When does poor grammar become evolving language?
In: 1546
In the Isle of Man, our local, distinct language (a form of Gaelic, think of a mix of Welsh, Irish and Scottish, but unique) has been described by several linguistic experts to be a ‘dead language’, despite the fact that, having been suppressed by English rule for hundreds of years, in the last 30 years or so learning Manx has been taken up by a huge amount of both locals and people who have moved here wanting to get to know the culture better, and a lot of signage/place names/business names etc. these days is English/Manx bilingual. The reason they give for calling it a ‘dead language’ is that the Manx speakers argue amongst themselves about proper sentence construction, grammar and spelling of words etc, based on various, differing sources from hundreds of years ago, rather than allowing it to evolve as a language. I’ve worked as a graphic designer here for 30 years, and there was a time that you knew damn well that everything you were asked to produce with some Manx involved, you would get a complaint from a few people saying that ‘that’s an incorrect spelling of X’ or ‘you should have put X instead of Y’.
I know this is probably not particularly ELI5, but TLDR, language always evolves, the direction it takes will always annoy some, but at least it evolves. If we all spoke Middle English these days I wouldn’t be able to say GTFOOH you pedantic bastards!
When a million idiots say “literally” when they mean “figuratively,” eventually the dictionary changes that sometimes literally means figuratively.
I’ll never accept it, I won’t parrot the idiots, but that’s how they do.
Also, a “reboot” is throwing away the characters, stories, and canon of what came before. Restarting the storyline 20 years later is a continuation, or possibly a sequel, but it isn’t a reboot. But the idiots will keep using the wrong word, so. Yeah. That’s how they do.
My non-professional opinion is that language is always evolving, and once something becomes widely accepted, it becomes part of the language.
I think a good litmus test would be: if you use this word / phrase in an essay for high school or college, will it take away points from your score? If the answer is yes, then it is more likely it’s still poor grammar and hasn’t reached acceptance yet.
10,000 bce? Grammar did not come from the gods on golden plates. it’s just fashion and evolving communication needs. It has always changed.
It depends on the language. It’s basically what others have already said, but, since you didn’t specify a language, I wanted to add that English scholars tend to be more descriptivist, so English evolves fast, as grammatical “errors” become accepted. Descriptivism roughly means the standard for the language readily accommodates the way speakers form the language. For instance, the philosophy of many dictionary companies in English is to *describe* the meaning of words as they’re used, not to ascribe meaning to them. So, what is considered the English *language* evolves fast.
Some other languages, like my native Spanish, have a more prescriptive nature. We have what are called “academies of the language,” which are basically offshoots in almost every Spanish speaking country of the one and only Spanish Royal Academy in Spain. They all *prescribe* or dictate speakers how to speak the language. Actually, the motto of the Royal Academy is to “purify, fix, and dignify” the whole of the Spanish language. So, the standard for Spanish doesn’t really accommodate for *peoplespeak*. Ours is a very slowly evolving language by design, with the elites fixed in their purpose that all Spanish speakers be able to read Cervantes in its original form. That would be like demanding all English speakers abide by Shakespearean English as the standard.
“I could care less” … I just need the people who say this to think about it for more than half a second lol
But always is my answer. That’s how language evolves. People are lazy.
From the first moment. Grammar is not language. Language defines grammar, not the other way around.
The point is, a grammar is a MODEL of actual language. It’s not the thing itself, and like any model, it has its limitations. With the exception of artifical languages such as Esperanto, no-one sat down and “designed” the rules by which the languages any of us speak would actually work; they evolved over time. So any grammar is inevitably incomplete, overly simplistic and out of date. And in the case of any grammar, it’s also inevitably geographically and culturally biased, to boot, reflecting the culture and prejudices of the people whoi drew it up.
There are contexts in which understanding a grammar of a language is useful – but anyone who thinks that “bad grammar” is somehow the same as “poor usage of the language” simply doesn’t understand how language works.
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