. As an interesting note (well, I find it interesting), Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German close to Pfälzisch, genitive case has completely and almost utterly died out. There're some words that I think originate from the genitive that've become standalone entries but that's it. Also the nominative and accusative case have fallen in together outside of pronouns (hence why I'd say guder Mariye instead of guten Morgen)
I used to be one myself, that's what you get taught... Then, the more I became engaged with linguistics and learned about it, the less prescriptivist I became and eventually I began to consider that view as something to fight against (ooops 🤭)
@@boardbill5852 specially knowing more about the natural evolution of human languages and the creation of standards and codifications of a normalized form
I didn't know ending sentences with a preposition was considered a "mistake", I guess that explains why I constantly get my answers marked wrong in Duolingo whenever I put "at" at the end of a sentence that would otherwise be a completely accurate translation. I hate how I'm using the app to learn another language and instead I end up having my English nitpicked.
Ukrainian here, we have a big problem with prescriptivists who change words for no reason and make our language harder to learn and make less sense. They will always abuse the fact that the previous generation was heavily russified and that nowadays a lot of people speak surzhyk - a mixture of russian and ukrainian in order to do whatever they want with the language. Getting rid of some words("криша" - roof), phrases("на протязі" - during), changing stresses("піцéрія" instead of "піцерíя" - pizzeria) and sometimes replacing words just because they're too close to "uncivilised" words(one prescriptivist made up word "славень" to replace "гімн" - anthem/hymn, as it was "too close" to "гімно" - shit). And because many ukrainians wrongly consider their dialect surzhyk they believe prescriptivists, who try to "bring back" ukrainian language of the XX century, while actually doing more harm for people who want to learn ukrainian and to the dialects. The worst part about this is that their books are used in our schools and we even had to have a dictionary of ukrainian language where we replace surzhyk, foreign and "easily confused" words and phrases with "more authentic" ones. On the other side are people who, partially because of this, speak russian instead, as it's not regulated and they think their ukrainian is very bad(while it's most likely a dialect).
I live in Silesia and my family generally speaks Polish with varying amounts of Silesian substratum. I remember my niece correcting her elders that we should say "sobie" instead of "se", both being reflexive pronouns, but the former is Polish while the latter is Silesian. The worst part is, se is even found in informal Polish, though I'm not sure if it's a shortened form of sobie or perhaps a naturalized Silesian loanword.
I think it is a common pronoun in the regions of Poland that have been occupied by Prussia and Austria. I live where there previously was an Austro-Rusian border and saying ,,se" sounds natural to me and other people form austrian side but unnatural on the other
I don't know anything about Polish, but I think that what happens here is that she is right, because you are speaking an incorrect form of Polish; but on the other side you are speaking a correct Polish in Silesia. So? What heppens here is that you are speaking a dialect, but you are speaking it correctly. But if you were to speak correct Polish, she is right, use "se"
"se" is short form of pronoun "sobie" the same as "cię" or "mię"(archaic) are short forms of pronouns "ciebie" and "mnie" + modern denasalization (sę -> se)
This is like saying a word isn't a word unless it's in a dictionary, or written down somewhere. Case in point: fart-ology, which I bet most fluent English speakers would immediately understand, regardless if it has ever been said before, and even if it has, I can think of another example that would be more unique.
Yes, and it's also annoying when someone says a word, and then asks, "Is that a word?" Of course it's a word! If you make any utterance with any intended meaning, whether anyone understood it or not, it is a word.
I have to disagree to some extent, as prescriptivism can definitely serve a purpose on the condition that it's not overly conservative. Without prescriptivism, we wouldn't have the Dutch language today. It's a completely artificial language compose out of the dialects of the powerhouse regions of Holland (Amsterdam/Rotterdam) and Brabant (Brussels/Antwerp/Eindhoven) for the most part. If we'd allow descriptivists complete reign, we would lose the ability to communicate effectively among each other as this artificial language is what makes it possible for a person from Groningen to communicate with one from Hasselt, and one from Alkmaar with one from Brugge/Bruges. With pure descriptivism, they would be speaking different languages with limited mutual intelligibility both in spoken as in written form. Another point is pronunciation: Dutch descriptivism allows for NL Dutch and BE Dutch variants and sees those as mostly standardized within those two countries. It allows for differences between both region, yet still keeps both regions closer than they would be without this central unifying institute, again increasing communication. Because it's not overly conservative and made adaptations from time to time, the prescribed version stays closer to reality and the way people speak is influenced by this standardization as well. This continuous updating of spelling in the past also made Dutch way more consistent in spelling versus official pronunciation than English whose spelling is just an absolutely attrocious mismash of centuries of changes that nobody ever properly tidied up. English writing is a mess because of it. As with anything in life: it's not black or white. Everything in moderation. Descriptivism and prescriptivism should find each other rather than fight each other.
I would also add that prescriptivism has a role in teaching children the rules of the highest register of the language so they can learn to communicate formally and develop more sophisticated writing processes. In those cases, you're basically teaching them a new language (albeit very similar to their own) that has new grammatical rules they haven't heard before. The problem arises when and if they are told that their native grammar is inherently inferior and incorrect because it doesn't match the official, educated form.
I don't know much about Dutch despite having distant ancestors from the Netherlands, but there is a difference between creating a lingua franca out of natural dialects on the one hand and forcing everybody to conform in every aspect of their speech on the other. In Italy, even though most people couldn't speak Tuscan, it coexisted as a literary language with other regional languages for centuries. The situation in France was rather similar. In Jamaica, people are taught that their language is just broken English, and there seems to be a fear that legitimizing Jamaican (Patois) means abandoning English. But clearly societal bilingualism is a thing, it can be done! You can have your native language or dialect you use day to day, as well as a command of a more supraregional "standard" used mostly for mass communication or interactions with strangers.
@@djeparker99 In theory yes, but in practice the dialect languages just die out and slowly morph into just a mix between the official language the children get taught in school and the dialect that used to be spoken in the region. Nobody is forbidden the dialect, but in all aspects of public life the official language is used albeit with a strong local accent. As generations pass, and more couples have children that would only be exposed to the dialect in the familial sphere, more children miss out on that as parents from different dialect zones mix as people became more mobile and speak the official language at home as well, or the children just don't pick a single dialect very well when hearing multiple growing up. And then they have children, etc etc. The dialect of my ancestors just nearly died out by now, as few still speak it and those that do still have been heavily influenced by Brabantian Dutch over the centuries too as the center of power lied there.
So, Catalonia is a part of Spain, they speak Spanish there and also Catalan. As always happens in bilingual societies, often words from one language often enter the other language. One example is 'Generalitat', which refers to the government of Catalonia, a Catalan word used always in Spanish to refer to the government in Catalonia, there is a Spanish equivalent 'Generalidad', but this is never used. Despite this, Spanish Wikipedia insists on using the prescriptivist, never used 'Generalidad' to refer to the government in the region, even though 'Generalitat' is essentially a Spanish word now borrowed from Catalan and always used in that context in Spanish (including outside Catalonia). They even automatically remove any attempt to change the word to the correct 'Generalitat'. The descriptvist position is close to non-existent in Spain because there is a language-setting body called the RAE which determines rules of the language, so everyone says that whatever they say is 'correct Spanish' and anything else (especially things borrowed from regional languages like Basque or Catalan) are incorrect. This is despite the fact that people don't really know what the RAE says cause no one bothers to read these technical rules, so presciptivists often use the 'wrong' speech while simultaneously criticising others for using 'wrong' (i.e. socially less desirable) speech.
I've been living in Romania my entire life and all my teachers corrected me when I made a cacophony. "ca" (as) and "că" (that) are some of the most common words in romanian but paired with a word starting with "ca" it sounds like "caca/căca" (shit). Even teachers acknowledge the existence of certain exceptions like "biserica catolica" (the catholic church) but EVERYONE will stop and correct you if you do this with any combination of words except for maybe the top 2 or 3 combinations rumored to be exceptions. Some years ago, people read on the internet that these combinations are ok to use if there's a comma between those two words. When middle schoolers and high schoolers found out, instead of paraphrasing those problematic sentences like they've always been taught, they started placing random commas between those word combinations in essays and, more importantly, during exams. It turned into a meme since they did lose points for those commas because it altered the meaning of the sentence. More emphasis has been put on teaching kids to not place random commas but nothing has changed in the way they are taught about how cacophonies should be treated.
I'm also Romanian and I have to add that the funniest thing to come out of this cacophony situation is that in order to avoid cacophonies in actual speech, some people literally say the word "virgulă" (comma) in between. So instead of saying "ca casa" (as the house) which would be a cacophony, they say "ca virgulă casa" (as comma the house) and I just find this hilarious
Brazil has a lot of its sociolinguistics still influenced by colonialism unfortunately One example i particularly hate is the insistence in enforcing the portuguese pronoun order, with Verb-oblique instead of the brazilian oblique-verb. for example "ele me deu um presente" is the brazilian way and "deu-me um presente" is the portuguese way which is also considered normative, this one pisses me off the most because in this case, our form is the most conservative one dating back to the 16th century, they were the ones to change it and force it down our throats. 200 years after independence and we still act as if our variety is the inferior one that needs to be corrected. *disclaimer: nothing against the portuguese variety, I really hope they manage to maintain their linguistic identity in a time where brazilian culture is dominating them. And I hope we manage to maintain and assert our own Identity after centuries of everything brazilian being considered uneducated and wrong in our own country.
@@andrasfogarasi5014 what? we do speak portuguese of course. But we speak a drastically different variety from Portugal portuguese, in grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary
Nossa, não sabia que essa "regra" era por causa do português de Portugal, quando comecei a estudar redação os professores enfatizavam bastante essa forma de escrever.
here's a little anecdote from the german language. Please be aware that I have witnessed this multiple times. It happened to me, it happened to the people around me and I've heard of other people experiencing the same story. Here goes: In german, when you want to say, that you go to a branded Store (e.g. Walmart) you are supposed to say the word "zu" (meaning "to"). Alot of people will say "zum" though (roughly translates to: "to the") Here's an example conversation between a speaker S and a prescriptivist P: S: "I am going *to the* Walmart." P (correcting): " *to* walmart" The problem arises with the Speaker, since the word "to" (zu) in german is the same as the word "closed" (zu). So the Speaker will perceive the conversation like this: S: "I am going *to the* Walmart;" P: " *closed* Walmart" The Speaker of course interprets it, as the Prescriptivist telling him that walmart is closed. So they'll respond with something like: S: " why would it be closed?" The Prescriptivist now realizes the speaker's mistake and gets a kick out of it. Now they treat the conversation as a glorified linguistic Deeze Nuts Joke.
@revilo178 we don't, I just thought the comment would be easier to understand, if I chose an internationally known company as an example, lol. In Hindsight, I could have just used Aldi or Lidl, couldn't I?
@revilo178 Aldi is pretty common in the US (although on the topic of linguistic evolution people often call it Aldi's). Never encountered Lidl here but apparently it does also exist
I speak Serbo-Croatian and to say this society is governed by prescriptivists would be an understatement. Yes, governed. There are official institutions governing what's right and wrong in the language. Institutions because there are 4, all claiming to be the authority over their own language (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin). We even have a rule that's not been part of the way people really speak since the 14th century. Generally the way you have to write is very different from how people speak. The worst part is the effect of this policy on dialects. My native dialect is basically dead at this point because it's seen as 'peasant talk' and 'illiterate'.
@@jayasuryangoral-maanyan3901 East Slavonian in the Bosnian Posavina. It is but one of many though. Numerous dialects have gone or are going extinct because of the lack of care for culture.
In colloquial Irish a common thing in speech that isn't much used in the standard language is the Dative case, particularly with verbal nouns. Eg. Tá mé ag screadaigh - I'm screaming (nominative: screadach). A friend studying Irish at uni told me just today that a professor gave out to him for using it because it's 'archaic' or dialectal even though literally nobody would say ag screadach
Everybody needs to watch this video. I can't tell you how many times I've had people say to me "Oh, you like linguistics? So English must have been your favorite subject in school, right?"
hi, I'm from Portugal. The Portuguese the word for "thank you" is "obrigado" wich is technically an adjective and so it technically has to agree in gender with the implied subject, so prescritivists defend that women should always say "obrigada" and men always "obrigado". In reality, people of all genders usually use the "masculine" form of the word and sometimes the feminine, Although I'm a man I used to use the feminine form. In conclusion I think "obrigado" has turned into a word of its own and doesn't need to agree in gender with anything. Another subject I think it would be interesting to talk about is common things that people tend "correct" but are not mistakes even for the standard language/prescriptivists
One thing, that's quite unique to the English language comoared to most other European languages, is, that there is no official standard variety. In Germany/Austria/Switzerland there is Standard High German, a "normed" language that is based on descriptions of the spoken German varieties, but itself is an artificial, prescriptionist language. Schoolchildrem, who may at home speak other varieties or even languages (like low German or Frisian), have to learn Standard High German. Meanwhile the state has to use SHG in its communication and laws etc. And indeed there is right and wrong. A public official has to follow the norms of SHG to be sure that all the citizens who have learned SHG will understand them. I think this is an important distinction to make (and one that is not explained even in the German school system), that the Standard/literary/normed language can actually exist, prescriptively by definition, alongside the various, natural, spoken varieties that cannot be prescribed. And of course even SHG evolves as it models itself on the spoken language and gets updated. As an aside, this same observation always has me baffled at Anglo anti-spelling-reformists. The biggest argument against English spelling reforms seems to be that "you cannot map spoken English onto a spelling system, because there are too many varieties, that are too different from each other". Well, of course, that is the point of a standard language: you just agree on one standard variety and everyone carries it around with themselves alongside their native variety. And agreement implies prescriptions.
Correct to a degree about spelling reform, but the English speaking world does not have a single dominant variety that can be imposed as The Standard. One might simplisticly say that American English has the largest number of speakers but there are 2 or 3 major English variants within the USA, so which of those is to be the standard? So, let me give you a similar question. The EU has too many official languages. Why can't you agree to standardize on one? (English is the obvious choice. With the British gone, it is now a neutral choice.)
Nice video, and you present the descriptivist case well. I will push back a little bit though, on two fronts. First, people "using words wrong" can actually happen. There's a ... let's call it margin of error, for how far your word usage can get from the unconscious consensus before you just start annoying people. Second, people in fact do use prescriptivist tactics in order to reinforce the societal language consensus. Have you ever heard a mother tell her child, "No sweetie, it's not *mouses* it's *mice* okay?" Mostly though I'm with ya. Me and my brother watched our prescriptivist father fight a desperate rear-guard action against split infinitives, accusative subject pronouns, and the word "gonna" for decades, and it broke his heart. ;D
I had to Google what split infinitives are and I’m not sure what the argument is against them that’s literally correct English in any English speaking part of the world.
@@Freshbott2 As I understand, the rule came from fans of Latin grammar, where an infinitive is one indissoluble word (e.g., "amare" means "to love"). In Latin it's impossible *to* even *contemplate* splitting an infinitive. ;D
'Gonna' is "gaun'ae" Going To< Gang Tae. in Scots so its perfectly fine in English especially that which is descended from Scots etc. I thought you were linguists?
I'm a Dutch speaker from Belgium and my grandparents and parents grew up in an incredibly prescriptivist environment that pushed the use of Common Civilised Dutch, which in most cases sounded awfully stiff and unnatural and was not at all how most people spoke. Now, this has loosened a bit, but my grandfather, despised also being a dialect speaker, constantly corrects people on speaking "wrong", even though in our dialect this is completely normal to say. Common forms of a language can be useful, but only in certain situations and definitely not when you're at the kitchen table with your own family talking about what to eat and how your day was. Phew, I guess I need a rant too haha. Thanks for sharing!
Not a native speaker of Japanese but there are a number of things that prescriptivists in Japan fuss over. One is the pronunciation of the word for bear 熊 くま 'kuma' with a different pitch accent from what was common before like 15 years ago or so. There are a lot of other instances of pitch accent changes that people get mad about, to the point that older people and younger people pronounce some words with completely different pitch patterns. Another is saying that なそう 'nasou' and なさそう 'nasasou' should be used differently. Both mean 'it doesn't seem like X" but なさそう is only supposed to be used with adjectives and なそう is only supposed to be used with verbs. This one is kind of similar to the pronoun cases in English because there is precedent for it since the two constructs are etymologically unrelated, but a lot of people say なさそう 'nasasou' in all situations to the point where it'll probably become standard in the coming decades. ら抜き 'ra nuki', which is basically removing the sound ら 'ra' from verbs in the potential form (喋られる shaberareru＝>喋れる shabereru) used to be criticised, but i have the feeling that its already become grammatical as a distinction between the potential and passive conjugations of verbs.
