Re: On prescriptions and misunderstanding: was can/may

My turn to apologize, Sally.  I didn't mean to imply that you
were one of the very "schoolmarms" you were clearly satirizing in your
earlier message, despite the alignment in your profession.

On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 02:32:52PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:

> My quarrel with this word "prescriptive" is that it is too often used
> to mean something someone thinks was "made up" arbitrarily by a bunch
> of elitists
It can be used that way by descriptive linguists, to be sure, but that's
not how I intended it here!

It is not true, however, that some - by no means all! - of the rules
of "proper" English were not based on observation of actual use?  I
believe several were added in an attempt to make it more Latinlike, in
the hope that this would somehow cause it to gain some of the cachet of
Latin.  The canonical example is the split-infinitive prohibition, which
as I understand it, grew out of the fact that the Latin infinitive is a
single word and therefore unsplittable - which makes observation of the
rule much more convenient in Latin. :)

> I disagree with your final statement.  I understand your use of
> "native" to mean the language we learn in the green years after our
> birth, but "native" speech does not end at kindergarten.  The rules we
> learn in school are no more "made up" than the rules we learn at home,
> although they may seem so to us.  Mastering our complex "native"
> language and its various discourses and registers can take us well
> into our young adulthood.  Sometimes it takes a lifetime, especially
> if we want to write and publish.  Aren't we all still learning?
I would, in turn,  disagree that mastering English discourse is in the
same category as learning English as a native language.  I would argue,
in fact, that the English of educated discourse is actually a second
language (to those of us whose first language is English itself), which
we gain greater and greater fluency in over time (hopefully), but which
is distinct from our mother tongue.  As with any other second language,
it can cause interference with the native language, and if separated
from the native language long enough, one can even seem to forget it,
but that doesn't identify the second language with the native one. :)

> Who is that "one" referring to, Marcos?  Are you misunderstanding ME?
Certainly not!  I didn't mean you at all.  I was simply trying to
characterise the motivation behind the anti-prescriptivist sentiment you
cited.  I do apologize for the misunderstanding; I certainly meant no
offense to you.

-Marcos

Replies