7 ms·

Thats seems more like a arbitrary cultural distinction versus a rule. It sounds odd, but a half second of thought should make it obvious it makes perfect sense.

eru 5y ago
What's the difference between 'arbitrary cultural distinction' and 'rule of a language'?
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  RADAR vs radar. Acronyms should be all upper case. But no one really cares for words that have entered common languge
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    The dictionaries we have (Oxford, Merriam-Webster etc.) are all descriptive rather than prescriptive.
    - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
      I mean true but this is like pointing out that no one plays baseball with a golf club. One is ubiquitous because it's useful and the other isn't. Prescriptive dictionaries do exist but they're mostly used by specialists to understand specific usages within a time-limited context like "what did 'gay' mean in 1920s california" etc. Similarly there might possibly be some training reason to try to hit a baseball with a golf club. But if that applies to you you're probably aware of it.
      - lupire 5y ago
        > understand specific usages within a time-limited context That sounds descriptive to me.
        8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
        Yeah you're right. I guess a style guide or a usage guide would be a prescriptivist dictionary? I'd always heard "prescriptivist dictionary" is a thing that exists but now that I'm thinking about it I'm kind of doubting it.
        bobthepanda 5y ago
        I suppose the only thing where that might actually make sense is if you're a lawyer, where slightly different wordings have big impacts on what a contract or ruling actually means.
  - gumby 5y ago
    This differs among languages, e.g. NATO vs Nato, and even dialects. Acronyms look weird to me when not written in all caps, yet when they turn into commonplace proper nouns (e.g. when people an acronym without even knowing the expansion) such spelling is essentially vestigial. Luckily English spelling has a fondness for vestigial forms, unlike languages like German that undergo periodic spelling "reform"
    - eru 5y ago
      Not sure German undergoes periodic spelling reform? There was one attempt recently, but it didn't change much. The Turkish switch to Latin script about 100 years ago was a much bigger deal. And they went completely phonetic.
      - samus 5y ago
        There was an initial effort to set up some rules in the 19th century, a highly confusing back-and-forth during the Drittes Reich period between Antiqua and Fraktur-style writing, and the utter clusterfuck of a spelling reform you mentioned, which eerily reminds me of the Python 2/3 debacle. Going completely phonetic is also possible, but fraught with severe problems: - major convincing of all literate speakers required. - there might be more than one way to spell certain words if phonetic features of the language make it difficult. For example consonant clusters or vowel modifications by tones, such as in Vietnamese. Representing just the tones is also already quite tricky. - definite FU to the dialects since the spelling is going to be aligned to the prestige variant or to a compromise variant nobody speaks. - all existing literature would become difficult to understand within a generation or two. - A phonetic writing system, together with pronunciation rules a linguist would still understand in a few hundred years, makes it possible to fix pronunciation. We humans are surprisingly good at coming up with such systems. But languages still change, and the writing system will therefore accumulate artifacts. Cue the ğ in Turkish, which changed its role to a vowel lengthener. Going phonetic is still the rational choice when introducing an alphabet for a language that didn't have one before, or one of a different kind. You have to alphabetize people anyways, and there is not much literature yet.
      - gumby 5y ago
  - function_seven 5y ago
    One style guide I've seen (forget where) tells you to lowercase acronyms and capitalize initialisms. (But initial letter still uppercases when it's a proper noun) So Covid, Nasa, and radar/laser; but FBI, CIA, and UPS. I do this in my own writing, except for “NASA”. Just feels wrong to lowercase that one. And of course, laser and radar are just words at this point. Their origins may be acronymic, but like you said: common language mints new words.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
  Honestly it's grim but the social power of the group that uses it. If you speak a prestige dialect your patterns are "rules" and if you don't your patterns are "errors." But in both cases it has nothing to do with the language per se, just social and political relationships.
lukeschlather 5y ago
All linguistic rules are arbitrary cultural distinction. They're used for error correction and conveying subtly different meanings. In the "big red ball" vs. "red big ball" case it can be deliberately used to change the way the term parses. The "normal" one means a ball that is both red and big. The abnormal one implies that "big ball" is lexically a single object, perhaps a proper noun, and that the "red" modifier is being applied to it.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  I dont really think thats a valid distinction. Is there a false/different final "thing" that is being described?
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    To make this more apparent, “that big yellow bird” just means any old ordinary bird, whereas people would probably take “that yellow big bird” to refer to Big Bird the Sesame Street character. So that can totally be a valid parsing of the sentence.
  - ericbarrett 5y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "false," but "different," definitely. Hyphens have fallen somewhat out of fashion in modern English but they can provide clarity in these cases. Let's change the noun. If a native speaker says, "big red hands," you can normally assume they're speaking of large hands which are colored red. However, if they say "red big hands," this parses to "red big-hands," meaning "big-hands" is treated as a title, or perhaps a brand. You might see this title capitalized: "red Big-Hands". Going back to the first example, if you mean "red hands" as a title, you could write "big Red Hands" or better yet, "big Red-Hands," meaning something big with the title Red-Hands. Since the adjective order is the same as grammatically conventional English, the hyphen helps distinguish the writer's meaning. But nowadays I find writers often leave it out when the adjective order implies the multi-word title.
    - lupire 5y ago
canjobear 5y ago
"Rule" in this context means a regular distinction which speakers know and follow implicitly. Not a prescriptive rule that you learn in school, like "always put periods inside quotes."
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
  I'm curious to see how this goes for you because in my experience this site is HARDCORE prescriptivist almost like it's a religion it's a bit scary sometimes.
  - canjobear 5y ago
    Most people are. I'm used to it.

eru 5y ago

What's the difference between 'arbitrary cultural distinction' and 'rule of a language'?

