Nanohedron wrote:
Although I'd much rather discuss Trad...
s1m0n wrote:
...the rules of grammar are observed, not ordained.
Your meaning is unclear, here. "Ordained" contrastively suggests to me that by "observed", you mean "noted". This speaks to the tension between descriptionism and presciptionism in language, and I can work with that. OTOH, "observed" also means "practiced", but the latter meaning carries with it an implication of hewing to standards, so if that's what you meant, it strikes me that you've acknowledged that since people follow rules, there are rules after all, contrary to what you like to say.
I mean A, not B. The 'rules' of grammar we all got taught at school and read in in stylebooks were arrived at by people observing how people actually spoke (and wrote) and attempting to generalize principles out of the data. They retain validity only in so far as they accurately reflect the data.
This view contrasts with how students are taught language. Teachers and stylebook authors present rules as if they have objective reality beyond the corpus of present-day language use, but grammar rules have no legislative authority, and it is not the task of the body of native speakers of a language to conform to them. It is the reverse.
Because the target is in constant motion. A rule that existed when your grade school teachers went to school may no longer be valid today, because a substantial body of the population has moved on and no longer conforms to it.
Note, too, that by substantial body, I don't mean majority.
As examples, I'll present rule changes that have happened over the course of my lifetime in the UK and in North America:
In the UK, recent generations have abandoned the venerable
Subjunctive Mood, a grammatic structure that has been with English since it was proto indo-european. This is a change in the form of the verb that marks a statement that is contrary to fact, usually but not always because it's future and hasn't come into being, yet. In NA, it is still correct to write,
"it is imperitive that the test be conducted in secret". In recent decades in the UK, that's no longer considered correct. They'd write:
"it is imperitive that the test is conducted in secret".
Over the same period in North American, in contrast, the made-up restriction on splitting infinitives has hit critical mass.
I once posted here about the Dylan song Tombstone Blues, which contains the following verse:
Quote:
The hysterical bride in the penny arcade
Screaming, she moans, "I've just been made"
Then sends out for the doctor, who pulls down the shade
And says, "My advice is to not let the boys in"
In late 60s, this is what Dylan wrote and recorded, and no one thought it was incorrect in any way. I collected up clips of covers by American artists from the 80s and 90s, however, and without exception they all altered the last line to ...
"My advice is not to let the boys in". They'd likely have learned the song either from Dylan's recording, or from published lyrics, so the change had to have been made unconsciously. The singers had internalized a brand new rule that didn't exist when Bob Dylan went to school and learned to speak english. Are they wrong? Well, emotionally I think so, because I learned it like Bob, but they're the future, and future grammarians will have to keep up.