THE PASSIVE VOICE! That's a rule I hate SOOOO much. "Waah! It doesn't sound as strong as the act-" blah blah blah I'm gonna use whatever voice sounds right to me. And fits my writing.
In Norway there's an increasing case of younger ppl switching out traits specific to their dialect to the standardized norwegian bokmål ones. Especially in the bigger cities. The argument being so you're more easily understood, but the less people r exposed to other varieties the harder a time they're gonna have understanding them so it's more of a self fulfilling prophecy than anything else really. And we have some more nitpicky rules ofc. E.g. you're not supposed to say "å spørre et spørsmål" (to ask an ask, basically) but rather "å stille et spørsmål" (to ask a question). Or the fact that our da/når (then/when) distinction is on its last leg lol.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when style guides for academic writing insist that “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve” and the like should be spelt “would of, could of, should of”. It’s ungrammatical and is unfaithful to the origins of these contractions. Also, I feel that prescriptivism does have some applications, like in language teaching, especially for language revival, and having a strict set of words for news reporters to use so as to not in jargon the general public would likely not understand. Great channel you have. :)
@@FarfettilLejlI’m sorry guys :(, I think in the past I’ve seen people use “would of” and “should of” before, but I think that they were spelling it wrong or that it was used in some old style guide that isn’t used anymore. I’m unable to find an example of such a style guide, I think I was a bit annoyed by it when I did a spelling test for a job once and they asked me to correct the spelling of the paper I was given, and I got frustrated with it and saw that they’d spelt “should of” instead and made a comment about it in the test itself.
Okay, I've thought of an even better, more fitting example. This is very interesting: In Turkish, the syllable "de / da" (the form depends on phonetic patterns) can either impart a locative case to the noun it's suffixed to, or function as a sort of "modal particle/conjunction" that approximates "even/too/(n)either". As a rule, in the former case, it's written as an attached suffix (yerde: on the ground), and in the latter case, as a detached word (yer de: the ground too). However, spoken reality does not reflect this, as "de/da" (along with the questions markers "mı/mi/mu/mü", which also have to be written separately) have absolutely no trouble coming in between nouns and suffixes or between multiple other suffixes. Which means, in fact, in my opinion, they should be classified the same as all the other suffixes. But since they aren't, written langauge has to unnaturally bend itself to avoid splitting a word and its suffixes. In speech, you'd most likely say: "Yerdedeler, göktedeler" (they're on the ground as well as in the sky). However, that sentence I wrote seems like an abomination in a prescriptivist perspective. Instead, in written language, you'd bend the phrasing this way: "Yerdeler de, gökteler de" (it means the same). This ordering of suffixes allows the "de"s to be written separately; however, it's very inauthentic. You'd never hear someone uneducated (non-brainwashed by prescriptivism) say it that way. So there's a big tension here, and unfortunately it results in appalling prejudices regarding intelligence and status. People who don't "properly separate" their conjunctional "de"s are looked down on everywhere -- I see it only too often in RUclips comments. I think this is also symptomatic of the whole... "analytic and synthetic tendencies evolving as a circle" idea. But I admit I haven't thought enough about this, nor am I knowledgeable enough to begin with. As for the resolution to this tension, I'm really not sure. On the one hand, not distinguishing the two (locative and conjunctional versions) and writing both of them without spaces seems more in line with how they are used in reality. On the other, there's utility in distinction in form when there's difference in meaning. For example, the sentence "Yerdedeler, göktedeler" can as easily be interpreted as "The ground drills as well as the sky". If the prescriptivist rule is maintained, this sort of ambiguity is prevented with two distinct correct forms: 1. "Yerdeler de, gökteler de" (they're on the ground as well as in the sky), 2. "Yer de deler, gök de deler" (the ground drills as well as the sky). It honestly makes my head ache. In speech, of course, none of this is a problem, since no matter in what order one speaks the morphemes, the intonation and rhythm clearly distinguish the meaning (1. "Yerdedeler, göktedeler" 2. "YerDEdeler, gökTEdeler"). In the end, it's an insoluble, eternal problem, as while writing is in one sense an "imperfect interface" for speech, it clearly also has a life of its own, and creative workarounds are always needed to reconcile the two media.
This whole argument gets exceedingly complicated in Norway. I tend to stick to being descriptivist with how people speak but vehemently sticking to a rubric when writing (but never "correcting" others) because the dialect situation and the two separate standard written languages just makes things complex.
A History teacher telling us that "History" is mainly written from a male's perspective because you can break the word down into "his story". Although maybe historically correct in the fact that many history textbooks and documents were written by men and definitely play a role in the narrative received by students, it is linguistically wrong is bothered my ears.
5:39 Fun fact: Italian “pecunia” (money) from Latin “pecunia, ae” (goods) is related to “pecus, oris” (sheep). It is mostly used jokingly nowadays, unlike its cultured sibling “pecuniario” who’s got a law degree
I had prescriptivist elementary school teachers.. I had to relearn so many things because I was given incorrect information such as "you can't start a sentence with subordinate conjunction no matter what, that's a sentence fragment." Because of this, I thought sentences like this one were grammatically incorrect for basically a year.
I remember I was assigned a tutor to assist me in writing my college application essay, and the woman spent so much time forcing me to not start sentences with conjunctions, even though the two sentences that had them, kinda needed them. rephrasing them made them clunky and inelegant and ugly sounding. it was very annoying and she really was no help at all.
That teacher was bad for giving the class incorrect information. But they weren't bad for being prescriptivist. Teaching the class how to use English was part of their job.
in Germany we have Bastian Sick and the VDS, a borderline fascist-feeling organization that publish books and a list of “good” and “bad” loanwords from English
Italian as a language just didn't exist before Italian unification. It was a literary form of a dialect of a language that then got forced onto everyone, teaching people speaking their (somewhat related) languages that theya re speaking Italian already, just wrong. To this day what is right and wrong in the Italian language is decided by the Accademia Della Crusca, and everything else is wrong
To answer the question at the end: As a native speaker, I think Spanish is flooded with these type of 'casual' prescriptivists. No joke, someone once responded to a comment of mine saying that Spanish was getting more and more vulgar with time and that was why foreigners (apparently) learned it with so much ease.
About the you and I thing. Two points. 1) it's not perscriptivist to say it's wrong. The only native speakers who use it that way were *educated* incorrectly to say it that way. It's the same logic with preposition stranding. If you were educated to not use preposition stranding, and your kids now don't use preposition stranding, that doesn't make preposition stranding ungrammatical because grammar is a function of a *population* of speakers, not of individual speakers. Educated people learn this grammar structure, making it an unreal feature of a certain sociolect of English. And that leads to my second point (2), that grammar needs to be consistent. Because it's a sociolectal feature, but one that is poorly articulated, speakers who misuse this rule hypercorrect inconsistently. "The secret is between you and I" >> this is incorrect no matter what becaause "I" is never used in the oblique except in this hypercorrection. This means that these speakers aren't actually using "you and I" are two consecutive objects, but as a fossilized phrase "you and I". This is in fact where I suspect the phrase "Me and you should go to the store" gets its grammar. Personally, I'm not interpreting "me and you" are two consecutive subjects. I'm interpreting it as a SINGLE subject (me-and-you should go to the store). Compare: "it's not a you thing, it's a you-and-me thing". Clearly, "you and me" isn't two consecutive nominals, but a single subject. Long story short, this whole hypercorrection is artificial. If you stop repeating it, then speakers will naturally tend back to the "you and me" specifically because it fits English grammar better (ie, English grammar likes to combine nominals). *NB: this isn't the same as using incorrect grammatical forms like swim-swam-swum. The past participle is grammatical in most standard varieties of English, and is ablaut. The English ablaut is just irregular, and irregular forms need to be learned. The reason it's not the same is the consistency point (2). Ablaut is consistent with English grammar and phonology (swim swam swum, run ran ran, eat ate eaten; whence you get perscribed forms bought bought *boughten; or innovated forms, gaslight *gaslit *gaslit, instead of the standard gaslighted).
Interesting if the Icelandic "fé" does not (no longer?) include other livestock such as cows or goats. In Norwegian the word "fe" can be further specified as either "småfe" or "storfe" (lit. small vs. large fee), where the former would include at least sheep and goats, while the latter would be mainly the cows/oxen. There's also "fjørfe"/"fjærfe" referring to the feathered ones, commonly hens, cocks and chicken, but possibly other bird species. I cannot recall any instance of using it with a monetary meaning though, like the English "fee".
in Brasilian portuguese, in most accents, we´re often( mostly in informal speech) dropping plural conjugation if it is not needed, Heres a exemplo: "os carro é bonito" instead of "os carros são bonitos" , but both mean the same: " the cars are beatifull". the thing is, in the first, because the word for "the"(os) already is in the plural form, we dont feel the necessity to conjugate all the other words in the pural form too, since we already know(because of "os") that the following words are also plural. prescriptivists woud tell you that you always need to conjugate the plural( even you feel that it´s not needed) for all the words.
And in the other end you have people (at least in my nordestina accent) drop the s instead of the plural conjugation so you get "o carro são bonito" where the s is implied lol.
I fully expect people that say "it's *_nuclear_* not *_NUCULAR_* " to pronounce "bird" and "horse" as "brid" and "hrose" because the exact same process nuclear is going through is how we got bird and horse
Those are two different word changes. The r sound regular gets lengthened in English. The L sound does not. George Bush constantly fakes a southern accent so he mispronounced nuclear as nucular energy to seen more "country". No one pronounces it "nucular", it's "nuclear".
Terror is awe, terrific is awesome. Terror and horror describe different things. Words were spoken before they were written, and felt before they were invented.
My native Language is Dutch (actually Oost-Vlaams Verkavelingsvlaams) and here's a typical example we have: prescriptivists says that if you want to say "He's called John" you should say "Hij heet John" and when you want to say "I call him John" you should say "Ik noem hem John" so you "should" use the verb heten, not noemen when it's reflexive. But in practice people would say "Hij noemt John" more often than not, but prescriptivists love to "correct" people if they do so.
Dat zal wel iets Vlaams zijn, want in Nederland zou men hier ongetwijfeld raar van op horen. Ik weet niet of dit in Vlaanderen ook gaande is, maar hier hoor je steeds vaker 'hun hebben' ipv 'zij hebben'. Het zet de luisteraar kortstondig op 't verkeerde been.
Well, I'm from a specific region of Germany, where we use a different word for comparison. In standard German it's "ich bin größer, als du", where I'm from you could say "Ich bin größer, wie du". But as soon as I use this phrase I'm called out and or corrected... I hate this!!
As a Brazilian, I think our relationship with Portuguese is weird. Some Portuguese people don't consider Brazilian Portuguese to be Portuguese (basically, in a similar way that White American Prescriptivists consider AAVE to be "broken English"). In Brazilian literature (specially in music and Cordel literature), regional dialects and forms that prescriptivists consider " wrong" are not only accepted, but expected. So, the formal language is only used in very formal situations. Portuguese teachers are taught what they need to know about linguistics (though the focus is in writing), and the National curricullum acknowledges linguistic variety. Even with all that, Brazil remains a very xenophobic and aporophobic country. One example of that is that many people here in São Paulo State believe that our accent is "neutral", and Globo TV, actually based in Rio, also came up with a "neuter accent" (that reduces the most pronounced features of São Paulo and Rio pronunciation) that is as neuter as sulphuric accid (it's just neuter in the Rio-São Paulo Axis, literaly just two towns.) People here in Southeast have a very stereotypical view of the other regions, and it really shows on how some people here talk about Northeastern people (basically, the same way that Americans talk about Latin American Immigrants. So, for example, in Globo TV, it's common to ask for people from other regions to "neutralize" their "accent". Aka, " You're in Murica, speak English"). Also, the people who believe in only one right way to talk aren't educated. So, they think vowel reduction is wrong because "that's not how is written". That leads to a very funny over correction: ADEVOGADO. The "e" here actually comes from an epenthetic /i/ in the word "ADVOGADO" (lawyer), that has been overcorrected. I think that the concept that better exemplifies prescriptivism, specially in Brazil, is the dichotomy of the rich and the poor. In Brazil, the last country to abolish slavery, this dichotomy has shaped much of our history, culture and language. The elected president of Brazil, Lula, is an example of this: he came from humble beginnings in the poorest region of the country, worked as a factory worker and is proud that he and his family were illiterate (He can read now, of course, next year he's going to start his third mandate). Also, I should mention one thing that happened with the Portuguese. They don't like when our dialect "leak" into theirs. One example of this are the Portuguese kids, who watch a Brazilian RUclipsr, talking in the Brazilian accent (almost like a reverse Peppa Pig). This made many Portuguese pissed off (imagine a White prescriptivist seeing their children speaking AAVE). Besides all of it, I still love my language, spoken and written, and I'm excited to be in Language Arts school.
@@ethanbeharry9478 Ué, não tem dialeto em Portugal? Ouvi falar que tem lá o da Ilha da Madeira também, e até uma outra língua, o Mirandês. Não sei se eu tô certo (nunca saí do Brasil né), mas sério que não tem outros dialetos?
@@gabrieltomasevic2085 não ouvi muitos outras palavras ou frases por tudo do portugal, ilhas têm dialetos sim, sempre é assim, mas do porto à lisboa ouvi quase as mesmas coisas
elementary school math teacher tried to police my class's language, insisting that "ain't" is not a word and every time she heard it she would tell you "ain't ain't a word" in the southern USA.... lmao
I'm a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker, to be more specific I speak a Surzhyk version of both (a creol but not really). Society really discourages this way of speaking, seeing this it as low brow and uneducated, which is extremely annoying as some aspects of either language are more useful in common sprach. A similar thing is happening in Steppe vernacular Ukrainian, which has a lot of Russian structures and phrases, but which are discouraged by the government for literary Ukrainian, and thus some are also pricks about it in the spoken Ukrainian.
A very funny (albeit minor) example of this in Turkish is the "correct" use of the "ne ... ne ..." conjunction, which is very similar to "neither ... nor ..." (so a negator of multiple elements). We were taught in elementary school that the correct usage is with affirmative verbs and using negated verbs is categorically wrong. I wonder if they still teach that, because it certainly doesn't seem to be true now (if it ever was). I've been noticing that especially politicians (for rhetorical emphasis I suppose) subconsciously almost always use negated verbs with it. I expect that to become the almost universal "de facto rule" before too long. I'm certainly hoping for a resolution to this tension (in either direction), especially since currently you need to rely exclusively on context to infer whether the "grammatical formula" adds up to affirmation or negation. There are, of course, innumerable such linguistic tensions floating around, but this was the first to come to mind.
As a Spanish speaker this makes me extremely angry. The RAE (Real Academia Española/Royal Spanish Academy) has an overwhelming prescriptivist bias. Like, I'm a teenager and I know very little about linguistics compared to the actual experts but I can't take any of these guys seriously. And the way people quote them, and how they say their role is "regulating language", as if the concept of regulating language wasn't an outdated and lowkey kinda fascist, specially in Spain. All the anger about people wanting to use the gender-neutral "elle" as if its the end of the world. Yes, it isn't grammatical, but it is our language and our gender identity and I say we get to do whatever we want with them! (I don't use the pronoun elle myself but I am queer). To them language is this sacred thing, and I get it, I do, I think language preservation is important, specially the preservation of minority languages, but we also have to accept that it changes with time and there's nothing we can do about it. It happens. In an academic setting perhaps it makes sense to work with rigid definitions but I ain't going around life speaking like I'm writing an essay. I like it when language changes, today, for once, I heard my teacher say "saludh" instead of salud (health in Spanish), you know the voiced dental fricative, I think it's called, which is a sound not proper of Spanish at all, but that I think it's becoming more common when "d" appears at the end of a consonant (I've realized I do this too). And of course most people don't notice because they are homophones, but it is still a little way I can hear the language changing, perhaps. Maybe it's all a nonsense ramble, but it's frustrating to hear people insisting so much on "talking right", when they themselves have a dialect of their own. And the fact that a prestigious linguistic institution acts this way, its crazy to me. How can people not know. Its like linguistics 101. How is this prevalent at all. When it comes to writing I think that "whatever feels right" is more important that what's "correct". SORRY. LONG COMMENT. I HAVE AUTISM. AND I AM HOOKED TO LINGUISTICS RIGHT NOW. I'M NOT GREAT AT SPEAKING MYSELF AND OF COURSE THIS AIN'T MY NATIVE LANGUAGE. SORRY IF I DIDNT GET THE POINT ACROSS. I love ur channel bro it's so good you should get more views.
@@jojothermidor you don't have to use elle if you don't want to. no one is forcing you bestie literally do whatever you want. I use it. You don't have to. But just say you don't want to do it instead of using the excuse that it's "not correct" or whatever.