NikolaeVarius 5y ago
RADAR vs radar. Acronyms should be all upper case. But no one really cares for words that have entered common languge
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  The dictionaries we have (Oxford, Merriam-Webster etc.) are all descriptive rather than prescriptive.
  - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
    I mean true but this is like pointing out that no one plays baseball with a golf club. One is ubiquitous because it's useful and the other isn't. Prescriptive dictionaries do exist but they're mostly used by specialists to understand specific usages within a time-limited context like "what did 'gay' mean in 1920s california" etc. Similarly there might possibly be some training reason to try to hit a baseball with a golf club. But if that applies to you you're probably aware of it.
    - lupire 5y ago
      > understand specific usages within a time-limited context That sounds descriptive to me.
      - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
        Yeah you're right. I guess a style guide or a usage guide would be a prescriptivist dictionary? I'd always heard "prescriptivist dictionary" is a thing that exists but now that I'm thinking about it I'm kind of doubting it.
        bobthepanda 5y ago
        I suppose the only thing where that might actually make sense is if you're a lawyer, where slightly different wordings have big impacts on what a contract or ruling actually means.
- gumby 5y ago
  This differs among languages, e.g. NATO vs Nato, and even dialects. Acronyms look weird to me when not written in all caps, yet when they turn into commonplace proper nouns (e.g. when people an acronym without even knowing the expansion) such spelling is essentially vestigial. Luckily English spelling has a fondness for vestigial forms, unlike languages like German that undergo periodic spelling "reform"
  - eru 5y ago
    Not sure German undergoes periodic spelling reform? There was one attempt recently, but it didn't change much. The Turkish switch to Latin script about 100 years ago was a much bigger deal. And they went completely phonetic.
    - samus 5y ago
      There was an initial effort to set up some rules in the 19th century, a highly confusing back-and-forth during the Drittes Reich period between Antiqua and Fraktur-style writing, and the utter clusterfuck of a spelling reform you mentioned, which eerily reminds me of the Python 2/3 debacle. Going completely phonetic is also possible, but fraught with severe problems: - major convincing of all literate speakers required. - there might be more than one way to spell certain words if phonetic features of the language make it difficult. For example consonant clusters or vowel modifications by tones, such as in Vietnamese. Representing just the tones is also already quite tricky. - definite FU to the dialects since the spelling is going to be aligned to the prestige variant or to a compromise variant nobody speaks. - all existing literature would become difficult to understand within a generation or two. - A phonetic writing system, together with pronunciation rules a linguist would still understand in a few hundred years, makes it possible to fix pronunciation. We humans are surprisingly good at coming up with such systems. But languages still change, and the writing system will therefore accumulate artifacts. Cue the ğ in Turkish, which changed its role to a vowel lengthener. Going phonetic is still the rational choice when introducing an alphabet for a language that didn't have one before, or one of a different kind. You have to alphabetize people anyways, and there is not much literature yet.
    - gumby 5y ago
- function_seven 5y ago
  One style guide I've seen (forget where) tells you to lowercase acronyms and capitalize initialisms. (But initial letter still uppercases when it's a proper noun) So Covid, Nasa, and radar/laser; but FBI, CIA, and UPS. I do this in my own writing, except for “NASA”. Just feels wrong to lowercase that one. And of course, laser and radar are just words at this point. Their origins may be acronymic, but like you said: common language mints new words.
8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
Honestly it's grim but the social power of the group that uses it. If you speak a prestige dialect your patterns are "rules" and if you don't your patterns are "errors." But in both cases it has nothing to do with the language per se, just social and political relationships.

lukeschlather 5y ago

All linguistic rules are arbitrary cultural distinction. They're used for error correction and conveying subtly different meanings. In the "big red ball" vs. "red big ball" case it can be deliberately used to change the way the term parses. The "normal" one means a ball that is both red and big. The abnormal one implies that "big ball" is lexically a single object, perhaps a proper noun, and that the "red" modifier is being applied to it.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago
I dont really think thats a valid distinction. Is there a false/different final "thing" that is being described?
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  To make this more apparent, “that big yellow bird” just means any old ordinary bird, whereas people would probably take “that yellow big bird” to refer to Big Bird the Sesame Street character. So that can totally be a valid parsing of the sentence.
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "false," but "different," definitely. Hyphens have fallen somewhat out of fashion in modern English but they can provide clarity in these cases. Let's change the noun. If a native speaker says, "big red hands," you can normally assume they're speaking of large hands which are colored red. However, if they say "red big hands," this parses to "red big-hands," meaning "big-hands" is treated as a title, or perhaps a brand. You might see this title capitalized: "red Big-Hands". Going back to the first example, if you mean "red hands" as a title, you could write "big Red Hands" or better yet, "big Red-Hands," meaning something big with the title Red-Hands. Since the adjective order is the same as grammatically conventional English, the hyphen helps distinguish the writer's meaning. But nowadays I find writers often leave it out when the adjective order implies the multi-word title.
  - lupire 5y ago

canjobear 5y ago

"Rule" in this context means a regular distinction which speakers know and follow implicitly. Not a prescriptive rule that you learn in school, like "always put periods inside quotes."

8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
I'm curious to see how this goes for you because in my experience this site is HARDCORE prescriptivist almost like it's a religion it's a bit scary sometimes.
- canjobear 5y ago
  Most people are. I'm used to it.