5 ms·
My instinct is to mock the ridiculousness of campaigning for correct use of apostrophes. Since english is pretty lawless these days and often gets dragged in ne
by ImaCake 7y ago
My instinct is to mock the ridiculousness of campaigning for correct use of apostrophes. Since english is pretty lawless these days and often gets dragged in new and wonderful directions. It seems stupid to rail against the tide of mutable grammar and syntax. But what about the development of High German and standard Italian? Both are examples where, with sufficient resources and nationalism, you can coalesce a disparate heap of diverge language(s) and make something coherent that people will stick to.
Both of them (and others I can think of) had central government sponsored organisations to help. But english doesn't have anything more formal than the Oxford Dictionary, whoever decides state curriculums, and ESL staff. I wonder what organisations have the biggest impact on contemporary english? Google and Microsoft with their spellcheckers maybe?
- Taniwha 7y agoThe think is we dont need them in spoken English, we understand what people mean. Theres no reason why we need them when we write
- krisAU 7y agoI would argue that we convey the same meaning during speech by changing pitch, stressing certain vowels and consonants, etc. Things that we can't do in writing without things like apostrophes.
- ImaCake 7y agoThis is a good point. The way I usually think of this is that most of the time we simply don't need as much redundancy as we have encoded in language. It only becomes important in instructions for complicated things, scientific papers, or when you are communicating over the top of loud noises or a bad phone connection. I don't think explains the forces that shape our language fully, but it does provide a starting point!
- solarkraft 7y agoThere absolutely is. Your misspelling of thing completely distracted me while reading, checking whether you were making some more complex joke, actually meant think, etc.