Re: The definition of the Standard variation of British English

On Jul 9, 7:08 pm, Eric Walker <em...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:35:50 +0200, Arne H. Wilstrup wrote:

[...]

Yes it does, but if nothing exists as "standard variety of British
English" - anything goes - doesn't it?

There are certainly those--some not so far away--who believe things much
along those lines.  But, if you take note you will find that they
themselves almost inevitably express their great disdain for standards
and norms in language that very closely conforms to the extant standards
and norms of the tongue, as expressed in numerous reference works that
(as has been noted elsewhere) generally agree one with another not
perfectly but to a high degree.

Though I'm far from believing there are no standards or that anything
goes, I'm planning to disagree with you on standards and do it in
standard language (with your remark below on slips kept in mind).

To me, the most interesting, and indicative, aspect of the chain of
replies so far on this thread has been the utter absence of any focus on  
the base purpose of language: not social distinctions, not political
theory, not expression of personality, but _communication_: the placing
of thoughts in the mind of another with the maximum precision and
elegance (in both senses of that word) practicable.

Remembering that elegance in one sense is a matter of taste. I like
the dangling hyphen in "bee- or wasp-like"; a friend of mine, a
recently retired English teacher, hates it and says that if you find
yourself writing something like that, you should recast the sentence.

As has been remarked countless times hereabouts, language is a set of
conventional symbols, and conventional rules[1] for the altering and
arranging of those symbols, so as to allow one user of the language to
place thoughts in the mind of another user with--again--the maximum of
precision and elegance possible given the skills of each party in those
conventions and the limits imposed by the degree of clarity and exactness
of those conventions.

It should thus be obvious to a mere child that the potential for
precision and elegance is, at least for skilled users of a language,
maximized in proportion as that language's conventions are detailed,
exact, and clear (and, conversely, that the available precision and
elegance are reduced in proportion as those conventions are incomplete,
ambiguous, or unclear).

It seems from that you would favor the wide adoption of the AAVE
distinctions among "he workin'", "he be workin'", "he stay workin'",
and "he been workin'", distinctions that can't be expressed so
concisely in standard English. But I doubt that you do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAVE

None of that is to say that English, or any language, is or should be
frozen in some one state.  But it is equally obvious that changes
(assuming them to be such as to either improve potential precision and
elegance, or at least not reduce either) need to be evolutionary, not
revolutionary: the Tower of Babel is a cautionary parable.  Putting it
another way, that there be clear, definite rules is far more important
than precisely _what_ those rules may be.  Other languages, with
conventions quite different even in broad outline from those of English,
serve their users satisfactorily--but only in proportion as _their_
conventions are clear and detailed.

Are you sure about that last? I have never heard any claim that any
language or dialect had insufficiently clear and detailed conventions.

But, in recent decades, probably as part of various broad social or
political fevers, there has arisen the notion that language is--as the
several postings here have amply demonstrated--some sort of sociological
or political construct, to be manipulated or altered to further goals
having little or, usually, nothing to do with sheer communication.  The
coming of this movement was not subtle: its development was wryly or
angrily noted by many observers, from Eric Partridge (see the page in my
sig block) to, famously, George Orwell.  Indeed, this entire post could
be summed in one word by these brave new thinkers: _crimethink_.

I think the movement began with the observation that standard
language /was/ constructed and being used for social and political
purposes, specifically to make some people feel superior and others
inferior. See for instance Henry Alford on a spelling difference:

http://books.google.com/books?id=8_0RAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA11

Of course, true observations don't always lead to good ideas. I don't
know enough about the movement you mentioned to say more.

As an aside, it scarcely matters what fraction of a population normally
and naturally speaks the standard form: what matters is that the form is
known to and can readily be both spoken and understood by most.

You cannot be seriously suggesting that standard English can readily
be spoken by most native speakers. When I grade papers written by
native speakers, I find hardly any of them can manage to /write/ it.
I admit that the schools here in northern New Mexico are bad, but I'd
still say my students are mostly people in the more educated half of
the population.

As for understanding, I agree that most people understand a good-sized
part of standard English. Availing oneself of its more abstruse
phenomena, though, will hardly conduce to a salutary result. (I'd bet
more than half of American native speakers wouldn't understand that
last sentence.) To use an example I've used here before, I sometimes
demonstrate the importance of reading problems carefully by showing my
students Moses Hadas's famous sentence from a book review, "This book
fills a much-needed gap." None of them understand it immediately, and
some require patient explanation. Searching the Web for "a much-
needed gap" will convince you that many others don't understand it
either. Many people seem to interpret sentences by considering mostly
the words, ignoring at least some of their syntactic relations.

(I am beginning to wonder whether this example makes my students feel
humiliated and thus does more harm than good to their attempts to
learn math.)

A French
pilot landing his craft at a German airport communicates with the control
tower in standard English: that it is the "natural" tongue of neither is
irrelevant to the task at hand, communication.

Except when the French pilot is having a sudden emergency and
accidentally says "Au secours!" instead of "Il faut Mayday". (Just
kidding.)

[1] "Conventional" here meaning "by convention", that is, by arbitrary
agreement among all concerned parties.  There are some researchers who
believe that language is not entirely conventional--that certain
grammatical patterns, or at least tendencies, have been "hard wired" into
the human brain by evolution--but, though the concept is fascinating,
proof is somewhere from minimal to lacking and the position is a minority
one.

Your choice of the word "conventional" strikes me as strange. No one
(in English) convenes a meeting at which people come to an agreement,
arbitrary or not. The rules of languages (and above you were talking
about all language) evolve by a quite different process and are
learned by a quite different process, and the vast majority of people,
including me, aren't even aware of what many of the rules of their
native language are.

Even the rules of standard English are selections from the available
rules; they aren't generated or chosen arbitrarily. My idea of a
convention is something like a sign convention in math or physics, or
a bidding convention in bridge, which really is chosen arbitrarily and
learned explicitly.

--
Jerry Friedman
.

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