Re: On prescriptions and misunderstanding: was can/may

On Mon, 27 Dec 2004 15:06:23 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

>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. :)
I strongly believe it's different varieties of one and the same language.
I'm very sensitive to this questions because I'm defending the opinion that
all over the German speaking area, the same language is spoken: German, even
though it's split up into many different traditional local varieties that
are mostly not mutually intelligible. In spite of using a dialect in
everyday speech, my native language is a rich language with an old tradition
of literature, and not just a poor, mostly illiterate language spoken only
by few in some remote region.

Opinions are very divided, and there are e.g. many who consider Low German
to be a language of its own. It's not as much question of linguistics (and
neither a question of the political definition) as rather a question of
self-identity: There are those who identify themselves as opponents, and
others who identify themselves as parts of a literary tradition.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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