/lit/ - Literature

>>20693846
Americans are obsessed about negroes to the point where they started defending their pets' retarded caveman speak.

>>20693849
That's definitely part of the reason prescriptive grammar is considered unacceptable today. You can't criticize anything the negro does and you must worship them, so we have to pretend that ebonics is a legitimate and deep dialect of English worthy of study and preservation.

>>20693849
God it's been a long time since someone posted the Zhukov copypasta

>>20693846
One of the only ways to keep a language alive for a long period of time is to have a teachable and unchanging set of grammar rules. This is how Latin survived so long. So I conclude that anyone who actually cares about their native language ought to agree with you.

>>20693849
>>20693856
>>20693859
>Literally defaults to "IT'S THE BLACKS FAULTS!"

America Moment

People fail to realize that languages like Italian, French, Spanish, even English only exist due to "prescriptive grammar". Social institutions or upper-class custodians of the language decided how the grammar rules and language ought to be used. Otherwise, as said, it would be nothing but chaos and retarded ebonic pleb-speak would dominate. We can see the result of turning on prescriptive grammar today. Look at how zoomers speak. But not just in English, in anything. It's idiotic internet/social media influenced drivel. If you can't see how and why rigorous standards must be enforced in light of such abominations to language, then there is no helping you.

>>20693874
Oh, I forgot. Romanian. Slovenian. Russian. Arabic (through the Quran). Modern Hebrew. All were LITERALLY CREATED THROUGH PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR LOL.

>>20693868
How does blaming negroes constitute an "American moment"? An American would never do such a thing in his or her life. Americans fear blacks like a mortal would fear God. They're not allowed to curse or speak ill of blacks, like how you mustn't blaspheme God or take His name in vain. They devote entire institutions in academia and media to remind themselves of their sins against blacks and beg for their mercy, like you'd beg God for forgiveness for your sins. Negro worship is essentially the academic and state religion of America at this point, and has been since the Civil Rights Act.

>>20693868
unironically the problem would be fixed if americans just accepted and recognized AAVE as an official dialect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZpCdI6ZKU4

>>20693897
>talking about grammaticality in ebonics
lol this is surreal

>>20693897
It already is in academia. Everyone that is older than 25 or isn't black hates it and thinks it's retarded babble. But even if that were to be the case that still wouldn't "fix the problem" with regards to the proscription on prescriptive grammar by our marxist academic overlords.

>>20693897
I'll only accept it if it's called ebonics. AAVE sounds far too lame.

The people who want to do away with these conventions are part of the same class that created them.

>>20693849
>>20693856
It is especially dumb because there are black people who have never spoken in ebonics but will feel prompted to because liberals expect it from them. "Are you too self hating to speak naturally?" These people have bad intentions. Us thirdies want to the ability to communicate at a higher level in whatever language we speak.

>>20693846
Your first reason has some merit, insofar as having a standard language/dialect facilitates communication, but this can be done without denigrating the vernacular tongues; consider the German cantons of Switzerland, where all natives speak both Standard German and their local dialects. As for your second reason, I wholly disagree. If languages deteriorated over time, then after hundreds of thousands of years of human speech, our idioms would have declined to such a point that we were incapable of expressing complex thoughts, yet that is obviously not the case. There's no link between grammatical complexity and civilizational complexity; the Navajos are capable of expressing complex ideas in very few words, and their language's grammar is almost impossible for outsiders to learn due to its complexity, but before European colonization of the Americas, the Navajos were technologically and politically primitive. On the other hand, the Chinese language has had almost no grammatical complexity for thousands of years, yet in that time, China has almost always been one of the world's leading powers, and they've had a sophisticated literary tradition as well.

>>20693929
I think you misunderstand what deterioration means here. You can express any idea in practically any language no matter how stupid it is, but if you take twice or three times as long due to simplified or retarded grammar it has in some sense deteriorated. This is why I consider Hungarian and the other Urgic languages frankly superior to my own. It is much easier to express very complex ideas by agglutination.

>>20693929
>China has almost always been one of the world's leading powers
LOL. Are you serious? No they were not. Maybe they were known for their scholarship, inventiveness, or mercantile routes, but leading powers? They were historically always raped by outside tribes or killed each other in insanely gory revolutions and civil wars. They didn't really subjugate much outside of China proper.