@@lyxthen Most of the genderization in Spanish is because the words themselves have gender. In which case using "elle" would only appeal to a persons sensibilities when referring to a person. Which I will not do.
My most hated rule I was taught in school, for both my native Dutch and for English, is that a comma before 'and' is not allowed, and that I should just omit the comma. I stubbornly refused to follow this rule, and included it anywhere I would leave a pause in my sentences. I figured that being consistent with the comma ALWAYS meaning a rest, and a rest always being indicated by a comma, there would be no ambiguity in how to read something. Try it. Read the first two sentences in this comment, and then read it as if there was no comma in there. In my head at least, it sounds completely different. Still, that is what was taught at my school.
Yeah, I use this as well. But I probably use commas in places where they stylistically aren't typical. I was taught in primary school to put them wherever a break seems appropriate, so I stick them everywhere. It would be neat to actually see some sort of revealed syntactic basis for it all, but I'm not going to put in that sort of effort for every email.
I was taught in late elementary or middle school (about 9-12 years old) that you should use them before "fanboys" an acronym for common 'co-coordinating' conjunctions in English, such as "For," "And", "Nor", "but", "or", "yet", "so", and it's pretty common in reading to see it following other conjunctions like "However" and "although". I have no idea for Dutch rules though but this is pretty common in at least American English. My mom is British and writes run-on sentences with no commas and it feels like I can't take a breath reading it, but I'm not certain she was an A student or anything in her day.
on god, germans are especially guilty of this, probably half the words that german artists use in their songs are from English even though most of the time it would make a LOT more sense to just use the native word. And it makes their songs sound like absolute dogshit because all I hear are wannabe Americans speaking a weird mix of German and English that doesn't even sound good together.
yeahhh i'm not a prescriptivist either but anglicization's really a bitch. it was kinda the inevitable outcome of british imperialism, and the way it's becoming a global lingua franca is great in that people from all over can communicate w/ it, but it's killing off so much linguistic diversity that you can't help but hate it, especially w/ the way english words (& the cultural concepts that come with them) seem to be prioritized over ones from other languages now.
@@posthumously Yea, i dont mind new words coming from English that are also new concepts, but in my native language Dutch i sometimes hear people use English words that have perfectly non-archaic Dutch variants. Someone said 'anxiety' instead of the Dutch 'angst' even though angst is way easier to both pronounce and write.
Czech speaker reporting in. I just want the written form to freely reflect the spoken form. I hate that we keep retaining things that majority of the speakers don't care about. Most of the education is spent on drilling semantic minutae, but the language works just fine without them. The standardized form is relatively young, we have a perfect time to just let the speakers dictate spelling. Instead, we (or the ÚJČ) keep pretending like voicedness of prepositions in written form is something that needs retaining. We (and Slovenes) have such a neat distinction of turning "kto" into voiced "gdo", but you'll be a laughingstock if you don't write it as "kdo". The raising of "mléko" to "mlíko" is so widely spread, why not legitimize it? I don't know any good reason to keep the yer representation other than to make our brains do mental gymnastics when writing. The worst one is the distinction of masculine animate plural participle ending, where you also have to keep in mind the rule that masculine animate subjects take precedent before all others. "-li" has more weight than "ly". The animacy distinction is annoying enough, since it will clearly seize to exist in spoken form eventually. On top of that, feminine subjects take precedence before neuter subjects, the neuter participle being the only distinct one in spoken form "-la". But in speech, it often just becomes "-ly" for neuter nouns only, so much so that there is a rule that two singular neuter subjects take "-ly" instead of "-la". And there are other exceptions where either "-li" or "-ly" is valid. And finally, the "ů". That's a remnant of "uo" diphthong. And if a dialect retains it, it should be fine to write "uo" instead of "ú", but since it's so consistently in medial positions, it's just a way to catch kids off-guard when the root makes the long vowel "ú" even if there is a suffix. None of this would matter if the writing rules were lax. Or rather, if they were descriptive. Our language could have a phonemic orthography and we could have written proof of all changes to the language and variations between speakers. Sure, as dialects drift away, this would mean that the written form would be less mutually intelligible. Which is good. But instead, we spend most of our education on the tiniest things since early childhood, and so education quickly becomes a painful chore. All it does is help the institutional centralization efforts.
As a speaker of Spanish (Chilean Spanish to be specific), I feel like the descriptivist view is much more extended in Anglophone countries than the rest of the world, probably due to cultural reasons, as well as the fact that there's a big Linguistic tradition that's not equally present in other places. You really wouldn't see people questioning prescriptivist rules of Spanish, unless they were students of Linguistics, and even then, those with some knowledge of Linguistics but with a professional formation as a Language Teacher would have prescriptivist biases ingrained into their brains. I think this is starting to change with younger generations, through lenguaje inclusivo (gender-neutral language). The emergence of that issue has motivated further reflection and discussion about the flexibility of language, and of course, there's the usual debate between those who want to keep language as it is, supported by the RAE (the Academy), and people who believe language can and must change as time goes on.
The thing I hate is when you get people *_prescribing_* a new meaning to a word or a new way to use a word, that nobody outside their small bubble uses or recognises as anything but sounding immensely weird, and when you don't conform to their demand to change your speech and tell them that you and 99% of the population are speaking your language correct and properly because this is how words are used, they go "bro words change over time", conflating their decreed, demanded change with natural evolution of language, pretending like *_you_* are a prescriptivist, when it's them who are prescibing a meaning, just a "new" one they want to make happen instead of an older one that has fallen out of use. The main cuprits of this are activists trying to change languages like German and French because they are upset that these languages have gendered terms to refer to persons.
I don't think that's really comparable to the kind of prescriptivism the video is addressing, since it's not dependant on a presumption of truth, it's activism, as you have described it. Also because prescriptivism usually comes from a position of authority, while the promotion of gender-neutral language isn't accepted by most academies of language. To oppose gender-neutral language under that basis would also be pretty weird from a descriptivist perspective considering many of the changes in languages were imposed at some point.
These people exist in Cantonese, a scholar/TV person started this correct pronunciation thing in the 70s, using a dictionary a thousand years ago written by people living in other parts of china, and for some reason he’s popular among TV stations and broadcasters, despite a lot of criticism and debates from the academic circle, it somehow survived, and now you have these pretentious people correcting people‘s Cantonese with weirdly pronounced words that they think are correct base on a medieval dictionary from northern china.
There's a common misconseption in Russian education is "Нет слова "нету"". There IS such a word (нету) that means roughly "there is no something", and you know why they say that? It's because the usage of the word "нету" is complicated (no examples, sorry :( )
I find it easier to treat "нету" as contraction of "нет тут"; its history is tad more complicated than that, but it works. Prescriptivists revolt against its use because it sounds too informal to be entrenched, and Russian totally does not have any contractions (откуда _на_ хрен в русском столько префиксов), when it is a perfectly old word from western East Slavic dialects that have now made it into fabric of Russian. Also, Russian sees prescriptivists complain about grammatical gender of loanwords - yes, "paletot" is masculine in French, "пальто" sounds neuter in Russian, shut up its neuter now - and use of null-ending vocative case - because language displaying a remarkable feat of re-evolving a trait that it has lost previously is too alive for prescriptivists' understanding.
@@user-qd8yy9lc4g agree with everything you said at the end there. Though the reemergence of the vocative case is mostly limited to personal names, it's still a legitimate feature and not some bastardization. Also, I for one think that the very reason why "нету" sounds informal is precisely because we've been constantly told it's a non-existent word from the first time we go to school.
Another example of overcorrection in English is the phrase "aren't I". The wordt ain't evolved from amn't, but people started using it for other persons too, so prescriptivists started denouncing it, which led to people avoiding "ain't" altogether, and they started saying "aren't I". Also in standard written Dutch there is an arbitrary distinction between accusative "hen" (them) and dative (and genetive) "hun". The distinction between dative and accusative had long been lost in Dutch, but some guy wanted to bring it back (he also wanted to distinguish between hem and hom or something like that, but that didn't stick). It was also decided that all prepositions are followed by an accusative, so either you use dative, or you use a preposition with the accusative, but that's not even how Dutch worked historically. For most Dutch speakers, even the distinction between nominative and oblique had faded in the third person plural pronoun. They would usually use hun in every case, or the weak form ze from zij in all cases but the genetive. This latter system is allowed by the written standard, but not the preferred system. Personally I just say the weak form ze, which I learnt as a sort of way to cheat the system. As I child I also used hun a lot in every case. In my hometown, you will also hear the older generations say hunnie or sullie
Believe it or not, the disappearance of "thou" is a prescriptivism, just dating back to the English Civil War, where soldiers would discourage the use of the singular "thou" with each other because their commanders would refer to groups of soldiers with the plural "you," and they consequently misunderstood this as more formal / correct. It's why English now has all these awkward constructions for the second person plural (namely "y'all," which is a feature of Southern English but doesn't appear in my dialect of California English). I find myself using Spanish "ustedes" or "you-stedes" when I'm trying to clarify I'm using the plural second person, because while it sounds silly at least people know immediately what I mean.
Since you give me the choice I will go with not believing it. No English speaker at the time of the Civil war would confuse the use of "you" as a plural with the use of "you" for formality.
As both an amateur linguist and a teacher, I find myself in an interesting tension with this topic. On the one hand, from a linguistic perspective, I agree with your thesis. But on the other hand, as a teacher, I know that some pedants will judge my students for their "incorrect usage," however unjustified they may be, and that judgement can have meaningful consequences in some contexts; thus, it becomes my responsibility to teach them how to follow the presriptivist rules, however ridiculous they may be.
I'm going to agree with the vast majority of what you said here, however I do think there is a place for prescriptivism, and it's specifically for written or spoken works that require a specific and un-open to interpretation understanding, such as law and scientific description, so ironically you need prescriptivist language to describe and understand descriptivist language sources and papers on the subject.
One (passive) prescriptivist complaint I have, is that the PC keyboard does not support the 25th letter of the original alphabet, and now recently the Dutch alphabet has being replaced with the nearly identical English one. The Netherlands is often seen as too small of a country to translate things, and indeed Dutch PCs ship with the keyboard setting 'US (international)'. But the 'ij' is very central to the Dutch language (from 'hij/zij' = 'he/she' to 'pijn'='pain' to 'schijt'='sh*t' (vulgar) to 'ijsvrij'='ice free'), and many people from the war generation will still tell you that the 'ij' is the 25th letter of the alphabet. But as you can tell, in these RUclips comments the 'ij' is two letters: i+j. You can type ij (a single glyph) via unicode alt-codes, but it is not included in US (international) or similar. Unicode calls it 'deprecated'. Now most Dutch people don't care about this at all, and happily accept the 'y' as the 25th letter -- though they do pronounce it as 'ij' in the alphabet song. But as someone with the 'ij' in my name, I don't like that my name is changing because the PC industry is dominated by American companies who can't be bothered to support the 'ij'. See how hard the Germans had to fight for their eszett (ẞß); we Dutch will never get our 'ij' back. Note how Wikipedia calls it a digraph and only mentions it is 'sometimes considered a letter in itself'. Yes, some older Dutch speakers still consider it a letter, most of the others a ligature. So one whose authority are you calling it a digraph? Sound like dumb prescriptivism to me.
I find that a bit hard to believe seeing as Scandinavian keyboards include our special letter åöäøæ. Although I guess there are a few more Scandinavians than Dutch people... I do think that IJ is a stupid "letter" though. It's two separate letters written separately, yet supposed to be treated as one?
So I know this isn't really that relevant to the meaning of the video, but I've had an interesting and different relationship with my interest in linguistics and prescriptivism. Over the past few years, I've always taken a descriptivist stance on most issues. I do think that some areas (such as teaching languages, technical language, jargon, and edge case scenarios) are a lot more complicated than "prescriptivism good/bad" and need a more moderate approach, so to speak. But over the past few months as I've become more and more interested in the study of languages and understanding the underlying functions, I've started to agree with more prescriptivist perspectives and I'm not sure why. I think my position recently is very similar to something you briefly touch on when you describe your position on using the nominative case in the subject and how you're somewhat torn because you think cases are cool. That's how I've felt on the issue recently. With learning about languages and grammar and spelling and why prescriptivists prescribe the things they do came the feeling that those things are cool, and that since I like learning about them and knowing how they work, that's how I should speak. So because of that, I've been speaking and typing very formally in some situations. I've started using commas and semicolons "properly" and now I have to physically stop myself because it became habit. And worse still is that because I've always been the "annoying know-it-all type" and because I usually got psychologically rewarded for that in school, I have the horrible tendency of correcting people sometimes. Thankfully its usually only my family or close friends and thankfully I'm never a dick about it, but it still feels like that's the wrong perspective, like I've adopted a prescriptivist outlook in some small ways. I still think that the role of people who write the dictionaries and grammar books is, obviously, to describe an existing language, not to invent unused rules and enforce those on the populace; however, I have been lately falling more and more into the trap of being a member of said populace who tries to intentionally steer the direction of the development of the language towards what I have arbitrarily decided as having "more utility." Idk I'd never try to correct people who speak different dialects or who use common ways of speaking that aren't ""technically"" correct, but I am starting to feel like I have some sort of "duty" to uphold certain weird things like irregular Latin-descended pluralizations, pronoun cases, punctuation, and very precise definitions of technical things from science or philosophy that I'm interested in (like the commonly "incorrect" definitions or uses of fruit, flower, communism, gender, species, theory, etc.) sorry this makes absolutely zero sense. I'm procrastinating working on my history final and my mind is dead.
Interesting to know from which word "fee" originated. I noticed its proto germanic origin "fehu" also evolved into the german word "Vieh", which just sounds like "fee" but mostly kept it's original meaning.
What is your opinion about obvious yet hugely common mistakes such as “it’s” in place of “its”? Are we going to passively witness a verb becoming an adjective?
That's just spelling. There's no actual change happening there, it's just that "it's" and "its" sound identical and so people can become confused of which one to use when writing something down.
it makes sense that people mix them up- consider, if this land is the property of John, then it is John's property, with an apostrophe. and yet, something can be 'its property', which is without an apostrophe. it's counterintuitive, given an existing situation where the possessive -s suffix is marked with an apostrophe, that of the two spellings of its/it's, the one with the apostrophe is not the possessive. as a matter of fact, that thing that does not make sense is why we use an apostrophe for "John's property", when I couldn't tell you what John's is supposed to be short for. The land is John is property? The land is John has property? if it was ever short for anything, it's not anymore, so why do we use it? only because people have associated apostrophes with possessives, to the point of overcorrecting its to it's.
In German, most people say "wegen dem" ("because of the") using dative case, but it is considered incorrect. The supposedly correct from is "wegen des" using genitive case, despite much fewer people saying it this way, and those who do mostly because they purposefully correct themselves.
I will state one place where presriptivism has a use, When the language being needs to be very strict. Simple NLP programs may only parse (and understand) a small subset of English, and it's better that their subset is more akin to a programming language (though, not actually like a programming language) than raw-unfiltered natural language. But apart from that, letting language act as more of a contextual and relative communication system works better because it captures a large amount of nuance and also allows for ambiguity. But, prescriptivism is still very useful for some domains. (Also, I've read a few people's comments about having language prescribed to you in school. I have a similar experience. I went to a welsh school and they put in a lot of effort into stopping people speak Wenglish. So many much "Ffôn nid ffown" and some grammatical things like "Adjectives After the noun, Order your prepositions, Don't forget mutations" There was a lot. But, it does mean I can speak Wenglish much better than i could've otherwise. I'dn't've known what it was if it wasn't for them trying to crush it.)
Nice video, I just wanted to let you know you made a small French mistake in the sentence ''La chaise sur laquelle j'assois...''. Asseoir needs a direct object (the thing or person you make sit down), so here you need the reflexive form ''La chaise sur laquelle je m'assois...''. All the luck for you for learning French!
For myself, I translate assoir as "set" not "sit", as it is usually taught. "Set" requires a direct object, so in English " i set myself on the chair."
The only thing that I hate is something known as 'skunked terms'. The word disinterested actually means impartial, but nowadays it is more common to be synonymous with uninterested...
Prescriptivism is for mathematic and scientific types, and other people who would be described as Lawful in D&D, descriptivism is for artistic and creative types and others who would be described as Chaotic in D&D Seeing a language as a struct of algorithms and laws that should be tightly controlled is important for an autistic person like me. Someday, all languages will be prescribed into a single global language, and everyone will be able to understand each other.
When I see people saying that stuff like "He was trying to both drink the milk and read the book, without success" is an ungramatical sentence, it makes me want to rip my hair out.
