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Sometimes people, including my younger self, disdain and even ridicule expert 'rules' and knowledge, from grammar to art appreciation. "Dogs bark at those whom

Sometimes people, including my younger self, disdain and even ridicule expert 'rules' and knowledge, from grammar to art appreciation. "Dogs bark at those whom they do not know." [0] They say / I said: I don't need to know those things; they are arbitrary and useless; I can do it fine without them (and when I can't, it's the art, etc., not me that has failed). But in my life it has turned out that those things arose from challenges and subtleties that have real impact but that my naive self - not an insult; I came by it honestly, from inexperience - hadn't yet noticed. Now when there is miscommunication I can often attribute it to grammatical error, and it turned out that the English grammar is a handy, powerful abstraction that works well. Now it seems that when I disdained certain art as offering nothing to understand, I was unwittingly disdaining my lack of understanding. I think what Heraclitus meant was, "Dogs bark at those whom they do not know." Now when people speak, I listen. [0] Heraclitus, I'm pretty sure.

lolinder 3y ago
> Now when there is miscommunication I can often attribute it to grammatical error, and it turned out that the English grammar is a handy, powerful abstraction that works well. There's the English grammar as it exists in the actual language, and then there's the English grammar as it is insisted upon by self-appointed arbiters of proper speech. The first is indeed quite handy and productive, the second is mostly a tool for reinforcing hierarchies: like the Mid-Atlantic accent, the rules are useful precisely because no one speaks or writes that way naturally. You have to spend time learning and practicing them, and spending that time sets you apart from the plebians who only speak their native tongue. Human languages in general is very good at introducing the right amount of redundancy to avoid miscommunication, even as the languages evolve. We don't need artificial rules to help with that.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > the Mid-Atlantic accent Accents are not grammar. > There's the English grammar as it exists in the actual language, and then there's the English grammar as it is insisted upon by self-appointed arbiters of proper speech. Who are you referring to as the latter? The grammar I know arose from the language, and from centuries of study of both descriptive and optimal use of it. That's the grammar I learned in school though, as I said in the GP, I didn't understand it at the time. > Human languages in general is very good at introducing the right amount of redundancy to avoid miscommunication, even as the languages evolve. We don't need artificial rules to help with that. Do you mean to imply that humans naturally communicate well. My experience is that humans are poor communicators, and effective communication takes skill and work. As more objective evidence, lots of very smart people, for centuries, have worked very hard at it. If you can write well, you can make good money doing it. (I don't agree that the rules are 'artificial'; at least the ones I know arose from usage.)
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > Accents are not grammar. It's actually rather hard to separate the two. "I done told you" is a grammatical sentence in the South but not in other forms of English. Most "accents" are actually a full dialect. > The grammar I know arose from the language, and from centuries of study of both descriptive and optimal use of it. No, not really. Most of the classic grammatical rules taught in schools were never rules in the English language in the first place: they were borrowed from Latin because Latin was perceived as being "better". That's why they have to be taught—they're not naturally part of spoken English. Split infinitives are the classic example of this: a totally normal part of English, they're impossible in Latin (since Latin infinitives are a single word), so the grammarians insisted we must keep them together in English. Francis Bacon, Edmund Burke, and the King James Bible all used coordinating conjunctions at the start of a sentence. Double negatives had to be rooted out by force (again, because Latin doesn't allow them) and still persist in most non-standard dialects because they're a natural part of English speech. > (I don't agree that the rules are 'artificial'; at least the ones I know arose from usage.) Can you give concrete examples? Which rules arose from usage but have to be explicitly taught?
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      See our other conversation too; I won't repeat those things here (my fault for starting two threads). > Most of the classic grammatical rules taught in schools were never rules in the English language in the first place: they were borrowed from Latin because Latin was perceived as being "better". That's why they have to be taught—they're not naturally part of spoken English. I'm aware that rhetoric in the Early Modern period (~16th-17th centuries) was based at least partly on Latin and Greek rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't grammar - rhetoric is about style and persuasion - and I wasn't taught rhetoric in school. I don't recall any Latin-style grammar in school either, and Latin grammar is much different - no set word order and word endings, not order, determine parts of speech (e.g., in a Latin sentence the subject could be anywhere; you find it by word endings. English lacks word endings so the example is missing something, but the Latin word order 'dog bites person' could mean 'person bites dog', depending on the endings of 'person' and 'dog', and 'person dog bites' or any other combinatoric possibility could mean the same), much more genderized, etc. How could that be taught as English grammar? > Double negatives had to be rooted out by force (again, because Latin doesn't allow them) and still persist in most non-standard dialects because they're a natural part of English speech. They're instinctive but confusing, IME and IMHO. That's at least one reason - the only reason I know - that they are disliked. E.g., 'did you not fail to eat the apple?' 'Yes.' People don't communicate very well without some training and skill.