Don't evaluate things like this immanently, as if people actually believe their own reasons for adhering to things. Look for the midwit kernel of ulterior motivation in everything. The midwit kernel here is that they want to 1) rapidly identify the dumbed-down binary categories of their progressive neoliberal religion in the given situation (prescriptive=white oppressor, descriptive=respecting diversity and autonomy), 2) apply this dumbed-down binary categorisation in the simple, reflexive ways they've learned from their managerial class training institute slash finishing school, which don't require any self-sacrifice or risk-taking or giving up of managerial class creature comforts (I request that all heroic sit-ins and protests be scheduled on weeks when I'm NOT going to Milan with Jeremy).

That's it. If you're going to argue prescriptive vs. descriptive, at least go find the one autist of the binary that actually cares about it for its own sake and makes attempts to justify it internally. The millions of pussy bitch twitter kids who think they have opinions about it are not worth talking to. Just as they will use an entire discipline as a prop to performatively assert their identities, they will use YOU as a prop to roleplay their "I'm a linguist, I know things, descriptive not prescriptive ok!" identity as a subset of that.

>>20693949
>This is why I consider Hungarian and the other Urgic languages frankly superior to my own. It is much easier to express very complex ideas by agglutination.
I disagree, but fair enough.

>>20693958
>They were historically always raped by outside tribes or killed each other in insanely gory revolutions and civil wars. They didn't really subjugate much outside of China proper.
"China proper" is vastly larger than it was 2500 years ago, so I'd say they've done all right for themselves.

>>20693909
It has a structure and rules that even you can learn

>>20693968
Not him, but that's just a legacy of the decadent Qing (Manchu) state that finally put an end to the East Asian dialectic of autochthonous Han dynasties vs. Turco-Mongol border confederations (rape hordes) by simply deciding the dialectic in favour of the rape hordes forever.

During those centuries the Han then spread like a moss and out-competed all the other subtypes of Chinamen, like the Sichuan peoples. Now the only type left is the Arr Rook Same tribe and they all have the tatar yoke permanently affixed to their souls.

The Chinese Republican period was the last time a spiritually and racially hygienic stratification could have occurred within the Chinese folk-soul, but it was smothered in warlord garbage wearing communism as a suit. Hong Kong and Taiwan give me a little hope though, shame they're going to be gobbled up by the big fat retarded dysgenic dragon soon and made into yet another appendage of it.

>>20693994
That's literally the opposite of ebonics

>>20694044
ayo ebonics finna be a real dialek ov american n shit dey only aint get no recognition cuz raycism n shit gnomesayin my nigga

>>20693846
>Reason #1
So we should ideally remove any variation at all and create a globohomo world language. Great, got it.
>The reason Italians gesticulate is because there was no standard Italian before the unification of Italy, because people could hardly understand each other.
LMAO
>Reason #2: Languages deteriorate over time in beauty and nuance if they are not kept to a high standard.
They don't, that's obvious bullshit. If you equate the "beauty and nuance" with the amount of grammatical concepts you can name with traditional terminology, then e.g. English is already by far the most subhuman and simplistic language in Europe, because it has practically no cases, overall extremely simple morphology, fixed word order, etc. Even Shakespeare would read like a caveman to an Old English speaker.
Ironically, it is precisely the standardisation that has additionally simplified many modern languages - the linguists tended to pick the simpler ways of speaking and spelling that could be taught more easily to a massive variety of people.

I'm not even saying that standard languages existing is bad (it's learned mainly through interaction with wider culture anyway, it is an organic process for most people), but a lot of prescriptivism really is moronic nitpicking. E.g. complaining about double negatives and split infinitives.

>>20693949
And Hungary is so great with its complicated grammar that it's the gypsy capital of EU.

>>20693846

Languages with an Institution that says what is the proper way of speaking and what is wrong, are better at resisting attacks on language like new pronouns or inclusive language.

