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Why isn't it arrogant to make language ambiguous in a way that it hard to ever recover from? Prescriptivism tries to preserve the information content of languag
by gowld 5y ago
Why isn't it arrogant to make language ambiguous in a way that it hard to ever recover from? Prescriptivism tries to preserve the information content of language.
We can all communicate if we speak the same language. We can't if language forks until a million incompatible variations.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoPrescriptivism has various goals according to its various exponents. One very traditional goal is to preserve modes of speech that have become obsolete, or to avoid modes that are perceived as innovative. But that has nothing to do with information content. Complaining that an element of the sentence is being marked twice instead of once is also an odd way to "try to preserve the information content of the language". The more times something gets marked, the more obvious the informational content carried by the marking becomes.