(Or, if you are a prescriptive grammar purist, "I ought awkwardly to introduce myself".) I am not a prescriptive grammar purist, but I sympathise greatly with the concerns of those who are.
The power of words has a persuasive effect on people because you never know who might be listening. Angels especially understand this. Welcome to the board, Sanctuary Knave, and thanks for giving me a short chuckle. twin
Hello, Sanctuary Knave, and welcome to the forum. The forum is about Anglicanism and not grammar. So don't be worried about the latter.
Hello. Welcome. Thread hijack alert, because language and grammar interests me (yall should have chosen calculus or something I despise). NGL, I honestly am not sure that I believe in the dichotomy of 'descriptive' and 'prescriptive,' because a prescriptive grammar is honestly just a description of a literary register of English. A grammar is by its very nature both descriptive and prescriptive, because it's supposed to predict whether or not a sentence is well-formed, no matter what language or dialect it describes. Even if it is something outlandish like an English-Martian Lunar pidgin or whatever, it still has rules to sentence formation. So you can actually have an incorrect sentence in a perceived lower-class dialect. If you want to speak that dialect authentically (say you're writing a book or something and the characters speak Appalachian English or Cockney), then guess what? All of the sudden you're dealing with a functionally *gasp* prescriptive grammar, because not any corruption of standard English will do. You have to imitate what people actually say. More concretely, nobody raps in the Elizabethan rhetorical style. That's an old a joke for a reason. "Yo. The bruthas and I do behold the grievous estate of the hood, wherefore we blame not those homies that join in activities unlawful and wretched," is not going to be topping any albums for essentially the same reasons why nobody publishes unmodified prose in the AAVE proper to rap, even though there is no Chicago Manual of Style or APA - no analogous authority - to explain in detail to a songwriter that the prestige dialect of the rap genre does not use archaicisms such as no do-support on the negator and use of the demonstrative with the nominal head of a relative clause. The prestige dialect in this case still has a grammar and style that is acceptable, but it has other strategies. It still prescribes things. There is thus a tacit prescriptive grammar and style guide for things like rap, but it doesn't have the connotation that schoolhouse don't-split-the-infinitive maximally trimmed English has.
Prescriptive and descriptive grammars do exist. Prescriptive grammars tend to be somewhat dogmatic and tell people how to use a language. In general, they were how grammars used to be compiled. Nowadays, descriptive grammars are more the norm. They describe how people use the language rather than telling people how to use it. Of course, languages do have to have certain rules that its users follow. If they did not then people would struggle to communicate with each other. However, the descriptive grammar describes those rules rather than prescribes them. For example, no modern, descriptive grammar of English should tell you that an infinitive cannot be split or that at sentence must not end with a preposition. Of course, older, prescriptive grammars would indeed give you those rules. Another problem with prescriptive grammars was they often attempted to prescribe English grammar by using the same methods used to describe Latin grammar. I possess a delightfully wonderful grammar of English written in the early twentieth century. It prescribes language that simply is no longer spoken. It also tells us such things as English has four grammatical genders and, I cannot recall the number, cases. Of course English has no grammatical genders and very few English nouns or pronouns decline to show case.
Wikipedia may resolve this budding dispute. First of all, we, looking at this, must concede that there is no universally accepted definition of what a 'prescriptive' grammar is, but that it is generally associated with an ideal speech pattern. So, yes, you're right, they do indeed exist. But, as I said earlier, I am of the opinion that a prescriptive grammar is a descriptive grammar of a certain register, regardless of the creator's aim in doing so. That's just the way I conceptualize it. Ultimately this all gets to fuzzy theories about what language and grammar are. I suppose when you're arguing that a prescriptive grammar is one whereof its creator's aim is to impose an idealized register/sociolect/swaggy nomenclature at the expense of the target's indigenous speech, then you have an ironclad prescriptive grammar. OK. But I balk at this definiton because it's so narrowly centered around modern social concerns that it's egocentric. The concept itself might not describe, ironically enough, how historical civilizations have related to literary standards before nationalism. I can think of maybe Roman 'latinitas' as one case in which it does do so. And that brings us back to a grammar's definition. Does a grammar incorporate the grammarians' aims? Because accusing grammarians of snobbery about less prestigious sociolects is not really an analysis of a grammatical system - it's bashing the grammarian's intentions. If we say the grammar is 1) an exposition of a language or dialects' governing rules, or 2) the rules themselves, then apparently prescriptivism applies to the grammarian's ideology, and not the grammar itself. Chicago is not prescriptive, but its editors are. If the above definition is expanded to include the editors' aims, then Chicago is prescriptive. And that might reconcile the above two posts, by digging into what we define as grammar to start with. If we don't incorporate the grammarian's intentions, the conclusion of not doing so will get us to a point where your twentieth-century grammar is parsed (pun intended) as absurdly trying to describe a literary insert-greek-root-lect of English that discretely has four genders. If we do incorporate those intentions, we get to the conclusion that the twentieth-century grammar should be parsed as absurdly trying to enforce an idealization of English that, in fact, has four genders. Either way, it's a lame grammar.
What a weak judgement based only on two things I said about it, without you seeing it and not putting it within the context of the time when it was written.
First off, I was speaking in jest. It probably is really cool. But come to think of it, Anglican clergymen were doing a fine job making a grammar of a language as foreign Ainu at the same time, and the Jesuits compiled indispensable resources, yes, using Latin grammar on Japanese a couple of centuries prior, so NGL, the idea that they were trying to assert that English has four genders, when everybody knew perfectly well that the oldest Old English only had three, as does nearly the rest of attested early Indo-European (it was fashionable to study things like Sanskrit then), does seem like the author was at least indulging something.
In any case, I'm sorry if I upset you by criticizing your grammar. That was not my aim. Forget about how many genders English may or may not have had. Maybe you can share about it some time.
That was quite the wild rabbit trail, wasn't it? @Sanctuary Knave , we hope we'll see quite a lot of you on the forum!
Welcome and thank you for this. You seem to be in the forefront of a declining movement to keep the American English language similar to REAL English. Well done. I'll look forward to more of your input. .
I do like German's relative conservatism, not that I've much studied German, but I get 'good vibes' from Bach's and Pachelbel's vocal music. There's something catchy about it to me. Do you happen to know Low German at all? Low German is supposed to be more closely related to English than High German or Dutch, so I have this weird desire to read about it.
In that case why not go for Friesian. It's meant to be the language most closely related to English that's not mutually understandable, unlike Scots or American is.