In hebrew, some characters have old names that haven't been 100% phased out yet, and new names that every normal speaker uses. The most popular example, י (y/i), is called yud by nearly every speaker, and yod by some older people and hebrew teachers. The hebrew teachers call it wrong to say yud, even though that's how people speak now.
As a speaker and someone who learned bosnian/croatian in school (both are the names of official country standards for the bosnian/croatian/montenegrin/serbian language), I can relate to this video so much. The cultural elites in all of our countries but especially the croatian cultural elite (& the government) is completely infected with prescriptivism. They have a special agency for language standardization that regularly comes up with new words (often replacements of existing words), grammar and spelling rules. And then they have language "oversee-ers" on every state and even a lot of private media outlets to check and correct the language used. The prescriptivist make up so many new words and spelling rules that it's hard even for educated people like professional journalists to keep up. In the end you get people being told they can't speak their own native language, and people becoming insecure speaking on the media because they have to always pay attention to each word they're saying in order to speak as prescribed. They're also purists - they're always trying to replace words of foreign origin (even if well established in our language as a normal word) with native made-up words. For example, they replaced 'univerzitet' (university) with 'sveučilište' which literally translates to 'alllearnery', which doesn't even make sense semantically since universities are also institutions of scientific research and communication, not just teaching and learning. There's so many cases of dumb made-up words like that
I am an italian and personally it makes me die inside when someone says that the conjunctive is dying. If it was it wouldn't be used in writing or speech, things that are untrue.
Stesso dicasi del passato remoto. E' usatissimo dappertutto, infatti non si può raccontare una storia fittizia ambientata nel passato senza il passato remoto.
I think one thing that would be helpful when I'm learning a new language is knowing how "wrong" my "wrong" answer sounds. For example "Where's my keys?" doesn't sound that bad to me, but I wonder if a Spanish speaker would think the same about "¿Dónde está mis llaves?"
It's understood but not really something native speakers would say (in that particular case). Mistakes in gender and singular/plural are two of the most telling signs for non-native speakers of Spanish. Though in some cases native speakers do make those "mistakes" (under a prescriptive model), and their acceptance by the Academy really varies a lot. Mar (sea) is mainly a masculine noun (el mar), but the use of feminine is accepted by the RAE (la mar). Meanwhile, calor (heat) is also masculine, and even though the feminine form is widely used, it's only documented, not accepted by the RAE.
Okay, reading the comments throught here, it's pretty nice to know my country's institute of linguistics isn't as bad as, for example, France's. As a Slovak person though, we are still pretty much fucked, since the case system is so harsh and strong and unbending that it's really hard to even REACH any semantic drift. The case system, for context, has 6 cases, with an obsolete 7th that is still used today, though rarely. In combination with grammatical gender. Doesn't sound bad, right? No. Every word has a strictly defined gender and mustn't be changed, since the words change based on the grammatical case in which it appears. AND there are 4 ways for every gender that can be used for each case. And these rules are unbending. They teach these rules at school like it's the holy grail, meaning that everyone who was born or has studied Slovak will try to correct you should you use the wrong word inflection in a word that could even be considered obsolete. Slovak is a pain in the ass sometimes.
The main issue is that things like laws don't change how they are worded over time, so a proper education does rely on teaching the "prescriptive" meanings of words, and at least some awareness of the prescriptive meaning is valuable as an adult when coming into contact with things where prescriptive meaning is quite important to maintain the coherency of the whole institution across time (to a reasonable degree). It helps us in jargon filled fields as well.
I speak dutch and I often make the hypercorrection of "You and I" in english because in dutch "Jij en Ik" (the literal translation) is the only right way to say it
When I came to Germany and I talk with Germans a lot about languages, some say "I can't learn languages, even my German isn't that great (which is their native language)". Or some said "Some Germans have worse German that yours". They think that just because they had a bad grade in school or make some "mistakes" while writing that their language skill is somehow not good. They're the native speakers, they can talk, that's the language. I can't believe the Education System made them think that native speakers need to be good at "writing" to be "real" speakers of the Language.
no, we are just making fun of dialects
@@torben22.16 "okay, but that's worse. you do get how that's worse, right?" - chidi anagonye
My Dutch teacher was also like 'you know I think that whatever you say, how ungrammatical, can be considerd Dutch. But intil the language bureau allows it I'll have to mark wrong Dutch. He wad fully aware of how languages evolve.
Then I got a new teacher and he's fine but always looks disappointed at my friendgroup when we start conversing in English and seems more strict on rules
It's a bit more complicated than that... German is a very flexible language with a rich vocabulary pool and countless dialects. No one speaks true Standard High German and as it was said in the video what native speakers say IS the language. That means that speakers of a dialect often use phrases that are considered incorrect but in their mind it's just how it is and as long as an utterance is understood there is no problem. And that's true for generally known phrases as well. For example "Das macht Sinn" is considered wrong although the corpora tells a different story. The phrase is used by all demographic groups and in almost all dialects. The elitist's explanation "It's always been 'Das ergibt Sinn'" might be true but doesn't acknowledge language shift which happens naturally and can't be controlled by "perscriptionists".
I digress... Germans always say that Germans can't speak their own language because of its history. And at the same time Germans are indeed very capable of learning languages. In 2016 a study compared European and American languages learners. Germany was pretty average with about 82% speakers of at least one foreign language (mostly English but also French and Spanish which are mandatory in Gymnasium) in Europe while the US had about 20% (mostly Spanish). When you learn another language you also learn a lot about your own mother tongue. So we "know" e.g. that we often use the genitive and dative cases incorrectly. There are even sayings like "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod" which literally translates to "The dative is the death of the genitive".
@@torben22.16 Not making fun of. Looking down upon.
Well, I live in France, and I have been amazed by linguistics for quite some time now, so you can imagine my relationship with l’Académie Française lol.
One thing I love about France is that literally everyone who has a tiny bit of education in linguistics absolutely despises l’Académie, and continuously make fun of old people getting pressed when a single letter from a foreign language gets borrowed. I am in the middle of my linguistics degree in Paris, and seeing every single one of my professors continuously dunking on l’Académie always brings a smile to my face ;)
I'm from Cuba and the hate that I feel for the "Royal Spanish Academy" is indescribible
@@osz804 I’m half Uruguayan, and my mother is an Argentinian Spanish teacher in Buenos Aires, so I feel you 🥲🥲🥲
They still serve a purpose imo: to avoid confusion. When descriptivists just change the definition of a word, it can cause people to lose the ability to properly communicate as people mean different things with the same word. To have a single source of truth is handy in those cases... see how people try to obfuscate political debates regarding racism by changing the definition to that of institutional racism, to which the other person using the dictionary definition is insulted by.
In Dutch, de Nederlandse Taalunie fulfils a similar role l'Academie Francaise, but it serves another purpose as well. Dutch is an artificial language created from several dialects, and therefore nobody truly spoke it natively. Without it, we would still have trouble communicating with the Dutch language area as dialects can diverge quite a lot. It's good to have a central institute saying what "proper Dutch" is, so we can communicate effectively with Dutch speakers using entirely different words or even grammar rules natively. They also simplify spelling from time to time so Dutch doesn't become as horrible as English is with regards to spelling vs pronunciation.
ognion
@MeChupaUnHuevon tienen una actitud extremadamente pedante en todo lo que hacen y son extremadamente prescriptivistas
Another one that drives me nuts is when people say you can't split infinitives in English, and they claim that "to" is inherently part of the infinitive. Neither is true. I literally once saw someone on a forum unironically say:
"It's a rule of English to never split the infinitive."
Splitting the infinitive is so common and natural in modern English (and maybe has been for ages, idk) that they used it themselves without realizing it even while TALKING ABOUT split infinitives.
As a Russian speaker, the prescriptivist attitude is so deep within the language users’ mindset, it’s infuriating. All everyone cares about is telling people what the correct use is and there’s not even a hint of descriptivism on site anywhere unless you search for it. It was only after I learned English and went on the internet to learned about linguistics that I realized the flaws of the prescriptivist way of thinking. Even still, I have to stop myself from explaining basics of linguistics every time someone says “what’s the correct way to say this” or “you’re using that word/grammar piece incorrectly” cuz the notion of descriptivism is so far removed from the mindset of average Russian speakers most of the time so it takes a ground-up approach to make people step back from the deeply ingrained prescriptivism.
For any Russian speakers out there, the most prominent example that comes to my mind is the enforcement of “нет чего/кого-либо” instead of “нетУ чего/кого-либо”. People use the latter all the time without any second thought. It’s completely grammatically consistent, there’s a historical precedent for its use, and in most cases it makes more sense to use “нету” instead of “нет”, so there’s no real reason to enforce against it but people still do. Any teacher or a grammar snob will be quick to correct you for the “improper speech” especially in formal settings and there are so many example like that where people are very quick to try to correct you and no one thinks “well maybe what I was taught in school is not an end-all be-all”.
Хотел вот про это щас написать, я даже удивлен что в инглише этих прекрасных гениев языка кто-то слушает. Но самый вредительский бред конечно с ударениями у нас, абсолютная шиза. Английский со школы учил и давно подметил что у них никто этим практически не занимается и вот тогда ещё закрались сомнения что абсолютно все равно как правильно "звонить" говорить
@@jesusnavin5017 омг столько споров у меня было из-за "звонИт" и "звОнит". Иногда задумываюсь, если бы все эти люди хоть немного постараются и подумают немного, может мы смогли бы понять что зря нервы тратим на такие придирчивые аргументы. Literally anything else would be more productive
Не знаю застали ли вы ЕГЭ, но там есть задание по орфоэпике и там нужно выучить "правильное" ударение для слов: Оберег, фетИш, облегчИть... Хотя я 100% уверен едва ли кто-то говорит Оберег
@@ddddddd5075 wtf фетИш?? Откуда они это все берут? Только самые нужные и полезные знания на самом важном экзамене школы
Есть мысли откуда растут корни у такого засилья прескриптивизма в русском языке? Сдаётся мне всё началось со времён ликбеза и массого открытия школ вузов. Бывшим малограмотным нужно было дать правила, как правильно писать и говорить.
I’m from germany and here (in favour of prescriptivism) we are taught that our dialects are the wrong and that you are supposed to speak hochdeutsch in school, which is currently leading to the disappearance of these dialects because many people stop teaching them to their children because there is a myth that children who grow up spekaing a dialect will hwve difficulties in school. I know also many cases of people (young folks) that used to speak a dialect as children but then stopped in favour of Hochdeutsch.
I as a consistent speaker of one if these dialects sometimes get comments about how I’m supposed to speak Hochdeutsch in school and sometimes even peers comment abt my way of speaking.
My fuckin ex even wanted me to speak Hochdeutsch with her because my dialect sounded wrong in her ear.
This lincuistical situation is fucking trash dude utter garbage by the love of god I hate prescriptivism and hochdeutsch it brings out the arrogance of society.
I agree and sympathize with you but I think it's relatively good that prescriptivism is (to some extent) supported by policy. I take it for a fact that people who have more difficulty understanding each other are more prone to... have conflicts. Universalism promotes peace and for there to be universalism, there needs to be a "standard" to be universalized. I think Germany is internally more peaceful now than it was some centuries ago, when the principalities were not so keen on cooperation. On the flipside, though, this "internal cohesion" does sadly make the "linguistic sphere" more hostile to other spheres -- i.e. internal "peace/harmony" results in external "hostility/discord". I see this as a sort of terrible dilemma. The only real solution I can think of is that... the UN should pick a common language for all the world to learn (I propose tongue-in-cheek Toki Pona), and other than that, all languages, dialects and idiolects and so on should be freed from prescriptivist thinking and thrive without judgement. Actually, yeah, I think that's the important point: One should see the prescriptivist mode as a tool, as a pragmatic vessel, not as truth. That'd be the cure to the "arrogance of society". Easier said than done, though, of course.
Tut mir leid, ich wollte nur all dies sagen, weil ohne Hochdeutsch ich überhaupt erst nicht Deutsch zu lernen wagen würde. Doch ich stimme diesem zu: Ein einfacherer Dialekt wäre angenehmer gewesen! Vielleicht einer ohne Genera oder Kasus.
The problem is that germany( if u were referring to the Holy Roman Empire) was more divided due to political reasons less so because of linguistical reasons.
Our society in general is very divided, and differences in language support that division, but do not cause it.
Imo it’s just another dividing factor in our divided world.
I don’t think that everyone speaking the same language would be a necessary solution, but a possible one that still doesn’t fix things.
There is for example no strong divide between Bavaria and Lower Saxony, but a strong one between east and west which wasn’t caused due to language.
Nevertheless I support that Standard german would be useful even in a society which is not deeply divided in and of itself, but it should not hold a status anywhere near the one is holds atm.
Also prescriptivism still sucks ass in an only standard german environment cuz there are differences in speech between the written and vernacular, for example many regions people replace the word „als“ with „wie“ i. e. „Ich bin besser wie du“ instead of „Ich bin besser *als* du“ and to regard it as false is just fckn unnecessary
Interessant! Ich bin lernen als einer zweiten Sprache. Welche Dialekt sprichst du?
Ich spreche einen Rheinfränkischen dialekt! :D
@@climatechangeisrealyoubast3231 I don't think it's enough either, but I'm pretty convinced that everyone in the world being able to understand what each other is saying is a necessary prerequisite for world peace. Of course, there's no way to test something like that, but I feel pretty secure in that assumption, given how difficult (if not impossible) lasting, ultimate peace looks in the first place.
As for prescriptivism: I dislike it as much as the next person, but I think it's a necessary and natural force. To the extent that anything is *taught*, one needs to be prescriptive about it. And these prescriptions must come from "a limited space", since including everything is impossible -- you wouldn't even know where to draw the boundaries. If Chomskyan thinking is correct, we're all speaking the same basic langauge (universal grammar) anyway. Unfortunately, lines do have to be drawn somewhere if you want to teach a language (as opposed to let people naturally absorb/acquire it). So I see the als/wie situation as "prescriptivism done wrong" rather than "the inherent evil of prescriptivism". As I said above, I think it's much more about the attitude: When someone regards a language usage as "false", that's just (as you said) unnecessary and forceful. One could just say "that's not considered standard today", without any judgment attached -- wish that were more common.
I also agree that the "standard" should strive to remain as comprehensive and flexible as possible (endorsing both "wie" and "als" in comparisons for example), but I think it's important to remember that there's no limit to flexibility. Mutual intelligibility is a gradient. You'd get what I mean, if I said "iss bim better wie dich", but I doubt you'd consider that to be equally worthy of being seen as "not false".
So yeah, I don't really have a solution, other than: Let there be a standard world language (which is carefully prescribed and kept up to date) and let all the other languages in the world reign free without any prescriptivist imposition -- they shouldn't be taught in school but only acquired passively (since teaching limits them). Let the universal language take the burden of prescription (as it facilitates peace and critical communication) and let other languages be free spaces of play. That's all I can think of, when it comes to solutions that are neither temporary nor localized.
In Denmark you're still told by teachers not to write "fordi at", where "at" is a fully unnessecary word that people put in, but people just do it anyway.
Weird thing about being told not to do it is, the supreme body on the Danish language allows "fordi at"; they also describe themselves as descriptivists (so they are the good version of the French academy: they're descriptivist, and they're not French).
As a French speaker, I agree with your definition of a good French Academy 😂
Hello, I'm Danish and jsut out of curiosity, what is our "supreme body on the Danish language". Because if I can find a place they claim "fordi at" is grammatically correct, I have a lot of people I want to contact.
@@johannkyle8286 bare soeg paa dansk sprogneavns side
@@mbg8733 mange tak
I love that you described prescriptivists as language creationists! 😂
Them, and linguistic essentialists.
They do precisely treat any given language in their current form as a gift that fell from the skies, don't they
@@boardbill5852 i mean it is to be used and manipulated at the whims of mankind as that is why it exists we could change the language if we want or make our own form of it but we would need to classify it differently or get most all of the people to agree like if we wanted to make the prepositions more like a romance language we could if everyone agreed but most people do it like its always been
They probably think that a random individual some hundred years ago sat down at a desk and created the language that they are supposedly "correcting" in its final form that is to be static and unchanging for as long as its populations of native speakers last. I wonder where prescriptivists would draw the line between "correct" and "incorrect" grammar in the history of the evolution of the language they are "correcting."
@@TheMahayanist ¿What's linguistic essentialism?
In Spain there is a phenomenon that is "leísmo" . This means that in some occasions, specially in the masculine, the dative case pronoun "le" is used instead of the accusative "lo" and "la". My variety of Spanish has a very strong leísmo, and I don't really know when not to use it. Welp, this has caused several teachers well into high school mark me down for using leísmo. The best part? The Royal Spanish Accademy, the main governing body for Spanish, recently accepted leísmo, but only in some versions. So now it's only "allowed" in several very specific contexts.
el leísmo también es más inclusivo en mi opinión
First comment after a year. I’m native polish and have a few things to share.
