Michael Spivak, we salute you!
Jun. 18th, 2003 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexr_rwxkuro5hin rocks my universe.
In other news, they're running this really excellent article about pronouns and gender-inspecific-ness, which I think is a really important issue -- we don't think about it too much, but English really and truly does have some pretty glaring deficiencies. S/he is b0rked, and it's just confusing to use "she" when you mean "some singular random person, whose gender is unspecified and unimportant".
I mean, sometimes, you do need that shade of meaning -- you really /want/ to mean "this person is male" when you say "he", sometimes. Or "this person is female" when you say "she". That's important -- or at least the ability to make that distinction when you want it, is important. So there really /does/ need to be a gender-inspecific pronoun. The article is suggesting that "they" is probably the best way to do it, and I guess that's a pretty good one, really -- surely much better than "s/he" (which is brain-damaged -- the article points out, rightly, that Pronouns Are There To Be Short). On an idealistic level, I think Spivak is a much better solution, but that'd be pretty intrusive to the language to just suddenly inject this -- perhaps a core group of influential people could start using it. Maybe we get it used in the next Justin Timberlake single or something...
I came up with something a very much like the Spivakian solution, the "E", some years ago, independently... only I called it "'e" -- which is to say, that mine was like "she" and like "he", only with the first chunk unpronounced and left intentionally ambiguous. Sort of a Heisenpronoun, if you will.
Thinking about this sort of thing gets me pretty well riled up about people who try to "correct" other people's usage and stagnate the language. Things are changing, and have been, for forever. In other parts of the country, or social classes, or circles, people have vocabulary and constructions and shades of meaning that /you don't/ -- it's easier for them to express the things as they think about them because their usage is formed around their experiences, and you don't think and weren't raised the same way. "Standard English" is a lie passed off to us by 18th-century English aristocrat prescriptive grammarians with nothing better to do than rail against how people actually speak...
Language is there for people to use. Language changes over time. English is a synthesis of a billion different things, and no one dialect of it is any more "correct" than any other one, and people's efforts to use "Standard American English" in order to destroy other variations on the language, I find quite disgusting.
This rant brought to you by the letter 'j' and, evidently, some bubbling frustration that I'd been unaware of.
(it'd be unnatural and stilted to say "some bubbling frustration of which I'd been unaware" -- the meaning is clear with the original wording.)
Hrum, what do you English majors out there think? Denise? Cimmy? Anybody else?
In other news, they're running this really excellent article about pronouns and gender-inspecific-ness, which I think is a really important issue -- we don't think about it too much, but English really and truly does have some pretty glaring deficiencies. S/he is b0rked, and it's just confusing to use "she" when you mean "some singular random person, whose gender is unspecified and unimportant".
I mean, sometimes, you do need that shade of meaning -- you really /want/ to mean "this person is male" when you say "he", sometimes. Or "this person is female" when you say "she". That's important -- or at least the ability to make that distinction when you want it, is important. So there really /does/ need to be a gender-inspecific pronoun. The article is suggesting that "they" is probably the best way to do it, and I guess that's a pretty good one, really -- surely much better than "s/he" (which is brain-damaged -- the article points out, rightly, that Pronouns Are There To Be Short). On an idealistic level, I think Spivak is a much better solution, but that'd be pretty intrusive to the language to just suddenly inject this -- perhaps a core group of influential people could start using it. Maybe we get it used in the next Justin Timberlake single or something...
I came up with something a very much like the Spivakian solution, the "E", some years ago, independently... only I called it "'e" -- which is to say, that mine was like "she" and like "he", only with the first chunk unpronounced and left intentionally ambiguous. Sort of a Heisenpronoun, if you will.
Thinking about this sort of thing gets me pretty well riled up about people who try to "correct" other people's usage and stagnate the language. Things are changing, and have been, for forever. In other parts of the country, or social classes, or circles, people have vocabulary and constructions and shades of meaning that /you don't/ -- it's easier for them to express the things as they think about them because their usage is formed around their experiences, and you don't think and weren't raised the same way. "Standard English" is a lie passed off to us by 18th-century English aristocrat prescriptive grammarians with nothing better to do than rail against how people actually speak...
Language is there for people to use. Language changes over time. English is a synthesis of a billion different things, and no one dialect of it is any more "correct" than any other one, and people's efforts to use "Standard American English" in order to destroy other variations on the language, I find quite disgusting.
This rant brought to you by the letter 'j' and, evidently, some bubbling frustration that I'd been unaware of.
(it'd be unnatural and stilted to say "some bubbling frustration of which I'd been unaware" -- the meaning is clear with the original wording.)
Hrum, what do you English majors out there think? Denise? Cimmy? Anybody else?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-06-17 11:14 pm (UTC)In many ways, though, it is sad to see a language be destroyed by making so many changes to it that you can hardly recognize it for what it was. My example here is Japanese. The Japanese language, in addition to hardly ever being a written language of its own (the kanji are all Chinese,) is bastardizing itself by making most of its new vocabulary directly from English. The Japanese word for 'upgrade' is the engrishified "version-up." Surely, they could have created a purely Japanese word meaning the same thing...
I will end this remarkably long comment (for me) by my own personal bias: "British English is better English."
no subject
Date: 2003-06-18 01:47 pm (UTC)You've definitely got a point there -- I suppose it's a value judgement that needs to be made, whether we think it's more important to keep around interesting regional constructions like "might could", or to have things be more homogeneous, or to allow different groups to develop their own usages as necessary... I suppose it is more efficient (just from a smoothly-running-society perspective) to go in for the homogeneity, but we stand to lose so much culture if SAE blows away pockets of interesting usages. I suppose, on a bigger scale, whole languages are dying every day...
My stepfather, who's from Missouri, has this construction I don't think I could even reproduce properly (but I'd recognize it if I heard somebody use it) that involves the phrase "where at" ... although things like that have gradually washed out of his idiolect over the years.
> ... Japanese ...
You know, there was another island nation that had something similar happen to it, about a thousand years ago. Suddenly, new words started coming in from Latin roots, but the core of the language has remained Germanic :)
> "British English is better English."
I think I share your bias, Ross :)
no subject
Date: 2003-06-18 03:04 pm (UTC)In many ways, though, it is sad to see a language be destroyed by making so many changes to it that you can hardly recognize it for what it was. My example here is Japanese. The Japanese language, in addition to hardly ever being a written language of its own (the kanji are all Chinese,) is bastardizing itself by making most of its new vocabulary directly from English.
I believe I see the silhouette of what you mean, but I'm too trapped within my own ennui to act. Languages are not destroyed1 and certainly not by change to the language. Does the new Japanese vocabulary have different phrasings or grammar rules to any great extent? Cross-mingling is anything, but unnatural. A purer form of any language merely means an older form.
1. Unless, of course, you destroy all those who speak a language.
~samarin~