lolinder 3y ago

> Now when there is miscommunication I can often attribute it to grammatical error, and it turned out that the English grammar is a handy, powerful abstraction that works well. There's the English grammar as it exists in the actual language, and then there's the English grammar as it is insisted upon by self-appointed arbiters of proper speech. The first is indeed quite handy and productive, the second is mostly a tool for reinforcing hierarchies: like the Mid-Atlantic accent, the rules are useful precisely because no one speaks or writes that way naturally. You have to spend time learning and practicing them, and spending that time sets you apart from the plebians who only speak their native tongue. Human languages in general is very good at introducing the right amount of redundancy to avoid miscommunication, even as the languages evolve. We don't need artificial rules to help with that.

wolverine876 3y ago
> the Mid-Atlantic accent Accents are not grammar. > There's the English grammar as it exists in the actual language, and then there's the English grammar as it is insisted upon by self-appointed arbiters of proper speech. Who are you referring to as the latter? The grammar I know arose from the language, and from centuries of study of both descriptive and optimal use of it. That's the grammar I learned in school though, as I said in the GP, I didn't understand it at the time. > Human languages in general is very good at introducing the right amount of redundancy to avoid miscommunication, even as the languages evolve. We don't need artificial rules to help with that. Do you mean to imply that humans naturally communicate well. My experience is that humans are poor communicators, and effective communication takes skill and work. As more objective evidence, lots of very smart people, for centuries, have worked very hard at it. If you can write well, you can make good money doing it. (I don't agree that the rules are 'artificial'; at least the ones I know arose from usage.)
- lolinder 3y ago
  > Accents are not grammar. It's actually rather hard to separate the two. "I done told you" is a grammatical sentence in the South but not in other forms of English. Most "accents" are actually a full dialect. > The grammar I know arose from the language, and from centuries of study of both descriptive and optimal use of it. No, not really. Most of the classic grammatical rules taught in schools were never rules in the English language in the first place: they were borrowed from Latin because Latin was perceived as being "better". That's why they have to be taught—they're not naturally part of spoken English. Split infinitives are the classic example of this: a totally normal part of English, they're impossible in Latin (since Latin infinitives are a single word), so the grammarians insisted we must keep them together in English. Francis Bacon, Edmund Burke, and the King James Bible all used coordinating conjunctions at the start of a sentence. Double negatives had to be rooted out by force (again, because Latin doesn't allow them) and still persist in most non-standard dialects because they're a natural part of English speech. > (I don't agree that the rules are 'artificial'; at least the ones I know arose from usage.) Can you give concrete examples? Which rules arose from usage but have to be explicitly taught?
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    See our other conversation too; I won't repeat those things here (my fault for starting two threads). > Most of the classic grammatical rules taught in schools were never rules in the English language in the first place: they were borrowed from Latin because Latin was perceived as being "better". That's why they have to be taught—they're not naturally part of spoken English. I'm aware that rhetoric in the Early Modern period (~16th-17th centuries) was based at least partly on Latin and Greek rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't grammar - rhetoric is about style and persuasion - and I wasn't taught rhetoric in school. I don't recall any Latin-style grammar in school either, and Latin grammar is much different - no set word order and word endings, not order, determine parts of speech (e.g., in a Latin sentence the subject could be anywhere; you find it by word endings. English lacks word endings so the example is missing something, but the Latin word order 'dog bites person' could mean 'person bites dog', depending on the endings of 'person' and 'dog', and 'person dog bites' or any other combinatoric possibility could mean the same), much more genderized, etc. How could that be taught as English grammar? > Double negatives had to be rooted out by force (again, because Latin doesn't allow them) and still persist in most non-standard dialects because they're a natural part of English speech. They're instinctive but confusing, IME and IMHO. That's at least one reason - the only reason I know - that they are disliked. E.g., 'did you not fail to eat the apple?' 'Yes.' People don't communicate very well without some training and skill.