1. when you say sth like “I like it” (or any other action that we see as happening to oneself) the pronoun is always in Dative. However prescriptivists force the Accusative when the pronoun begins the sentence, which sounds super wrong to me.
2. In polish /w/ is often dropped or realised as labialisation. This is also hated.
3. In polish there’s a lot of a-o changes in verbs. The nasal diphthongs ą And ę (realised sth like ong, eng) derive from vowels. The o in ą started changing to a sometimes and u have the same story.
4. This one annoys me a lot. Historically /ɕt͡ɕs/ cluster became /js/. A lot of nouns were affected by this for example miasto-miejski (palatalisation caused it to be mieśćski earlier.) This also affected the word for 600: Sześćset, realised as /ʂejsɛt/. Other numbers 700 , 800, 900 are number 7/8/9 + -set and this changed in 600. The prescriptivists looked at this and made a bullshit rule to pronounce the śćs. That cluster is illegal in Polish, it just simply doesn’t appear.
5. Treating dialects and even languages (for example Silesian) as accents. This is pretty self-explainatory.
6. Hatred towards modern feminine job forms. These forms were invented (I think), but they quickly spread and the younger people use them all the time, even the bigoted ones. Most prescriptivists are against these forms, saying they sound funny and are “unpronounceable” which is very not true (I mean, come on, it’s polish”). This turned out longer than I thought lol.
All fascinating, thanks for sharing!
Number 6 made me extremely curious. I'm from Brazil so my native is Portuguese which as most romance languages has gendered basically everything specially when it's linked to people like professions. So if I understand correctly Polish is gaining gendered professions while English has groups of people trying to get rid of theirs by force. To someone with an interest in natural languages this is fascinating.
@@getsandom Polish proffessions are almost always masculine and follow masculine declensions. Some proffessions already had female version for example cook/chef "kucharz/kucharka". More recently such forms also were introduced for basically any proffesion. This is not a new form, it just spread to like all proffesions which is a very good thing in my opinion. There's still an issue with nonbianry people, who ususally stick to one form, or switch both masculine and feminine. We have gendered verbs so its even more complex lmao
@@actualdog2265 when you said that “śćs” changes to “js” I was like well that’s an interesting change in realization, but then when you brought up 600, I realized that we also do the same thing in Russian. For 60, шестьдесят, people don’t pronounces it [ʂɨzʲdʲɪˈsʲat] colloquially. We simplify the [zʲdʲɪsʲ] construction to something like [jɪsʲ] so it sounds more like [ʂɨ(j)ɪˈsʲat]. We do similar simplifications for 50, 70, 80 as well. Funny how I always thought Polish was weird-sounding as a Slavic language speaker myself but there are still some uncanny similarities in these kinds of weird places.
@@kkuwura it may be the case that thats not a result of a general sound chnage, but a shortening of common words. My dialect(?) shortens Dwadzieścia to Dwajścia which is non-standard
This brings me back to when someone would ask my 10th grade English teacher "Can I go to the bathroom?" and she would always respond with "I don't know, can you?" with the "correct" version of the question being "May I go to the bathroom?" It's absolutely absurd to me that there's an elite view that the word "can" cannot be used when asking permission. As an American English speaker, I doubt I have used "may" since that class as everyone I knows uses "can." I do not like that a large amount of English teachers I have are prescriptivist like my teacher was, especially considering the fact that it is an English class, and English, like every language on the planet, changes over time. It just felt like a weird way to get a power trip by preventing kids from using the bathroom before they asked her the "proper" way.
I just remembered when typing that last sentence, if we used the word "kids" in an essay, she would circle every occurrence and write "Kids are goats!" in the margin and deduct points. No one in my class had heard of this definition of kids before. When we tried asking her what that meant, she would only reply "kids means goats."
I also had a college biology professor who spent 10 minutes of a lecture complaining about how younger generations are destroying English by using the word "like" in conversations as an interjection. Meanwhile he used the word "umm" a large amount of times while explaining this. It certainly wasn't relevant to protein folding.
Bro I was hearing the "may I" bit in elementary school, but 10TH GRADE?! That's legit insane
@Watch your Language Yeah she was a bit overly pedantic. I wish I knew more about prescriptive/descriptive linguistics back then and had said something, but I guess instead she'll just continue with her intense prescriptivism.
She should have said that the younger generations are "destroying how _I_ want English to be"
My favourite experience as a British native English speaker explaining to a Swede that no we don't have an organisation that governs the English Language and governs spelling and we survive.
German where the mass education movement matched in with nation building - German being a loose mixture of dialects - a strong prescriptive movement in German language teaching occurred and it still is in control of teaching in the early years.
in brazilian portuguese the word "problema" (problem) is sometimes pronounced "pobrema" and whenever prescriptivists hear the phrase "eu tenho um pobrema" (i have a problem) they're like no you have 2 lol
love your channel :D
Which is weird because pronouncing l as r is as Portuguese as you can get.
@@throwaway1270 yes! /bl/ > /br/ happened in most places so if anything this is more regular
Actually, that's pretty funny lmao "não, você tem dois" 🤣🤣🤣
@@bruno-fz9dc isn't thank you in Portuguese obrigado, which is related to the English word obligation?
Well, technically who said also had a problem, since they was annoyed with someone don't speaking how they wants to. Concerning thing I think.
Fun fact: there is some preposition stranding in the familiar register of Canadian French
C'est ce genre de gens que je peux pas aller avec
-- How I would say "This is the type of person that I cannot go with." I live in Quebec.
"les gens qui je vis avec"
Prescriptivism is huge in Germany and I have to deal with that nonsense on a regular basis. There's a dude called Bastian Sick who created a fuss about it some 15 years ago with his book 'Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod' where he did the usual lamenting of 'oh nobody knows how to properly speak our sacred German language anymore and in the future it will all go to shit'. He has surprisingly had a lot of success and is largely treated like some sort of authority. I think the most common complaints are:
- Saying 'das einzigste' instead of 'das einzige' (the only one). It's a superlative and it's supposedly 'illogical' to form a superlative from the adjective for 'only'. By that logic, English 'children' should also be wrong since it's etymologically a doubly marked plural.
- using the preposition wegen 'because of' with the dative instead of the genitive. There are very few prepositions in German that still govern the genitive, and the genitive case as a whole is on its way out in colloquial German. So the shift is a natural part of grammaticalization. Most Germans, regardless of where they're from, will say 'wegen dem schlechten Wetter' colloquially, but because of education, many correct themselves to say 'wegen des schlechten Wetters'. To me, it just makes them sound like twats.
- and finally, the dumbest of them all. There's a German expression 'Sinn machen', equivalent to English 'make sense', and that's wrong, according to Bastian Sick. You should replace it with 'Sinn ergeben'. The reasoning is that 'Sinn' is an abstract noun that you cannot 'make'? Even though 'machen' is a semantically bleached verb and there are countless other expressions like 'Eindruck machen' (to impress someone) that nobody complains about. Bastian Sick even states that the Indo-European root for make, *magh, had a meaning of 'knead', so it should only be used with concrete meanings. Also, the German expression was supposedly borrowed from English, and I guess that's a bad thing? Which also implies that English people have been in the wrong for 'making sense' all along?
Tod dem Genitiv!
Beyond parody: Bastian Sick is against making sense!
I don't think prescriptivism is as common as you make it seem. Those with actual "authority" over High German like Duden rarely prescribe, they just suggest.
Nitpicking and correcting others is very popular among Germans, tho. It's more of a cultural thing than an academic one, I feel. But what do I know, I've never even set foot into a university.
Das Einzigste, was hier keinen Sinn macht, ist anderen vorzuschreiben, wie sie zu sprechen haben. Das machen Pedanten nur wegen ihrem Ego.
> " and the genitive case as a whole is on its way out in colloquial German."
Not a native speaker, but been learning for 3 years and speak it everyday living here. In my experience the genitive case is still very widely used in it's partitive and to a bit of a lesser extent the possessive function even in the most colloqial german. Only when I talk with people whose high german is very heavily influenced by their dialect (using mir instead of wir, dropping off n's) do I notice a complete absense of the case, but this is usually *older* people. In my experience it's only the usage with prepositions that is declining, and of course as a verb argument it's gone in colloqial speech.
ooh this is all very interesting, especially with how the phrase 'der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod' is often used in anglophone pop linguistic spaces at least in my experience. I've often seen that specific phrase used as part of a descriptivist explanation for the loss of the genitive case. Goes to show how divorced something can get from its author, this for example would be a complete 180 lol.
As an interesting note (well, I find it interesting), Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German close to Pfälzisch, genitive case has completely and almost utterly died out. There're some words that I think originate from the genitive that've become standalone entries but that's it. Also the nominative and accusative case have fallen in together outside of pronouns (hence why I'd say guder Mariye instead of guten Morgen)
I used to be one myself, that's what you get taught... Then, the more I became engaged with linguistics and learned about it, the less prescriptivist I became and eventually I began to consider that view as something to fight against (ooops 🤭)
@@boardbill5852 specially knowing more about the natural evolution of human languages and the creation of standards and codifications of a normalized form
@@boardbill5852 it was a slow process, not just that a random fact completely changed my mind
I didn't know ending sentences with a preposition was considered a "mistake", I guess that explains why I constantly get my answers marked wrong in Duolingo whenever I put "at" at the end of a sentence that would otherwise be a completely accurate translation. I hate how I'm using the app to learn another language and instead I end up having my English nitpicked.
You'd think Duolingo, of all entities, would know better
The hypercorrection "he sees you and I" really grinds my gears. I can live with "you and me" or "you and I" as a subject, but as an object? Yikes.
Ukrainian here, we have a big problem with prescriptivists who change words for no reason and make our language harder to learn and make less sense. They will always abuse the fact that the previous generation was heavily russified and that nowadays a lot of people speak surzhyk - a mixture of russian and ukrainian in order to do whatever they want with the language. Getting rid of some words("криша" - roof), phrases("на протязі" - during), changing stresses("піцéрія" instead of "піцерíя" - pizzeria) and sometimes replacing words just because they're too close to "uncivilised" words(one prescriptivist made up word "славень" to replace "гімн" - anthem/hymn, as it was "too close" to "гімно" - shit). And because many ukrainians wrongly consider their dialect surzhyk they believe prescriptivists, who try to "bring back" ukrainian language of the XX century, while actually doing more harm for people who want to learn ukrainian and to the dialects.
The worst part about this is that their books are used in our schools and we even had to have a dictionary of ukrainian language where we replace surzhyk, foreign and "easily confused" words and phrases with "more authentic" ones.
On the other side are people who, partially because of this, speak russian instead, as it's not regulated and they think their ukrainian is very bad(while it's most likely a dialect).
I live in Silesia and my family generally speaks Polish with varying amounts of Silesian substratum.
I remember my niece correcting her elders that we should say "sobie" instead of "se", both being reflexive pronouns, but the former is Polish while the latter is Silesian.
The worst part is, se is even found in informal Polish, though I'm not sure if it's a shortened form of sobie or perhaps a naturalized Silesian loanword.
I think it is a common pronoun in the regions of Poland that have been occupied by Prussia and Austria. I live where there previously was an Austro-Rusian border and saying ,,se" sounds natural to me and other people form austrian side but unnatural on the other
I don't know anything about Polish, but I think that what happens here is that she is right, because you are speaking an incorrect form of Polish; but on the other side you are speaking a correct Polish in Silesia. So? What heppens here is that you are speaking a dialect, but you are speaking it correctly. But if you were to speak correct Polish, she is right, use "se"
"se" is short form of pronoun "sobie" the same as "cię" or "mię"(archaic) are short forms of pronouns "ciebie" and "mnie" + modern denasalization (sę -> se)
This is like saying a word isn't a word unless it's in a dictionary, or written down somewhere.
Case in point: fart-ology, which I bet most fluent English speakers would immediately understand, regardless if it has ever been said before, and even if it has, I can think of another example that would be more unique.
Well it's probably not in a dictionary, but it _is_ written down somewhere; specifically in this comment.
Yes, and it's also annoying when someone says a word, and then asks, "Is that a word?" Of course it's a word! If you make any utterance with any intended meaning, whether anyone understood it or not, it is a word.
I have to disagree to some extent, as prescriptivism can definitely serve a purpose on the condition that it's not overly conservative.
Without prescriptivism, we wouldn't have the Dutch language today. It's a completely artificial language compose out of the dialects of the powerhouse regions of Holland (Amsterdam/Rotterdam) and Brabant (Brussels/Antwerp/Eindhoven) for the most part. If we'd allow descriptivists complete reign, we would lose the ability to communicate effectively among each other as this artificial language is what makes it possible for a person from Groningen to communicate with one from Hasselt, and one from Alkmaar with one from Brugge/Bruges. With pure descriptivism, they would be speaking different languages with limited mutual intelligibility both in spoken as in written form.
Another point is pronunciation: Dutch descriptivism allows for NL Dutch and BE Dutch variants and sees those as mostly standardized within those two countries. It allows for differences between both region, yet still keeps both regions closer than they would be without this central unifying institute, again increasing communication. Because it's not overly conservative and made adaptations from time to time, the prescribed version stays closer to reality and the way people speak is influenced by this standardization as well.
This continuous updating of spelling in the past also made Dutch way more consistent in spelling versus official pronunciation than English whose spelling is just an absolutely attrocious mismash of centuries of changes that nobody ever properly tidied up. English writing is a mess because of it.
As with anything in life: it's not black or white. Everything in moderation. Descriptivism and prescriptivism should find each other rather than fight each other.
This
I would also add that prescriptivism has a role in teaching children the rules of the highest register of the language so they can learn to communicate formally and develop more sophisticated writing processes. In those cases, you're basically teaching them a new language (albeit very similar to their own) that has new grammatical rules they haven't heard before. The problem arises when and if they are told that their native grammar is inherently inferior and incorrect because it doesn't match the official, educated form.
I don't know much about Dutch despite having distant ancestors from the Netherlands, but there is a difference between creating a lingua franca out of natural dialects on the one hand and forcing everybody to conform in every aspect of their speech on the other. In Italy, even though most people couldn't speak Tuscan, it coexisted as a literary language with other regional languages for centuries. The situation in France was rather similar. In Jamaica, people are taught that their language is just broken English, and there seems to be a fear that legitimizing Jamaican (Patois) means abandoning English. But clearly societal bilingualism is a thing, it can be done! You can have your native language or dialect you use day to day, as well as a command of a more supraregional "standard" used mostly for mass communication or interactions with strangers.
@@djeparker99 In theory yes, but in practice the dialect languages just die out and slowly morph into just a mix between the official language the children get taught in school and the dialect that used to be spoken in the region. Nobody is forbidden the dialect, but in all aspects of public life the official language is used albeit with a strong local accent.
As generations pass, and more couples have children that would only be exposed to the dialect in the familial sphere, more children miss out on that as parents from different dialect zones mix as people became more mobile and speak the official language at home as well, or the children just don't pick a single dialect very well when hearing multiple growing up. And then they have children, etc etc.
The dialect of my ancestors just nearly died out by now, as few still speak it and those that do still have been heavily influenced by Brabantian Dutch over the centuries too as the center of power lied there.
rule of thumb: prescriptivism for formal speech (especially in diverse languages), descriptivism for informal speech
So, Catalonia is a part of Spain, they speak Spanish there and also Catalan. As always happens in bilingual societies, often words from one language often enter the other language. One example is 'Generalitat', which refers to the government of Catalonia, a Catalan word used always in Spanish to refer to the government in Catalonia, there is a Spanish equivalent 'Generalidad', but this is never used.
Despite this, Spanish Wikipedia insists on using the prescriptivist, never used 'Generalidad' to refer to the government in the region, even though 'Generalitat' is essentially a Spanish word now borrowed from Catalan and always used in that context in Spanish (including outside Catalonia). They even automatically remove any attempt to change the word to the correct 'Generalitat'.
The descriptvist position is close to non-existent in Spain because there is a language-setting body called the RAE which determines rules of the language, so everyone says that whatever they say is 'correct Spanish' and anything else (especially things borrowed from regional languages like Basque or Catalan) are incorrect. This is despite the fact that people don't really know what the RAE says cause no one bothers to read these technical rules, so presciptivists often use the 'wrong' speech while simultaneously criticising others for using 'wrong' (i.e. socially less desirable) speech.
