Re: So-called rules


Claude Weil wrote:
On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 14:32:53 -0800, Evan Kirshenbaum
<kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Exactly. We learned the rules that our dialects actually work by and
when these differed from the way others had decided the language
*should* work (which may or may not have accorded with the rules by
which their dialects worked), we were "corrected".

You and others call them rules, especially because that's the word
that was used by your teachers. What I said is that these so-called
rules, whatever one chooses to call them, are but the expression of
common sense -- provided they are apt and thus help us understand one
another. Of course, there have been "rules" that were or still are
nothing more than superstitions, e.g. the one that forbade to end a
sentence with a preposition; as you certainly know, it is said that
Sir Winston Churchill made this comment: "This is the sort of English
up with which I will not put."

CW


Read *The Power of Babel* by John McWhorter and you will see that a lot
of things which our languages require us to say are essentially
linguistic junk, of no practical utility, and thus using them is
certainly not part of common sense. The only reason we use them is that
the rules of our languages, which we learned unconsciously, require us
to adhere to them slavishly or risk sounding goofy.

When I discussed McWhorter's ideas in sci.lang , a lot of people
disagreed with him. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that you
could not make an artificial variety of English as equally expressive
as natural varieties by, for example, replacing every irregular plural
form with a form following the usual "-s"/"-es" rules of pluralization,
and I would expect such a form of English to be easier for foreigners
to learn.

The rules we learn for varieties of English which are not natural to us
are another matter: Learning those rules is similar to learning the
rules of a foreign language.


--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA

E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

.

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