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Yes, you were taught a set of language rules in school. By what objective standard are those rules correct? "Because I learned them in school" isn't a good answ

Yes, you were taught a set of language rules in school. By what objective standard are those rules correct? "Because I learned them in school" isn't a good answer. I also learned in school that it's necessary to raise one's hand before speaking, to ask an authority figure's permission before using the bathroom, and to write math proofs in a two-column format. The point is that plenty of things you learn in school are just social conventions that are useful in certain situations, not reflections of any objective reality. I'm not arguing against the existence of a language standard -- I'm arguing against its validity. As for your intentional misspellings, that is a strawman -- nobody actually writes or talks like that, so you're actually deviating from the cultural phenomenon, there. If people did actually commonly write "iz" for "is", and "know" for "no" (and the rest of your examples), then that sentence would take no effort to understand, and yes, I'd be fine with it.

bluGill 8y ago
The standard for correct rules: when two people communicate they emerge at the end with a shared mental model of the subject. People make up languages all the time. You can write your own rules to make the above grammar be instructions on getting to my village. You could write a different set of rules that make it an order to make my roast duck for dinner. (you can have fun coming up with even more bizarre things that it could mean under some rule system)
- umanwizard 8y ago
  > The standard for correct rules: when two people communicate they emerge at the end with a shared mental model of the subject. By this standard, using "their", "there", and "they're" or "your" and "you're" completely randomly is fine -- it's almost impossible for it to cause misunderstanding.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    In fact this is false. Even though in verbal speech they are the same, in written they are different. I have known people who didn't understand something written because the wrong word was written, once someone read it out loud they understood it. Of course there is no reason the above people couldn't get used to one spelling if they changed the rules. We just need to have universal agreement to change the rules. (I have no clue how you would do that)

bluGill 8y ago

The standard for correct rules: when two people communicate they emerge at the end with a shared mental model of the subject. People make up languages all the time. You can write your own rules to make the above grammar be instructions on getting to my village. You could write a different set of rules that make it an order to make my roast duck for dinner. (you can have fun coming up with even more bizarre things that it could mean under some rule system)

umanwizard 8y ago
> The standard for correct rules: when two people communicate they emerge at the end with a shared mental model of the subject. By this standard, using "their", "there", and "they're" or "your" and "you're" completely randomly is fine -- it's almost impossible for it to cause misunderstanding.
- bluGill 8y ago
  In fact this is false. Even though in verbal speech they are the same, in written they are different. I have known people who didn't understand something written because the wrong word was written, once someone read it out loud they understood it. Of course there is no reason the above people couldn't get used to one spelling if they changed the rules. We just need to have universal agreement to change the rules. (I have no clue how you would do that)