I've been living in Romania my entire life and all my teachers corrected me when I made a cacophony. "ca" (as) and "că" (that) are some of the most common words in romanian but paired with a word starting with "ca" it sounds like "caca/căca" (shit). Even teachers acknowledge the existence of certain exceptions like "biserica catolica" (the catholic church) but EVERYONE will stop and correct you if you do this with any combination of words except for maybe the top 2 or 3 combinations rumored to be exceptions. Some years ago, people read on the internet that these combinations are ok to use if there's a comma between those two words. When middle schoolers and high schoolers found out, instead of paraphrasing those problematic sentences like they've always been taught, they started placing random commas between those word combinations in essays and, more importantly, during exams. It turned into a meme since they did lose points for those commas because it altered the meaning of the sentence.
More emphasis has been put on teaching kids to not place random commas but nothing has changed in the way they are taught about how cacophonies should be treated.
I'm also Romanian and I have to add that the funniest thing to come out of this cacophony situation is that in order to avoid cacophonies in actual speech, some people literally say the word "virgulă" (comma) in between. So instead of saying "ca casa" (as the house) which would be a cacophony, they say "ca virgulă casa" (as comma the house) and I just find this hilarious
I'm both prescriptivist and descriptivist. Some mistakes piss me off, other mistakes are fine and even preferable over the norm.
Brazil has a lot of its sociolinguistics still influenced by colonialism unfortunately
One example i particularly hate is the insistence in enforcing the portuguese pronoun order, with Verb-oblique instead of the brazilian oblique-verb. for example "ele me deu um presente" is the brazilian way and "deu-me um presente" is the portuguese way which is also considered normative, this one pisses me off the most because in this case, our form is the most conservative one dating back to the 16th century, they were the ones to change it and force it down our throats. 200 years after independence and we still act as if our variety is the inferior one that needs to be corrected.
*disclaimer: nothing against the portuguese variety, I really hope they manage to maintain their linguistic identity in a time where brazilian culture is dominating them. And I hope we manage to maintain and assert our own Identity after centuries of everything brazilian being considered uneducated and wrong in our own country.
Why are you trying to imply Brazilians don't speak Portuguese?
@@andrasfogarasi5014 what? we do speak portuguese of course. But we speak a drastically different variety from Portugal portuguese, in grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary
deu-me just sounds awful and I usually say falar instead of dizer most of the time because it sounds better too
Nossa, não sabia que essa "regra" era por causa do português de Portugal, quando comecei a estudar redação os professores enfatizavam bastante essa forma de escrever.
here's a little anecdote from the german language.
Please be aware that I have witnessed this multiple times. It happened to me, it happened to the people around me and I've heard of other people experiencing the same story.
Here goes:
In german, when you want to say, that you go to a branded Store (e.g. Walmart) you are supposed to say the word "zu" (meaning "to"). Alot of people will say "zum" though (roughly translates to: "to the")
Here's an example conversation between a speaker S and a prescriptivist P:
S: "I am going *to the* Walmart."
P (correcting): " *to* walmart"
The problem arises with the Speaker, since the word "to" (zu) in german is the same as the word "closed" (zu).
So the Speaker will perceive the conversation like this:
S: "I am going *to the* Walmart;"
P: " *closed* Walmart"
The Speaker of course interprets it, as the Prescriptivist telling him that walmart is closed. So they'll respond with something like:
S: " why would it be closed?"
The Prescriptivist now realizes the speaker's mistake and gets a kick out of it. Now they treat the conversation as a glorified linguistic Deeze Nuts Joke.
@revilo178 we don't, I just thought the comment would be easier to understand, if I chose an internationally known company as an example, lol. In Hindsight, I could have just used Aldi or Lidl, couldn't I?
@revilo178 Aldi is pretty common in the US (although on the topic of linguistic evolution people often call it Aldi's). Never encountered Lidl here but apparently it does also exist
I speak Serbo-Croatian and to say this society is governed by prescriptivists would be an understatement. Yes, governed. There are official institutions governing what's right and wrong in the language. Institutions because there are 4, all claiming to be the authority over their own language (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin). We even have a rule that's not been part of the way people really speak since the 14th century. Generally the way you have to write is very different from how people speak. The worst part is the effect of this policy on dialects. My native dialect is basically dead at this point because it's seen as 'peasant talk' and 'illiterate'.
north croat?
@@jayasuryangoral-maanyan3901 East Slavonian in the Bosnian Posavina. It is but one of many though. Numerous dialects have gone or are going extinct because of the lack of care for culture.
@@stojankovacic1524 Wow, I always sort of assumed Bosnia was a wild west with no state power, so local communities and dialects would be unaffected.
In colloquial Irish a common thing in speech that isn't much used in the standard language is the Dative case, particularly with verbal nouns. Eg. Tá mé ag screadaigh - I'm screaming (nominative: screadach). A friend studying Irish at uni told me just today that a professor gave out to him for using it because it's 'archaic' or dialectal even though literally nobody would say ag screadach
Everybody needs to watch this video. I can't tell you how many times I've had people say to me "Oh, you like linguistics? So English must have been your favorite subject in school, right?"
hi, I'm from Portugal. The Portuguese the word for "thank you" is "obrigado" wich is technically an adjective and so it technically has to agree in gender with the implied subject, so prescritivists defend that women should always say "obrigada" and men always "obrigado". In reality, people of all genders usually use the "masculine" form of the word and sometimes the feminine, Although I'm a man I used to use the feminine form. In conclusion I think "obrigado" has turned into a word of its own and doesn't need to agree in gender with anything.
Another subject I think it would be interesting to talk about is common things that people tend "correct" but are not mistakes even for the standard language/prescriptivists
One thing, that's quite unique to the English language comoared to most other European languages, is, that there is no official standard variety.
In Germany/Austria/Switzerland there is Standard High German, a "normed" language that is based on descriptions of the spoken German varieties, but itself is an artificial, prescriptionist language.
Schoolchildrem, who may at home speak other varieties or even languages (like low German or Frisian), have to learn Standard High German. Meanwhile the state has to use SHG in its communication and laws etc. And indeed there is right and wrong. A public official has to follow the norms of SHG to be sure that all the citizens who have learned SHG will understand them.
I think this is an important distinction to make (and one that is not explained even in the German school system), that the Standard/literary/normed language can actually exist, prescriptively by definition, alongside the various, natural, spoken varieties that cannot be prescribed. And of course even SHG evolves as it models itself on the spoken language and gets updated.
As an aside, this same observation always has me baffled at Anglo anti-spelling-reformists. The biggest argument against English spelling reforms seems to be that "you cannot map spoken English onto a spelling system, because there are too many varieties, that are too different from each other". Well, of course, that is the point of a standard language: you just agree on one standard variety and everyone carries it around with themselves alongside their native variety. And agreement implies prescriptions.
Correct to a degree about spelling reform, but the English speaking world does not have a single dominant variety that can be imposed as The Standard. One might simplisticly say that American English has the largest number of speakers but there are 2 or 3 major English variants within the USA, so which of those is to be the standard?
So, let me give you a similar question. The EU has too many official languages. Why can't you agree to standardize on one? (English is the obvious choice. With the British gone, it is now a neutral choice.)
@@HweolRidda A lot of people would prefer Latin. I honestly wouldn't be suprised if the EU ended up using a very latinised english in the future.
Nice video, and you present the descriptivist case well. I will push back a little bit though, on two fronts. First, people "using words wrong" can actually happen. There's a ... let's call it margin of error, for how far your word usage can get from the unconscious consensus before you just start annoying people. Second, people in fact do use prescriptivist tactics in order to reinforce the societal language consensus. Have you ever heard a mother tell her child, "No sweetie, it's not *mouses* it's *mice* okay?"
Mostly though I'm with ya. Me and my brother watched our prescriptivist father fight a desperate rear-guard action against split infinitives, accusative subject pronouns, and the word "gonna" for decades, and it broke his heart. ;D
I had to Google what split infinitives are and I’m not sure what the argument is against them that’s literally correct English in any English speaking part of the world.
@@Freshbott2 As I understand, the rule came from fans of Latin grammar, where an infinitive is one indissoluble word (e.g., "amare" means "to love"). In Latin it's impossible *to* even *contemplate* splitting an infinitive. ;D
'Gonna' is "gaun'ae" Going To< Gang Tae. in Scots so its perfectly fine in English especially that which is descended from Scots etc. I thought you were linguists?
Halloween< Hallows Evening , Scots "e'en" (even/ evening)
I'm a Dutch speaker from Belgium and my grandparents and parents grew up in an incredibly prescriptivist environment that pushed the use of Common Civilised Dutch, which in most cases sounded awfully stiff and unnatural and was not at all how most people spoke. Now, this has loosened a bit, but my grandfather, despised also being a dialect speaker, constantly corrects people on speaking "wrong", even though in our dialect this is completely normal to say. Common forms of a language can be useful, but only in certain situations and definitely not when you're at the kitchen table with your own family talking about what to eat and how your day was. Phew, I guess I need a rant too haha. Thanks for sharing!
Not a native speaker of Japanese but there are a number of things that prescriptivists in Japan fuss over. One is the pronunciation of the word for bear 熊 くま 'kuma' with a different pitch accent from what was common before like 15 years ago or so. There are a lot of other instances of pitch accent changes that people get mad about, to the point that older people and younger people pronounce some words with completely different pitch patterns.
Another is saying that なそう 'nasou' and なさそう 'nasasou' should be used differently. Both mean 'it doesn't seem like X" but なさそう is only supposed to be used with adjectives and なそう is only supposed to be used with verbs. This one is kind of similar to the pronoun cases in English because there is precedent for it since the two constructs are etymologically unrelated, but a lot of people say なさそう 'nasasou' in all situations to the point where it'll probably become standard in the coming decades. ら抜き 'ra nuki', which is basically removing the sound ら 'ra' from verbs in the potential form (喋られる shaberareru＝>喋れる shabereru) used to be criticised, but i have the feeling that its already become grammatical as a distinction between the potential and passive conjugations of verbs.
THE PASSIVE VOICE! That's a rule I hate SOOOO much. "Waah! It doesn't sound as strong as the act-" blah blah blah
I'm gonna use whatever voice sounds right to me. And fits my writing.
That isn't even prescriptivist, it just idiotic.
@@Carewolf Yeah, for real.
people like this are probably why we still spell wednesday as wednesday
In Norway there's an increasing case of younger ppl switching out traits specific to their dialect to the standardized norwegian bokmål ones. Especially in the bigger cities. The argument being so you're more easily understood, but the less people r exposed to other varieties the harder a time they're gonna have understanding them so it's more of a self fulfilling prophecy than anything else really. And we have some more nitpicky rules ofc. E.g. you're not supposed to say "å spørre et spørsmål" (to ask an ask, basically) but rather "å stille et spørsmål" (to ask a question). Or the fact that our da/når (then/when) distinction is on its last leg lol.
The only rule my English teachers ever cared about was "He, she it - das 's' muss mit."
One of my biggest pet peeves is when style guides for academic writing insist that “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve” and the like should be spelt “would of, could of, should of”. It’s ungrammatical and is unfaithful to the origins of these contractions.
Also, I feel that prescriptivism does have some applications, like in language teaching, especially for language revival, and having a strict set of words for news reporters to use so as to not in jargon the general public would likely not understand.
Great channel you have. :)
What? Would of? Which style guide? Only a style guide compiled by a severe case of Dunning-Kreuger.
Strange indeed. I expand those as "would have, could have, should have".
No way! That is written in an actual style guide? That's really surprising.
I call bullshit on this. People who really struggle with the basics of spelling write „would of”, etc. Not those who write style guides
@@FarfettilLejlI’m sorry guys :(, I think in the past I’ve seen people use “would of” and “should of” before, but I think that they were spelling it wrong or that it was used in some old style guide that isn’t used anymore. I’m unable to find an example of such a style guide, I think I was a bit annoyed by it when I did a spelling test for a job once and they asked me to correct the spelling of the paper I was given, and I got frustrated with it and saw that they’d spelt “should of” instead and made a comment about it in the test itself.
Okay, I've thought of an even better, more fitting example. This is very interesting: In Turkish, the syllable "de / da" (the form depends on phonetic patterns) can either impart a locative case to the noun it's suffixed to, or function as a sort of "modal particle/conjunction" that approximates "even/too/(n)either". As a rule, in the former case, it's written as an attached suffix (yerde: on the ground), and in the latter case, as a detached word (yer de: the ground too). However, spoken reality does not reflect this, as "de/da" (along with the questions markers "mı/mi/mu/mü", which also have to be written separately) have absolutely no trouble coming in between nouns and suffixes or between multiple other suffixes. Which means, in fact, in my opinion, they should be classified the same as all the other suffixes.
But since they aren't, written langauge has to unnaturally bend itself to avoid splitting a word and its suffixes. In speech, you'd most likely say: "Yerdedeler, göktedeler" (they're on the ground as well as in the sky). However, that sentence I wrote seems like an abomination in a prescriptivist perspective. Instead, in written language, you'd bend the phrasing this way: "Yerdeler de, gökteler de" (it means the same). This ordering of suffixes allows the "de"s to be written separately; however, it's very inauthentic. You'd never hear someone uneducated (non-brainwashed by prescriptivism) say it that way. So there's a big tension here, and unfortunately it results in appalling prejudices regarding intelligence and status. People who don't "properly separate" their conjunctional "de"s are looked down on everywhere -- I see it only too often in RUclips comments.
I think this is also symptomatic of the whole... "analytic and synthetic tendencies evolving as a circle" idea. But I admit I haven't thought enough about this, nor am I knowledgeable enough to begin with. As for the resolution to this tension, I'm really not sure. On the one hand, not distinguishing the two (locative and conjunctional versions) and writing both of them without spaces seems more in line with how they are used in reality. On the other, there's utility in distinction in form when there's difference in meaning. For example, the sentence "Yerdedeler, göktedeler" can as easily be interpreted as "The ground drills as well as the sky". If the prescriptivist rule is maintained, this sort of ambiguity is prevented with two distinct correct forms: 1. "Yerdeler de, gökteler de" (they're on the ground as well as in the sky), 2. "Yer de deler, gök de deler" (the ground drills as well as the sky). It honestly makes my head ache. In speech, of course, none of this is a problem, since no matter in what order one speaks the morphemes, the intonation and rhythm clearly distinguish the meaning (1. "Yerdedeler, göktedeler" 2. "YerDEdeler, gökTEdeler"). In the end, it's an insoluble, eternal problem, as while writing is in one sense an "imperfect interface" for speech, it clearly also has a life of its own, and creative workarounds are always needed to reconcile the two media.
This whole argument gets exceedingly complicated in Norway. I tend to stick to being descriptivist with how people speak but vehemently sticking to a rubric when writing (but never "correcting" others) because the dialect situation and the two separate standard written languages just makes things complex.
A History teacher telling us that "History" is mainly written from a male's perspective because you can break the word down into "his story". Although maybe historically correct in the fact that many history textbooks and documents were written by men and definitely play a role in the narrative received by students, it is linguistically wrong is bothered my ears.
5:39 Fun fact: Italian “pecunia” (money) from Latin “pecunia, ae” (goods) is related to “pecus, oris” (sheep). It is mostly used jokingly nowadays, unlike its cultured sibling “pecuniario” who’s got a law degree
That word is technically a borrowing from Latin, an inherited form would have been either *pecugna or *picugna
I had prescriptivist elementary school teachers.. I had to relearn so many things because I was given incorrect information such as "you can't start a sentence with subordinate conjunction no matter what, that's a sentence fragment."
Because of this, I thought sentences like this one were grammatically incorrect for basically a year.
I remember I was assigned a tutor to assist me in writing my college application essay, and the woman spent so much time forcing me to not start sentences with conjunctions, even though the two sentences that had them, kinda needed them. rephrasing them made them clunky and inelegant and ugly sounding. it was very annoying and she really was no help at all.
That teacher was bad for giving the class incorrect information. But they weren't bad for being prescriptivist. Teaching the class how to use English was part of their job.
in Germany we have Bastian Sick and the VDS, a borderline fascist-feeling organization that publish books and a list of “good” and “bad” loanwords from English
Italian as a language just didn't exist before Italian unification. It was a literary form of a dialect of a language that then got forced onto everyone, teaching people speaking their (somewhat related) languages that theya re speaking Italian already, just wrong.
To this day what is right and wrong in the Italian language is decided by the Accademia Della Crusca, and everything else is wrong
To answer the question at the end: As a native speaker, I think Spanish is flooded with these type of 'casual' prescriptivists. No joke, someone once responded to a comment of mine saying that Spanish was getting more and more vulgar with time and that was why foreigners (apparently) learned it with so much ease.
But, would a grammar that describes how prescriptivists speak English, be a prescriptive or a descriptive grammar?
This is beyond science
About the you and I thing.
Two points.