>>20693846
Because POCkmarks

>>20694313
everyone in this thread can decipher this, so yes, ebonics is coherent and logical

>>20693994
No, it doesn't. This is the problem that every single fucking study of "Ebonics" runs into: It's not a uniform dialect. It's not even a dialect, it's just that niggers are fucking dumb and screw up English and use each other's fuckups because of their herdlike nature. It varies nigger to nigger. "Dids bes bouta do gonna" isn't some kind of "postgressive pre-prepositional progressive anti-pluriperfect adverbially form" or whatever, it's just how one nigger would cudgel something together, and he would change the order every time he said it. For comparison, the North American nominal TAM system absolutely forbids something like "We'v'l'bn running", it MUST be "we'll'v'bn running" every single time.

Whites and Jews picking up on how one nigger says something and then spreading it around has more impact than some kind of negro folkish linguistic vitality or whatever. This is to be expected because niggers are a bioweapon and not an actual community however, so yes, if they did actually run their own society, they would indeed develop new grammar and phonology. The "habitual be" is an example of this (the idea that "I be here" means "I am at this location frequently"), in that its usage as a distinct grammatical aspect is SOLELY because of the "Niggas be like" meme. When niggers actually speak, they just use "be" as a copula interchangeably with am/are/is. Likewise, "finna" is itself just part of "finna bouta gonna", and all three of those words mean the same thing repeated for emphasis (something that niggers often do, like referring to ebonics as the "true original aboriginal initial" language of negroes). The only real uniform grammatical change that isn't just Whites or Jews taking their "dialect" and improving it for them is their transitioning of the nominal plural into a sort of gender marker and the introduction of a crude measure word system ("one nigga" and "one niggaz" are both singulars, whereas "tree dog" and "tree dogs" are both three of some thing, a dog and a "dogz").

It's a decayed form of English. It has a reduced phonological inventory and a reduced grammar.

>>20693846
I take it you haven't actually studied Greek? Koine is way more elegant than Ancient Greek (which was itself comprised of various dialects - which of those was 'proper' Greek?)
Also the thing about Italian gesticulation is complete bullshit, neighboring countries like France and Germany had just as much dialectical diversity

>>20694686
> screw up English and use each other's fuckups because of their herdlike nature
How do you think we got from the English of Beowulf to the completely unrecognizable English of today?

>>20694654
Unless the institution is the one suggesting those new pronouns.

>>20693846
Alternative dialects should be preserved as a part of history but there should be a prescriptive standard for formal explorations of language and settings where universal communication is a primary aim.
Didn't we have this figured out? At least tacitly.

>>20694701
>How do you think we got from the English of Beowulf to the completely unrecognizable English of today?
The difference here is that our ancestors continuously innovated new grammatical and phonological features due to the constant tug-of-war of ease of perception and ease of production. For example, do-support, more vowels, specific word orders, adjective order, more active use of articles, etc. Niggers aren't. Again, I will absolutely admit that they would if they actually were in charge of their own media, but they aren't, so they don't.

>Koine is way more elegant than Ancient Greek
Literally every Greek throughout history has disagreed with this btw. Modern Greek is even re-importing the dative case because it's in Ancient Greek.

>>20694686
>if they did actually run their own society

You're too generous.

It's done for political purposes. Descriptivism is just a way of prescribing the status quo.

>>20694701
>Modern English didn't exist in the stone age, therefore niggerspeak is heckin' valid

>>20694654
If such an institution were created for Modern English it would immediately be infiltrated by activists who would recognize Ebonics as equal if not superior to Modern English and then kids would be forced to learn both Modern English and Ebonics in school.

>>20693846
Descriptive grammar is just modelling reality. Prescriptive grammar is traditional Latin/Greek grammar messily slapped onto random languages.

English is already standardised without an official standard. As are most languages, and they do not follow their official standards yet are still standard.

Descriptive grammar is the in-depth way of doing things. Prescriptive grammar mostly takes the form of meaningless, mythical grammar nitpicking that worsens language's expressiveness or constrains it to ugly forms.

>>20694919
>Descriptive grammar is just modelling reality.
In cases like this, "just modeling reality" is just as much a prescription as anything else, and if it really wanted to "model reality" it would recognize that language use is inherently prescriptive.

>>20694919
>Descriptive grammar is the in-depth way of doing things. Prescriptive grammar mostly takes the form of meaningless, mythical grammar nitpicking that worsens language's expressiveness or constrains it to ugly forms.
This is kind of rich considering that the descriptivist position is mostly used to defend hideous ways language is used today. I've never seen an intellectual position so obviously fraudulent that is legitimized to this extent.

