Lingual Relativity

Are you a lingual relativist?

  • Yes, I am a lingual relativist

    Votes: 16 28.1%
  • No, I am a lingual absolutist

    Votes: 28 49.1%
  • "I don't know and I suck"

    Votes: 13 22.8%

  • Total voters
    57
This is a much more thorough and well thought out post than my thread deserves. Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)

Long-winded, perhaps...basically I agree with downtown; if in some contexts you can deviate from the standard (a non-standard English speaker trying to speak like a standard American or British person among their community would be shunned) it is still "correct" for that same person to write the standard way. However, standard can be a messay affair sometimes too.

For an interesting real-world example, Brazilians and the Portuguese have disputes about this; Brazil uses different spellings and written accent marks, besides a lot of different vocabulary and pronunciation, and when the Portuguese academy scolds them, they threaten to rename their language "Brazilian." :D The issue is that Brazil is very much the senior partner in the relationship, with 20 times the population and much more economic clout, even if Portugual is the mother country of the language.
 
Downtown hasn't been in this thread, just me with his avatar.

Hilarious...granted, I haven't slept at all, but it's funny how my brain saw the avatar and info and swapped in the name downtown. I could have sworn that I had actually seen the username "downtown"...

See, there is no objectivity...;)
 
I dont really know what this thread is on about.
 
Your poll is poopy!

A word communicates meaning. It doesn't have to be in a dictionary, and it doesn't have to be of a certain age, but it has to express something.

That imaginary codex isn't imaginary, it exists in speakers' minds.
 
The best way to communicate would depend on your audience and how they will best receive the information. Generally if you are writing something then 99% of the time yes, you should be following standard protocol for whatever language you are communicating with. Most speakers learn to read the same way with the same rules so this is the most efficient and sensible thing IMHO.

This being human language however, I think it naturally evolves in the sense that sometimes an incorrect usage becomes normal, or more accepted then it should be. For instance "irregardless" is now so commonly misused, that the Oxford Dictionary I got in 2005 has a special entry for it, specifically saying "this word is wrong and you are an idiot if you use it" (paraphrasing.)

I should add that there are a few quirky/minor rules in English that can be usually overlooked, however, simply because the majority of people don't even know what they are. I am sure I broke several grammatical rules in this post, for instance.
 
What the carnal knowledge application is this poopity thread about? "Correct" was invented by the Man to keep the bruthas down. "Convenient" and "more understandable" maybe, but never "correct." Never, I say!
 
Mid Atlantic English is the only acceptable pronunciation for me.

I say "No" to it because when you start allowing a single language to have multiple spellings, you aren't speaking the exact same language. E.g. American English vs. British English are very similiar yet aren't the same language/dialect. Efficiency of communication drops significantly if you allow 'relativism'.

Yeah they are the same language. Dialect is a totally different thing. They are different dialects.
 
Mid Atlantic English is the only acceptable pronunciation for me.



Yeah they are the same language. Dialect is a totally different thing. They are different dialects.

But regardless, each has a set of words and standard spellings that they don't share. Having to bridge those differences is inefficient. It's a good example of why a set dialect should have have a standard ruleset in order to facilliate efficient communication.
 
This poll needs more intermediary options.

And I'm wondering where, for example, Grice's maxims of efficient communication fit in. Or the need for phonic clarity. In the only language I know, there are many words that sound too damn similar to each other.

The assignment of sounds/spellings to meanings is ultimately arbitrary, but there are better and worse ways of making those assignments. Take "y'all" for example. Usually considered a sign of low class (and intelligence?), this word has great potential if used properly (i.e., only for second person plural, not singular). By distinguishing second person plural from second person singular, we can clarify some statements without making them any more verbose. Yay!
 
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