Rishon Rishon

Linguistic Conservative

Amritas, back from the undead, has a couple of interesting new posts up. In the first, he talks about descriptive vs. prescriptive linguistics:

Seriously, it might seem at first that the problem with linguistic conservatives is one of infinite regress. If older is better, then oldest is best, right?

But when people talk about how their language is in 'decline', they have no real intention of turning the clock back. They implicitly assume that their version of the language is 'perfect'. What they are really saying is, 'I don't want the language to deviate from what I see as its peak when I grew up in the year 19XX'.

I guess I'm a linguistic conservative of a different stripe. I don't think that one set of linguistic rules is intrinsically better or worse than another (assuming they are both fully expressive, which is true of any language that people really speak). On the other hand, the purpose of language is to communicate, and this is only possible if the speaker and the listener both know its rules. When language changes, it cuts us off from the works of our past, which we can then only appreciate in translation. In the case of English, very little was written before Shakespeare's time (Chaucer and Beowulf are two of the few exceptions), and Shakespearean English is still fully accessible, with only a little effort. On the other hand, I consider myself incomparably blessed by the fact that I can read 4000+ years of Hebrew literature in the original. It would be a real shame if Hebrew were to change so much that its speakers couldn't do it.