>>20694958
prescriptivist:
>you always have to say X and never Y because Y will destroy the language!
descriptivist:
>some people say X and others say Y
linguistic genius on 4chan:
>these are literally the same thing

Anyway this whole discussion is moot because most of the posters here have nothing to do with linguistics, are monolingual, and have never used a single grammar book, be it prescriptive or descriptive. Might as well argue about angels dancing on the head of a pin.

>>20695087
No it's more like this

prescriptivist:
>we should preserve the integrity and beauty of our language somewhat

nigger:
>ooga booga *scratches scrotum* y'all crackaz be FINNA gibs me dem reparashunz

descriptivist:
>so fascinating, he used the post-alveolar fricative gerund affine prepositional dative! this is beautiful, in fact, it's more rich than standard English, and shows how language is truly living rather than a contrived white supremacist construct!

>>20695087
It looks like you've described what's happening wrong; let's take a look about what's really going on:
>whenever language is used the speaker has many choices on how they can make any expression, and the speaker will always make choices based on a number of different considerations, making them prescriptive whenever they're using language.
>a linguist attempting to describe grammar will be making these kinds of choices in their attempt to describe and explain this language will be shaped by the prescriptive choice that linguist has made in the process of doing so.
>furthermore as an academic the mark of validity or invalidity from a linguist will have influence on how institutions, activists, etc. will will understand and use language, and therefore shape eventually shape the the direction of that language. This impact is enough to understand that their descriptions will inevitably function as superscription.
>Might as well argue about angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Any linguistics that considers "descriptivism" possible misunderstands language on such a fundamental level that it can't be taken seriously. Conversations about angels dancing on pinheads would be more fruitful than anything they've produced.

>>20693846
a fusional conlang with ergative elements and at least 10 cases should be constructed, and then enforced unto a whole nation, and anyone found to not use the language in the prescribed proper manner should be reported and punished by the state. further use after this, those users will be allowed to use the altered language, but will always be treated as second-class citizens, branded and labeled, and although no violence are allowed unto them, these people are still forced by the state to be segregated away from the users of pure language, at all times. no communication between them is allowed, all must be reduced to silent sign languages instead. we want to have no contamination.
those found to mingle will have the users of pure language constantly checked and examined at the language clinics for any hints or traces of deviations from the pure language.
all deviations, additional ideas to the languages should be reported to the state, the state will meticulously record them all and collect them.

>>20695105
>>we should preserve the integrity and beauty of our language somewhat
I think the problem is that that argument for descriptivism is a good response to this kind of perscriptivism.
Anything that believes that there is an ideal version of some language and that it should be fixed, even somewhat, to certain rules to keep them there is a fool.
What's harder to dispute is the fact that there are many reasons be they social, aesthetic, or political to prefer people to speak one way over another and that these preferences are perfectly legitimate. I think one of the reasons that the desc4riptivist argument struggles against it is because it is so often made for social and political purposes.

>>20693915
AAVE reads like some kind of media player or some kind of crypto.

Descriptive grammar is just far more interesting than prescriptive grammar

>>20695188
>>20695178
>bait?
A complex language is far more enriching for a population than multiple less complex dynamic languages. Most evolution steps of dialects are meaningless, like nigger slang or the quickly diverging dialects of the Balkan states. They don't use the changes to shape their language more to their needs, but rather focus on making it harder for foreigners to seem virtuous in front of their respective community.
I agree that public schools have too big of an impact on how a population thinks, but they should rather teach better and more than nothing at all. Having a language everybody understands isn't for social, aesthetic or political reasons, but mainly for economic reasons.
The average person isn't able to learn multiple languages/dialects well enough to speak and think fluently in them. If you now grow up in a smaller place with a very distinct dialect, you won't be able to find work too far from home, you won't be able to read books from an early age and you'll have to study in a foreign language.
Having no agreed upon structures and words would decrease the equality of opportunity immensely.

>>20695087
>A prescriptive theory prescribes and a descriptive one describes
Brilliant observation, now go flex your credentials on Reddit you fucking retard
>>20695188
I can relate numerous examples of languages whose rate of change has slowed down to human effort thus prolonging the intelligibility of its texts, but this is bad and foolish because??