1) it's not perscriptivist to say it's wrong. The only native speakers who use it that way were *educated* incorrectly to say it that way. It's the same logic with preposition stranding. If you were educated to not use preposition stranding, and your kids now don't use preposition stranding, that doesn't make preposition stranding ungrammatical because grammar is a function of a *population* of speakers, not of individual speakers. Educated people learn this grammar structure, making it an unreal feature of a certain sociolect of English.
And that leads to my second point (2), that grammar needs to be consistent. Because it's a sociolectal feature, but one that is poorly articulated, speakers who misuse this rule hypercorrect inconsistently.
"The secret is between you and I" >> this is incorrect no matter what becaause "I" is never used in the oblique except in this hypercorrection. This means that these speakers aren't actually using "you and I" are two consecutive objects, but as a fossilized phrase "you and I".
This is in fact where I suspect the phrase "Me and you should go to the store" gets its grammar. Personally, I'm not interpreting "me and you" are two consecutive subjects. I'm interpreting it as a SINGLE subject (me-and-you should go to the store). Compare: "it's not a you thing, it's a you-and-me thing". Clearly, "you and me" isn't two consecutive nominals, but a single subject.
Long story short, this whole hypercorrection is artificial. If you stop repeating it, then speakers will naturally tend back to the "you and me" specifically because it fits English grammar better (ie, English grammar likes to combine nominals).
*NB: this isn't the same as using incorrect grammatical forms like swim-swam-swum. The past participle is grammatical in most standard varieties of English, and is ablaut. The English ablaut is just irregular, and irregular forms need to be learned. The reason it's not the same is the consistency point (2). Ablaut is consistent with English grammar and phonology (swim swam swum, run ran ran, eat ate eaten; whence you get perscribed forms bought bought *boughten; or innovated forms, gaslight *gaslit *gaslit, instead of the standard gaslighted).
When someone says you can't say "I'm doing good". That for some reason you need to say "I'm doing well".
In both old and modern Icelandic Fé can mean either sheep or money/funds
Similarly in Turkish "mal" has the meanings of property, livestock or simpleton.
Interesting if the Icelandic "fé" does not (no longer?) include other livestock such as cows or goats. In Norwegian the word "fe" can be further specified as either "småfe" or "storfe" (lit. small vs. large fee), where the former would include at least sheep and goats, while the latter would be mainly the cows/oxen. There's also "fjørfe"/"fjærfe" referring to the feathered ones, commonly hens, cocks and chicken, but possibly other bird species. I cannot recall any instance of using it with a monetary meaning though, like the English "fee".
in Brasilian portuguese, in most accents, we´re often( mostly in informal speech) dropping plural conjugation if it is not needed, Heres a exemplo:
"os carro é bonito" instead of "os carros são bonitos" , but both mean the same: " the cars are beatifull". the thing is, in the first, because the word for "the"(os) already is in the plural form, we dont feel the necessity to conjugate all the other words in the pural form too, since we already know(because of "os") that the following words are also plural.
prescriptivists woud tell you that you always need to conjugate the plural( even you feel that it´s not needed) for all the words.
And in the other end you have people (at least in my nordestina accent) drop the s instead of the plural conjugation so you get "o carro são bonito" where the s is implied lol.
I fully expect people that say "it's *_nuclear_* not *_NUCULAR_* " to pronounce "bird" and "horse" as "brid" and "hrose" because the exact same process nuclear is going through is how we got bird and horse
Those are two different word changes. The r sound regular gets lengthened in English. The L sound does not. George Bush constantly fakes a southern accent so he mispronounced nuclear as nucular energy to seen more "country". No one pronounces it "nucular", it's "nuclear".
Terror is awe, terrific is awesome. Terror and horror describe different things. Words were spoken before they were written, and felt before they were invented.
My native Language is Dutch (actually Oost-Vlaams Verkavelingsvlaams) and here's a typical example we have: prescriptivists says that if you want to say "He's called John" you should say "Hij heet John" and when you want to say "I call him John" you should say "Ik noem hem John" so you "should" use the verb heten, not noemen when it's reflexive. But in practice people would say "Hij noemt John" more often than not, but prescriptivists love to "correct" people if they do so.
Dat zal wel iets Vlaams zijn, want in Nederland zou men hier ongetwijfeld raar van op horen.
Ik weet niet of dit in Vlaanderen ook gaande is, maar hier hoor je steeds vaker 'hun hebben' ipv 'zij hebben'. Het zet de luisteraar kortstondig op 't verkeerde been.
Well, I'm from a specific region of Germany, where we use a different word for comparison. In standard German it's "ich bin größer, als du", where I'm from you could say "Ich bin größer, wie du". But as soon as I use this phrase I'm called out and or corrected... I hate this!!
As a Brazilian, I think our relationship with Portuguese is weird.
Some Portuguese people don't consider Brazilian Portuguese to be Portuguese (basically, in a similar way that White American Prescriptivists consider AAVE to be "broken English").
In Brazilian literature (specially in music and Cordel literature), regional dialects and forms that prescriptivists consider " wrong" are not only accepted, but expected. So, the formal language is only used in very formal situations.
Portuguese teachers are taught what they need to know about linguistics (though the focus is in writing), and the National curricullum acknowledges linguistic variety.
Even with all that, Brazil remains a very xenophobic and aporophobic country.
One example of that is that many people here in São Paulo State believe that our accent is "neutral", and Globo TV, actually based in Rio, also came up with a "neuter accent" (that reduces the most pronounced features of São Paulo and Rio pronunciation) that is as neuter as sulphuric accid (it's just neuter in the Rio-São Paulo Axis, literaly just two towns.)
People here in Southeast have a very stereotypical view of the other regions, and it really shows on how some people here talk about Northeastern people (basically, the same way that Americans talk about Latin American Immigrants. So, for example, in Globo TV, it's common to ask for people from other regions to "neutralize" their "accent". Aka, " You're in Murica, speak English").
Also, the people who believe in only one right way to talk aren't educated. So, they think vowel reduction is wrong because "that's not how is written". That leads to a very funny over correction: ADEVOGADO.
The "e" here actually comes from an epenthetic /i/ in the word "ADVOGADO" (lawyer), that has been overcorrected.
I think that the concept that better exemplifies prescriptivism, specially in Brazil, is the dichotomy of the rich and the poor. In Brazil, the last country to abolish slavery, this dichotomy has shaped much of our history, culture and language.
The elected president of Brazil, Lula, is an example of this: he came from humble beginnings in the poorest region of the country, worked as a factory worker and is proud that he and his family were illiterate (He can read now, of course, next year he's going to start his third mandate).
Also, I should mention one thing that happened with the Portuguese.
They don't like when our dialect "leak" into theirs. One example of this are the Portuguese kids, who watch a Brazilian RUclipsr, talking in the Brazilian accent (almost like a reverse Peppa Pig). This made many Portuguese pissed off (imagine a White prescriptivist seeing their children speaking AAVE).
Besides all of it, I still love my language, spoken and written, and I'm excited to be in Language Arts school.
vem ao portugal, não temos suficiente espaço para ter dialetos. (sim sei que o algarve tem um próprio sotaque, vamos ignorar isso)
@@ethanbeharry9478 Ué, não tem dialeto em Portugal? Ouvi falar que tem lá o da Ilha da Madeira também, e até uma outra língua, o Mirandês.
Não sei se eu tô certo (nunca saí do Brasil né), mas sério que não tem outros dialetos?
@@gabrieltomasevic2085 não ouvi muitos outras palavras ou frases por tudo do portugal, ilhas têm dialetos sim, sempre é assim, mas do porto à lisboa ouvi quase as mesmas coisas
@@ethanbeharry9478 what about Tras-os-Montes?
@@k.umquat8604 haven't been, can't say
elementary school math teacher tried to police my class's language, insisting that "ain't" is not a word and every time she heard it she would tell you "ain't ain't a word"
in the southern USA.... lmao
I'm a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker, to be more specific I speak a Surzhyk version of both (a creol but not really). Society really discourages this way of speaking, seeing this it as low brow and uneducated, which is extremely annoying as some aspects of either language are more useful in common sprach.
A similar thing is happening in Steppe vernacular Ukrainian, which has a lot of Russian structures and phrases, but which are discouraged by the government for literary Ukrainian, and thus some are also pricks about it in the spoken Ukrainian.
For best results, watch at 0.75 normal speed.
A very funny (albeit minor) example of this in Turkish is the "correct" use of the "ne ... ne ..." conjunction, which is very similar to "neither ... nor ..." (so a negator of multiple elements). We were taught in elementary school that the correct usage is with affirmative verbs and using negated verbs is categorically wrong. I wonder if they still teach that, because it certainly doesn't seem to be true now (if it ever was). I've been noticing that especially politicians (for rhetorical emphasis I suppose) subconsciously almost always use negated verbs with it. I expect that to become the almost universal "de facto rule" before too long. I'm certainly hoping for a resolution to this tension (in either direction), especially since currently you need to rely exclusively on context to infer whether the "grammatical formula" adds up to affirmation or negation. There are, of course, innumerable such linguistic tensions floating around, but this was the first to come to mind.
As a Spanish speaker this makes me extremely angry. The RAE (Real Academia Española/Royal Spanish Academy) has an overwhelming prescriptivist bias. Like, I'm a teenager and I know very little about linguistics compared to the actual experts but I can't take any of these guys seriously. And the way people quote them, and how they say their role is "regulating language", as if the concept of regulating language wasn't an outdated and lowkey kinda fascist, specially in Spain. All the anger about people wanting to use the gender-neutral "elle" as if its the end of the world. Yes, it isn't grammatical, but it is our language and our gender identity and I say we get to do whatever we want with them! (I don't use the pronoun elle myself but I am queer). To them language is this sacred thing, and I get it, I do, I think language preservation is important, specially the preservation of minority languages, but we also have to accept that it changes with time and there's nothing we can do about it. It happens. In an academic setting perhaps it makes sense to work with rigid definitions but I ain't going around life speaking like I'm writing an essay. I like it when language changes, today, for once, I heard my teacher say "saludh" instead of salud (health in Spanish), you know the voiced dental fricative, I think it's called, which is a sound not proper of Spanish at all, but that I think it's becoming more common when "d" appears at the end of a consonant (I've realized I do this too). And of course most people don't notice because they are homophones, but it is still a little way I can hear the language changing, perhaps. Maybe it's all a nonsense ramble, but it's frustrating to hear people insisting so much on "talking right", when they themselves have a dialect of their own. And the fact that a prestigious linguistic institution acts this way, its crazy to me. How can people not know. Its like linguistics 101. How is this prevalent at all. When it comes to writing I think that "whatever feels right" is more important that what's "correct". SORRY. LONG COMMENT. I HAVE AUTISM. AND I AM HOOKED TO LINGUISTICS RIGHT NOW. I'M NOT GREAT AT SPEAKING MYSELF AND OF COURSE THIS AIN'T MY NATIVE LANGUAGE. SORRY IF I DIDNT GET THE POINT ACROSS. I love ur channel bro it's so good you should get more views.
do you mean like saluth? like the european spanish z/c?
@@danieljohn4014 more or less, yes!
It's just as annoying when people want to force their modern sensibilities on language. You're just as obnoxious as the people you trash.
@@jojothermidor you don't have to use elle if you don't want to. no one is forcing you bestie literally do whatever you want. I use it. You don't have to. But just say you don't want to do it instead of using the excuse that it's "not correct" or whatever.
@@lyxthen Most of the genderization in Spanish is because the words themselves have gender. In which case using "elle" would only appeal to a persons sensibilities when referring to a person. Which I will not do.
My most hated rule I was taught in school, for both my native Dutch and for English, is that a comma before 'and' is not allowed, and that I should just omit the comma. I stubbornly refused to follow this rule, and included it anywhere I would leave a pause in my sentences. I figured that being consistent with the comma ALWAYS meaning a rest, and a rest always being indicated by a comma, there would be no ambiguity in how to read something.
Try it. Read the first two sentences in this comment, and then read it as if there was no comma in there. In my head at least, it sounds completely different. Still, that is what was taught at my school.
Yeah, I use this as well. But I probably use commas in places where they stylistically aren't typical. I was taught in primary school to put them wherever a break seems appropriate, so I stick them everywhere. It would be neat to actually see some sort of revealed syntactic basis for it all, but I'm not going to put in that sort of effort for every email.
I was taught in late elementary or middle school (about 9-12 years old) that you should use them before "fanboys" an acronym for common 'co-coordinating' conjunctions in English, such as "For," "And", "Nor", "but", "or", "yet", "so", and it's pretty common in reading to see it following other conjunctions like "However" and "although". I have no idea for Dutch rules though but this is pretty common in at least American English. My mom is British and writes run-on sentences with no commas and it feels like I can't take a breath reading it, but I'm not certain she was an A student or anything in her day.
Personally im not presctiptivist but i absolutely despise the English influence on languages right now. It's getting out of hand
on god, germans are especially guilty of this, probably half the words that german artists use in their songs are from English even though most of the time it would make a LOT more sense to just use the native word. And it makes their songs sound like absolute dogshit because all I hear are wannabe Americans speaking a weird mix of German and English that doesn't even sound good together.
You're a prescriptivist.
@@tompeled6193Im whatever is against turning all languages into English-based creoles
yeahhh i'm not a prescriptivist either but anglicization's really a bitch. it was kinda the inevitable outcome of british imperialism, and the way it's becoming a global lingua franca is great in that people from all over can communicate w/ it, but it's killing off so much linguistic diversity that you can't help but hate it, especially w/ the way english words (& the cultural concepts that come with them) seem to be prioritized over ones from other languages now.
@@posthumously Yea, i dont mind new words coming from English that are also new concepts, but in my native language Dutch i sometimes hear people use English words that have perfectly non-archaic Dutch variants. Someone said 'anxiety' instead of the Dutch 'angst' even though angst is way easier to both pronounce and write.
Czech speaker reporting in.
I just want the written form to freely reflect the spoken form. I hate that we keep retaining things that majority of the speakers don't care about. Most of the education is spent on drilling semantic minutae, but the language works just fine without them. The standardized form is relatively young, we have a perfect time to just let the speakers dictate spelling.
Instead, we (or the ÚJČ) keep pretending like voicedness of prepositions in written form is something that needs retaining. We (and Slovenes) have such a neat distinction of turning "kto" into voiced "gdo", but you'll be a laughingstock if you don't write it as "kdo". The raising of "mléko" to "mlíko" is so widely spread, why not legitimize it? I don't know any good reason to keep the yer representation other than to make our brains do mental gymnastics when writing.
The worst one is the distinction of masculine animate plural participle ending, where you also have to keep in mind the rule that masculine animate subjects take precedent before all others. "-li" has more weight than "ly". The animacy distinction is annoying enough, since it will clearly seize to exist in spoken form eventually. On top of that, feminine subjects take precedence before neuter subjects, the neuter participle being the only distinct one in spoken form "-la". But in speech, it often just becomes "-ly" for neuter nouns only, so much so that there is a rule that two singular neuter subjects take "-ly" instead of "-la". And there are other exceptions where either "-li" or "-ly" is valid.
And finally, the "ů". That's a remnant of "uo" diphthong. And if a dialect retains it, it should be fine to write "uo" instead of "ú", but since it's so consistently in medial positions, it's just a way to catch kids off-guard when the root makes the long vowel "ú" even if there is a suffix.
None of this would matter if the writing rules were lax. Or rather, if they were descriptive. Our language could have a phonemic orthography and we could have written proof of all changes to the language and variations between speakers. Sure, as dialects drift away, this would mean that the written form would be less mutually intelligible. Which is good. But instead, we spend most of our education on the tiniest things since early childhood, and so education quickly becomes a painful chore. All it does is help the institutional centralization efforts.
As a speaker of Spanish (Chilean Spanish to be specific), I feel like the descriptivist view is much more extended in Anglophone countries than the rest of the world, probably due to cultural reasons, as well as the fact that there's a big Linguistic tradition that's not equally present in other places. You really wouldn't see people questioning prescriptivist rules of Spanish, unless they were students of Linguistics, and even then, those with some knowledge of Linguistics but with a professional formation as a Language Teacher would have prescriptivist biases ingrained into their brains. I think this is starting to change with younger generations, through lenguaje inclusivo (gender-neutral language). The emergence of that issue has motivated further reflection and discussion about the flexibility of language, and of course, there's the usual debate between those who want to keep language as it is, supported by the RAE (the Academy), and people who believe language can and must change as time goes on.
The thing I hate is when you get people *_prescribing_* a new meaning to a word or a new way to use a word, that nobody outside their small bubble uses or recognises as anything but sounding immensely weird, and when you don't conform to their demand to change your speech and tell them that you and 99% of the population are speaking your language correct and properly because this is how words are used, they go "bro words change over time", conflating their decreed, demanded change with natural evolution of language, pretending like *_you_* are a prescriptivist, when it's them who are prescibing a meaning, just a "new" one they want to make happen instead of an older one that has fallen out of use.
