Sam Hartman <hartm...@debian.org> writes: > The above said, I'd urge you to think carefully about what English is, > and whether it really is standardized. Chicago Style (which is far to > conservative in its handling of gender and pronouns for Debian) gives up > on Grammar fairly quickly. It notes that there are many schools of > thought and not a lot of agreement: > There are many schools of grammatical thought—and differing > vocabularies for describing grammar. Grammatical theories have been > in upheaval in recent years. It seems that the more we learn, the > less we know. (CMOS 17 5.2)
This is, incidentally, an utterly fascinating topic, and I'd encourage anyone who is curious to read or listen to information on linguistics. (I first got interested in this through listening to _Understanding Linguistics_, a course by James McWhorter through The Great Courses. I recommend all of his courses.) The perspective from linguistics is markedly different than the perspective one gets from style guides: 1. To a lot of linguists, spoken language is "natural" human language; written language is a relatively new construction with considerably more artificial and in some cases utterly arbitrary rules. Some of those rules were intentionally added to the language for various reasons, such as to serve as class markers. (The story of why there's a "b" in the spelling of "debt" and "doubt" when those words have never been pronounced that way in the entire history of English is rather fascinating.) 2. Linguists are generally descriptive. They're way more interested in describing how native speakers use the language and cataloging it than they are in telling people how to use it. 3. To a linguist, the grammar of a language is the rules that a native speaker follows. The more flawlessly all native speakers follow a rule, the more linguistic "credibility" it has; a lot of the rules that people get wrong all the time and have to be taught are perceived by linguists as social constructs or class markers or other cultural markers rather than true, innate grammar of the language. So "correct" and "incorrect" become more complicated and interesting ideas. Languages *do* have grammar, sometimes incredibly complicated grammar. English (for reasons that a good linguistics course will get into, related to the number of people who learned it as a second language) is a relatively uncomplicated language grammatically speaking. Languages spoken by only small numbers of people tend to be *way* more complex grammatically than languages spoken by large numbers of people. But English still has some rather surprising rules that nonetheless every native speaker will get right without thinking about it. I think my favorite example (this was from one of McWhorter's lectures) is that, in US English, one says "a can of corn" but "a can of peas." Why is "corn" singular but "peas" are plural? There's a complex grammatical explanation about mass nouns and count nouns, which doesn't really answer the question, since why is "corn" a mass noun but "peas" is a count noun? Well, there are some possible etymological explanations in US English, but we don't really know. There's no entirely satisfying explanation, it's a rather obscure corner of grammar, and most people are not going to be able to recite any grammatical rule for this. And yet "a can of corns" sounds obviously wrong, and if someone says that, they are probably either a toddler or someone who is not a native speaker of US English. (My recollection is that this specific rule is different in UK English.) Once you learn about examples like this that are followed uniformly, and then other examples that people are taught rigorously but break all the time with no loss in comprehension and usually unremarked (such as using "me" where one is supposed to use "I"), the whole concept of what grammar means and what "correct" means gets much more interestingly fuzzy. It's always worth keeping in the back of one's mind that very closely observed and precise grammatical rules in English has long been used as a marker of education. The rules are arbitrary and not "natural" to the language somewhat intentionally, in order to make them something that one has to consciously study instead of learn naturally as a toddler, thus proving that one has the leisure and money and connections to have gone to a school to teach you "proper" grammar, which in turn marks one as part of a certain (presumed superior) social class. That's... not necessarily something that Debian would want to embrace politically. :) Language as spoken by ordinary people on the street tends to be way more fluid and changing and adjustable than those schoolbook grammatical rules. (I realize that this can be kind of frustrating for people who aren't native English speakers, because those rules can provide the structure that they rely on to express themselves in English.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