>>20695551
Because it just is, ok?

>>20695253
No

>>20693846
Anything that exposes the lies of racial and class equality is anathema, for equality is the religious dogma of the day.

> 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
isn’t that the point? using African Americans again as an example, why would they want to be understood by you if whites and blacks are mutual enemies?

>>20698025
Pretty much

>>20693846
plebs want to have their plebian use of language to be considered on the same level as the aristocratic one

>>20693846
I am against it because the standard dialect of my language sounds super gay. It is a great source of discomfort for the mind and ears. I do believe that prescriptive grammar should be taught early on,however, as it is much more difficult to grasp a language when you have contradictory inputs, especially as a child. But if an adult decides to speak and write in their dialect, then they should be free to do so. By eradicating dialects you merely replace one heritage or tradition with another, simply because it is more convenient for speakers of the most infuential mode of language. That's like a micro genocide brooo

1
Is convenience that important? Universal languages exist for a reason. Nothing stops people from conversing in Latin
2
Complexity does not inherently equal beauty unless you are an autistic systematizer. I find the standard dialect hideous and people who speak the standard dialect think I am silly and backwards for how I speak. Who is right? These are preferences that originate, perhaps partially, from the sounds and grammar that you have been exposed to. Should some team of people in an office somewhere decide how you write and speak then?

>>20699090
What language is this?

>>20699112
Danish

>>20699116
I don’t think it sounds gay, I think it sounds like a tard speaking. The way you pronounce vowels and such. It sounds too "rounded" and slurred. I think it would be much better if people pronounced it more sharply.

>>20699125
I do understand, but then almost the whole language would have to be discarded

>>20699142
Not the language, just pronunciation. In schools children could be taught to speak in a less retarded sounding way, in a single generation.

>>20693846
>Why does prescriptive grammar get so much hate?
Because it tells people bullshit rules that aren't true, e.g. that they can't begin sentences with conjunctions or end sentences with prepositions.

>>20694044
midwit

>>20693846
English is decided by Anglos. If an English community (Yohkshuh, SommuRset, Lunnun, etc.) says it. it's proper English. Simple as

>>20699256
That would make Arabic proper English

>>20695087
>>20694919
You're right, and I know you know you're right but I need you to know that I know you're right because /lit/ destroys braincells.

>>20693846
I genuinely despise it when languages change. Stuff like German or Spanish gender-neutralizing or English grammar degrading drives me up the wall. Maybe I should just write in Latin. That way the language I use will be pure and unchanging.

>>20693846
Negation is usually easier to defend than affirmation, but besides that it's the familiar motte-and-bailey bullshit about something reasonable (linguistic superiority and standardization being arbitrary and subjective) being used as a trojan horse for sneaking in cancer (such as super-dumbed down oogabooga dialects like ebonics and zoomerspeak being aggressively claimed to be on equal grounds with Shakespeare's English).

>>20693846
cause chaos is fun

stop bein' a dweeb

>>20699614
Moreover, you get a lot of freshman zealotry with the descriptivism vs. prescriptivism thing because you're taught about it early on and it's kind of a shibboleth in linguistic circles for identifying yourself as one of the "good guys", so you get a lot of freshmen parroting the shibboleth to make themselves seem more legit in the eyes of others.

>>20699648
Finally, it's also a dishonest dichotomy to begin with, where the fact of descriptivism being a prescriptivism of sorts (of non-involvement) is masked to make it a clean case of "in the know guys with cutting-edge research" vs. "naive, outdated and politically motivated fools"

Prescriptive = bad, white supremacist, authoritarian

Descriptive = good, diverse, multicultural

>>20699403
If he were right, he would have been alble to respond to any of the comments tearing him to shreds, but it's clear that there really hasn't been a single compelling defense of descriptivism or even a case for the idea that descriptivism exists in any meaningful sense.
Imagine patting yourself on the back for parroting the beliefs of politically and ideologically motivated academics.

>>20693897
I remember I took a linguistics class and my professor said AAVE is more complicated than standard English. It was funny though because you could tell he was saying this to surprise people because everyone knows it sounds completely retarded.
Sort of a "Heh, bet you didn't know AAVE is MORE complicated than standard English!"