The main cuprits of this are activists trying to change languages like German and French because they are upset that these languages have gendered terms to refer to persons.
I don't think that's really comparable to the kind of prescriptivism the video is addressing, since it's not dependant on a presumption of truth, it's activism, as you have described it. Also because prescriptivism usually comes from a position of authority, while the promotion of gender-neutral language isn't accepted by most academies of language. To oppose gender-neutral language under that basis would also be pretty weird from a descriptivist perspective considering many of the changes in languages were imposed at some point.
Sounds like a cope
These people exist in Cantonese, a scholar/TV person started this correct pronunciation thing in the 70s, using a dictionary a thousand years ago written by people living in other parts of china, and for some reason he’s popular among TV stations and broadcasters, despite a lot of criticism and debates from the academic circle, it somehow survived, and now you have these pretentious people correcting people‘s Cantonese with weirdly pronounced words that they think are correct base on a medieval dictionary from northern china.
There's a common misconseption in Russian education is "Нет слова "нету"". There IS such a word (нету) that means roughly "there is no something", and you know why they say that? It's because the usage of the word "нету" is complicated (no examples, sorry :( )
Ха, не знал что кто-то уже коментнул про «нет» и «нету»
@@kkuwura как же не коментнуть?
I find it easier to treat "нету" as contraction of "нет тут"; its history is tad more complicated than that, but it works. Prescriptivists revolt against its use because it sounds too informal to be entrenched, and Russian totally does not have any contractions (откуда _на_ хрен в русском столько префиксов), when it is a perfectly old word from western East Slavic dialects that have now made it into fabric of Russian.
Also, Russian sees prescriptivists complain about grammatical gender of loanwords - yes, "paletot" is masculine in French, "пальто" sounds neuter in Russian, shut up its neuter now - and use of null-ending vocative case - because language displaying a remarkable feat of re-evolving a trait that it has lost previously is too alive for prescriptivists' understanding.
@@user-qd8yy9lc4g мне нравится Ваш аргумент. и "нету" это действительно сокращение только от Древнерусского "нє є ту" (типа "не здесь")
@@user-qd8yy9lc4g agree with everything you said at the end there. Though the reemergence of the vocative case is mostly limited to personal names, it's still a legitimate feature and not some bastardization.
Also, I for one think that the very reason why "нету" sounds informal is precisely because we've been constantly told it's a non-existent word from the first time we go to school.
Another example of overcorrection in English is the phrase "aren't I". The wordt ain't evolved from amn't, but people started using it for other persons too, so prescriptivists started denouncing it, which led to people avoiding "ain't" altogether, and they started saying "aren't I". Also in standard written Dutch there is an arbitrary distinction between accusative "hen" (them) and dative (and genetive) "hun". The distinction between dative and accusative had long been lost in Dutch, but some guy wanted to bring it back (he also wanted to distinguish between hem and hom or something like that, but that didn't stick). It was also decided that all prepositions are followed by an accusative, so either you use dative, or you use a preposition with the accusative, but that's not even how Dutch worked historically. For most Dutch speakers, even the distinction between nominative and oblique had faded in the third person plural pronoun. They would usually use hun in every case, or the weak form ze from zij in all cases but the genetive. This latter system is allowed by the written standard, but not the preferred system. Personally I just say the weak form ze, which I learnt as a sort of way to cheat the system. As I child I also used hun a lot in every case. In my hometown, you will also hear the older generations say hunnie or sullie
Believe it or not, the disappearance of "thou" is a prescriptivism, just dating back to the English Civil War, where soldiers would discourage the use of the singular "thou" with each other because their commanders would refer to groups of soldiers with the plural "you," and they consequently misunderstood this as more formal / correct. It's why English now has all these awkward constructions for the second person plural (namely "y'all," which is a feature of Southern English but doesn't appear in my dialect of California English). I find myself using Spanish "ustedes" or "you-stedes" when I'm trying to clarify I'm using the plural second person, because while it sounds silly at least people know immediately what I mean.
Since you give me the choice I will go with not believing it. No English speaker at the time of the Civil war would confuse the use of "you" as a plural with the use of "you" for formality.
That's not prescriptivism though. It's more like they just started to use 'you' instead of 'thou' because it's safer to do so.
3:17 that sounds like I is starting a sentence instead of being the subject
Of course the other extreme here are people who write "could of" and _actually justify it_ by calling anyone who corrects them a prescriptivist.
A "could of" nak igazából mégis van egy kicsi létjogosultsága mert kiejtés szerinti írás, a magyarba is van ilyen. Persze nem "helyes", de van.
@@colmangri Applying Hungarian standards to English is a bit chauvinistic of you, friend.
@@andrasfogarasi5014 te aztán igen okosnak érezheted magad hogy másokat sovinisztának nevezel, barát
As both an amateur linguist and a teacher, I find myself in an interesting tension with this topic. On the one hand, from a linguistic perspective, I agree with your thesis. But on the other hand, as a teacher, I know that some pedants will judge my students for their "incorrect usage," however unjustified they may be, and that judgement can have meaningful consequences in some contexts; thus, it becomes my responsibility to teach them how to follow the presriptivist rules, however ridiculous they may be.
I'm going to agree with the vast majority of what you said here, however I do think there is a place for prescriptivism, and it's specifically for written or spoken works that require a specific and un-open to interpretation understanding, such as law and scientific description, so ironically you need prescriptivist language to describe and understand descriptivist language sources and papers on the subject.
One (passive) prescriptivist complaint I have, is that the PC keyboard does not support the 25th letter of the original alphabet, and now recently the Dutch alphabet has being replaced with the nearly identical English one. The Netherlands is often seen as too small of a country to translate things, and indeed Dutch PCs ship with the keyboard setting 'US (international)'. But the 'ij' is very central to the Dutch language (from 'hij/zij' = 'he/she' to 'pijn'='pain' to 'schijt'='sh*t' (vulgar) to 'ijsvrij'='ice free'), and many people from the war generation will still tell you that the 'ij' is the 25th letter of the alphabet.
But as you can tell, in these RUclips comments the 'ij' is two letters: i+j. You can type ij (a single glyph) via unicode alt-codes, but it is not included in US (international) or similar. Unicode calls it 'deprecated'.
Now most Dutch people don't care about this at all, and happily accept the 'y' as the 25th letter -- though they do pronounce it as 'ij' in the alphabet song. But as someone with the 'ij' in my name, I don't like that my name is changing because the PC industry is dominated by American companies who can't be bothered to support the 'ij'.
See how hard the Germans had to fight for their eszett (ẞß); we Dutch will never get our 'ij' back.
Note how Wikipedia calls it a digraph and only mentions it is 'sometimes considered a letter in itself'. Yes, some older Dutch speakers still consider it a letter, most of the others a ligature. So one whose authority are you calling it a digraph? Sound like dumb prescriptivism to me.
I find that a bit hard to believe seeing as Scandinavian keyboards include our special letter åöäøæ. Although I guess there are a few more Scandinavians than Dutch people...
I do think that IJ is a stupid "letter" though. It's two separate letters written separately, yet supposed to be treated as one?
So I know this isn't really that relevant to the meaning of the video, but I've had an interesting and different relationship with my interest in linguistics and prescriptivism.
Over the past few years, I've always taken a descriptivist stance on most issues. I do think that some areas (such as teaching languages, technical language, jargon, and edge case scenarios) are a lot more complicated than "prescriptivism good/bad" and need a more moderate approach, so to speak. But over the past few months as I've become more and more interested in the study of languages and understanding the underlying functions, I've started to agree with more prescriptivist perspectives and I'm not sure why.
I think my position recently is very similar to something you briefly touch on when you describe your position on using the nominative case in the subject and how you're somewhat torn because you think cases are cool. That's how I've felt on the issue recently. With learning about languages and grammar and spelling and why prescriptivists prescribe the things they do came the feeling that those things are cool, and that since I like learning about them and knowing how they work, that's how I should speak. So because of that, I've been speaking and typing very formally in some situations. I've started using commas and semicolons "properly" and now I have to physically stop myself because it became habit. And worse still is that because I've always been the "annoying know-it-all type" and because I usually got psychologically rewarded for that in school, I have the horrible tendency of correcting people sometimes. Thankfully its usually only my family or close friends and thankfully I'm never a dick about it, but it still feels like that's the wrong perspective, like I've adopted a prescriptivist outlook in some small ways.
I still think that the role of people who write the dictionaries and grammar books is, obviously, to describe an existing language, not to invent unused rules and enforce those on the populace; however, I have been lately falling more and more into the trap of being a member of said populace who tries to intentionally steer the direction of the development of the language towards what I have arbitrarily decided as having "more utility." Idk I'd never try to correct people who speak different dialects or who use common ways of speaking that aren't ""technically"" correct, but I am starting to feel like I have some sort of "duty" to uphold certain weird things like irregular Latin-descended pluralizations, pronoun cases, punctuation, and very precise definitions of technical things from science or philosophy that I'm interested in (like the commonly "incorrect" definitions or uses of fruit, flower, communism, gender, species, theory, etc.)
sorry this makes absolutely zero sense. I'm procrastinating working on my history final and my mind is dead.
I used to be a prescriptivist, then I grew a brain
So, the prescriptivism made you smarter
@@aleksystrzecki205 Nah, understanding that prescriptivism is annoying and inherently bad made me smarter
Interesting to know from which word "fee" originated.
I noticed its proto germanic origin "fehu" also evolved into the german word "Vieh", which just sounds like "fee" but mostly kept it's original meaning.
I don’t really view prescriptivism or descriptivism as inherently bad things. They both have their place
What is your opinion about obvious yet hugely common mistakes such as “it’s” in place of “its”?
Are we going to passively witness a verb becoming an adjective?
They're not mistakes. Have you watched the video!
That's just spelling. There's no actual change happening there, it's just that "it's" and "its" sound identical and so people can become confused of which one to use when writing something down.
it makes sense that people mix them up- consider, if this land is the property of John, then it is John's property, with an apostrophe. and yet, something can be 'its property', which is without an apostrophe. it's counterintuitive, given an existing situation where the possessive -s suffix is marked with an apostrophe, that of the two spellings of its/it's, the one with the apostrophe is not the possessive. as a matter of fact, that thing that does not make sense is why we use an apostrophe for "John's property", when I couldn't tell you what John's is supposed to be short for. The land is John is property? The land is John has property? if it was ever short for anything, it's not anymore, so why do we use it? only because people have associated apostrophes with possessives, to the point of overcorrecting its to it's.
@@comradewindowsill4253 Yep. Ultimately it is the identical pronunciation that causes the confusion, and why it's not a linguistic change.
In German, most people say "wegen dem" ("because of the") using dative case, but it is considered incorrect. The supposedly correct from is "wegen des" using genitive case, despite much fewer people saying it this way, and those who do mostly because they purposefully correct themselves.
Today's descriptivists become tomorrow's prescriptivists.
deep
True, everybody will cling to what was true in their generation when they were young as the way they should forever be, to some degree.
Only a hypocritical descriptivist
"Language is use." (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
I will state one place where presriptivism has a use, When the language being needs to be very strict. Simple NLP programs may only parse (and understand) a small subset of English, and it's better that their subset is more akin to a programming language (though, not actually like a programming language) than raw-unfiltered natural language.
But apart from that, letting language act as more of a contextual and relative communication system works better because it captures a large amount of nuance and also allows for ambiguity. But, prescriptivism is still very useful for some domains.
(Also, I've read a few people's comments about having language prescribed to you in school. I have a similar experience. I went to a welsh school and they put in a lot of effort into stopping people speak Wenglish. So many much "Ffôn nid ffown" and some grammatical things like "Adjectives After the noun, Order your prepositions, Don't forget mutations" There was a lot. But, it does mean I can speak Wenglish much better than i could've otherwise. I'dn't've known what it was if it wasn't for them trying to crush it.)
Nice video, I just wanted to let you know you made a small French mistake in the sentence ''La chaise sur laquelle j'assois...''. Asseoir needs a direct object (the thing or person you make sit down), so here you need the reflexive form ''La chaise sur laquelle je m'assois...''. All the luck for you for learning French!
For myself, I translate assoir as "set" not "sit", as it is usually taught. "Set" requires a direct object, so in English " i set myself on the chair."
@@HweolRidda Not a bad trick indeed
The only thing that I hate is something known as 'skunked terms'. The word disinterested actually means impartial, but nowadays it is more common to be synonymous with uninterested...
Prescriptivism is for mathematic and scientific types, and other people who would be described as Lawful in D&D, descriptivism is for artistic and creative types and others who would be described as Chaotic in D&D
Seeing a language as a struct of algorithms and laws that should be tightly controlled is important for an autistic person like me.
Someday, all languages will be prescribed into a single global language, and everyone will be able to understand each other.
When I see people saying that stuff like "He was trying to both drink the milk and read the book, without success" is an ungramatical sentence, it makes me want to rip my hair out.
In hebrew, some characters have old names that haven't been 100% phased out yet, and new names that every normal speaker uses. The most popular example, י (y/i), is called yud by nearly every speaker, and yod by some older people and hebrew teachers. The hebrew teachers call it wrong to say yud, even though that's how people speak now.
As a speaker and someone who learned bosnian/croatian in school (both are the names of official country standards for the bosnian/croatian/montenegrin/serbian language), I can relate to this video so much. The cultural elites in all of our countries but especially the croatian cultural elite (& the government) is completely infected with prescriptivism. They have a special agency for language standardization that regularly comes up with new words (often replacements of existing words), grammar and spelling rules.
And then they have language "oversee-ers" on every state and even a lot of private media outlets to check and correct the language used. The prescriptivist make up so many new words and spelling rules that it's hard even for educated people like professional journalists to keep up.
In the end you get people being told they can't speak their own native language, and people becoming insecure speaking on the media because they have to always pay attention to each word they're saying in order to speak as prescribed.
They're also purists - they're always trying to replace words of foreign origin (even if well established in our language as a normal word) with native made-up words.
For example, they replaced 'univerzitet' (university) with 'sveučilište' which literally translates to 'alllearnery', which doesn't even make sense semantically since universities are also institutions of scientific research and communication, not just teaching and learning. There's so many cases of dumb made-up words like that
I am an italian and personally it makes me die inside when someone says that the conjunctive is dying. If it was it wouldn't be used in writing or speech, things that are untrue.
Stesso dicasi del passato remoto. E' usatissimo dappertutto, infatti non si può raccontare una storia fittizia ambientata nel passato senza il passato remoto.
I think one thing that would be helpful when I'm learning a new language is knowing how "wrong" my "wrong" answer sounds. For example "Where's my keys?" doesn't sound that bad to me, but I wonder if a Spanish speaker would think the same about "¿Dónde está mis llaves?"
It's understood but not really something native speakers would say (in that particular case). Mistakes in gender and singular/plural are two of the most telling signs for non-native speakers of Spanish. Though in some cases native speakers do make those "mistakes" (under a prescriptive model), and their acceptance by the Academy really varies a lot. Mar (sea) is mainly a masculine noun (el mar), but the use of feminine is accepted by the RAE (la mar). Meanwhile, calor (heat) is also masculine, and even though the feminine form is widely used, it's only documented, not accepted by the RAE.
I like the way you present language education inside an entertaining shell.
Second time i watched this video, still one of the best ones on your channel
Okay, reading the comments throught here, it's pretty nice to know my country's institute of linguistics isn't as bad as, for example, France's. As a Slovak person though, we are still pretty much fucked, since the case system is so harsh and strong and unbending that it's really hard to even REACH any semantic drift. The case system, for context, has 6 cases, with an obsolete 7th that is still used today, though rarely. In combination with grammatical gender. Doesn't sound bad, right? No. Every word has a strictly defined gender and mustn't be changed, since the words change based on the grammatical case in which it appears. AND there are 4 ways for every gender that can be used for each case. And these rules are unbending. They teach these rules at school like it's the holy grail, meaning that everyone who was born or has studied Slovak will try to correct you should you use the wrong word inflection in a word that could even be considered obsolete. Slovak is a pain in the ass sometimes.
The main issue is that things like laws don't change how they are worded over time, so a proper education does rely on teaching the "prescriptive" meanings of words, and at least some awareness of the prescriptive meaning is valuable as an adult when coming into contact with things where prescriptive meaning is quite important to maintain the coherency of the whole institution across time (to a reasonable degree). It helps us in jargon filled fields as well.
Before this video I didn't know what I was, but now I'm a descriptivist.
I speak dutch and I often make the hypercorrection of "You and I" in english because in dutch "Jij en Ik" (the literal translation) is the only right way to say it
What about literary languages that have no 'native' speakers, like Standard Czech?