/lit/ - Literature

Why does prescriptive grammar get so much hate? Everyone will tell you it's bad, and even RACIST (the horror!) and that you should merely describe how people speak rather than try to establish conventions. But this is stupid, for several reasons, not least of which are:

Reason #1: Lack of standardization creates innumerable dialects and chaos. The reason Italians gesticulate is because there was no standard Italian before the unification of Italy, because people could hardly understand each other. Even today, with standard Italian influencing these dialects, Neapolitan and Venetian are mutually unintelligible. Obviously this is bad, not only because it is an impediment to communication but because such variations in a language create a sense of otherness which can lead to separatist movements which are threat to the state and can cause nationalist revolutions or social instability. There needs to at least be a standard set of rules or dialect, such that people across an entire country and different cultural, social, and age groups can communicate effectively and unambiguously.

Reason #2: Languages deteriorate over time in beauty and nuance if they are not kept to a high standard. Compare Koine Greek to Attic Greek. Any scholar of Greek will tell you that Koine is dumbed down, lacking in nuance, sounds, and so on compared to Attic. Modern Greek is even more simplified than Koine. In Modern Greek, it has given up the optative mood, dative class, dual number and infinitive that were prevalent in ancient Greek. Romance Languages are in some sense a sort of bastardized Latin which due to lacking cases, sounds, etc from Latin and needing many prepositions to "get to the point" it can take 2 or 3 times as long to express an idea in Italian or French as it does in classical Latin. The English of today is obviously more simplified, the subjunctive is almost gone, it's losing the superlative. Due to the influence of ESLs and ebonics, English will degenerate into a language for retarded zoomers.