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> "Rules" arise out of usage. Academicians study the language, and then,
> reasoning backward from the patterns they notice, infer that the language
> has "rules" which generate individual statements. There is no
justification
> whatsoever for this inference.
Actually. A pattern of usage is, by definition, a descriptive rule. And one
can infer a prescriptive rule of grammar from a descriptive rule with
additional premises about the value of commonality in usage. You yourself do
that later in your own post when you say "If [people] wish their utterances
to be transparent, i.e. not interfere with their intended
meaning, they will make these utterances conform to the habits of the
linguistic community within which they speak or write." Whether you intended
it to be or not, this remark offers a justification for inferring a
prescriptive rule like "Thou shalt include a verb in every sentence" from a
descriptive rule that members of the [English] community habitually include
a verb in most sentences.
Another value that justifies prescriptive grammars: We want to communicate
not just with contemporaries, but we desire also to read the works of the
long dead, and send messages to future centuries. Prescriptive rules slow
the inevitable evolution of language and thereby stretch out the span of
time in which we can communicate. We can read the original documents
surrounding the Salem witch trials (easily) and Shakespeare (not so
easily!), both written circa 1600. But an English speaker living then could
make no sense of any English written 400 years before: it was a foreign
language. It is the advent of prescriptive grammar that gives us the power
to read, and be read, across so many centuries.
> All rules are descriptive, even when the rule-makers think they are being
> prescriptive.
All *moral* rules and all laws passed by legislatures are prescriptive. Many
of them are also descriptive; that is, they describe common practice. Some
are *only* prescriptive (the ones that are rarely obeyed). Many states in
the USA still have laws forbidding fornication out-of-wedlock. (By the way,
its silly to say there are no prescriptive laws, when prescriptive laws can
be constructed as easily as sentences. In the end, the distinction is just
linguistic: "Thou shalt do X" instead of "People tend to do X". I understand
that you have this theory that all prescriptive laws originate as inferences
from descriptive ones, but you mislead when you express this as the claim
that there are no prescriptive laws.)
> In the 17th century, the rising bourgeoisie needed "handbooks"
(crib-sheets)
> for all manner of manners, including how to speak and write "correctly".
And thank goodness! The spread of those grammatical handbooks and their
prescriptive rules is what slowed the change of English enough to ensure
that we can read the Bard and his witch-hunting contemporaries. By the way,
you trivialize the phenomenon by linking it only to "manners". At stake was
manners, money, and more: That 17th century brought the spread of the
printing press and the potential of *mass* communication for the first time.
But there was a hitch: regional variations within a given language
community. That same century brought an explosion of European colonies all
over the New World and the coasts of Africa and Asia. Without common
prescriptive rules, these colonies and their motherlands would have lost,
within two or three centuries, the ability to communicate without
translators.
(By the way, your chronology is oversimplified: there *were* grammars and
style guides in Roman times.)
> It
> is a characteristic of bourgeois culture to assume that there exists for
> every area of life "objective" facts, or "laws",
> a priori to any actual existent.
Certainly, some people have just "assumed" this or that prescriptive law,
but many others *conclude* from reasoning and evidence that this or that
prescriptive law is justified.
> Needless to say, since the bourgeois were
> making lots of money, pedants flocked to supply this market with
> instructions and self-help books.
And as a technical writer you are shocked at this mercenary use of
linguistic knowledge! ;-)
> Having a lot of fun on my day off "real work",
You are going to be a lot of fun to have on this list, Chris. But I won't
get much work done with you around! :-) Now as for your use of "bourgeoisie"
as a put-down, I have some bad news: the beatniks are not the latest thing,
jazz isn't selling well (Daddio!), and as for the revolution of the
proletariat . . . um, how shall I put this . . . well, have you been to
Berlin lately?
(P.S. I did notice that "all manner of manners". Nice!)
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