Punctuation (Page 12 of 12)

Charles_F_Bell, I would like to understand what you mean but you seem to regard every question I ask as a category error, and your attempts to take me past the difficulty seem to lead me back to the same difficulty.  I would like to understand what you believe here, but my efforts seem fruitless and more frustrating to you than to me.  You've set your beliefs out, but I can't do you the consideration and give you the respect  of considering them!

I suspect that I would agree completely with about a tenth of what you say, and partly with another half.  Regardless, it would be satisfying to achieve what I've been told is called stasis (hard-long 'a'):  agreement on what the issues are, what our respective beliefs are, and where they diverge.  That doesn't seem to be possible now, and I count it a loss.

In short, I don't understand, I don't now expect to understand, I thank you for trying, and I hope that this statement is useful for you, if only to know why I've stopped bothering you on this topic.

Hmm.  So what I though was a category error report was instead a rejection of my use of the word in attempting to explore the boundaries you attach to its proper use?

Even with that, I'm going to have to go a long way to follow you.  First, words often attach to multiple concepts.  Somewhere (I'm trying to recall where) C. S. Lewis gives a range of different meanings attached to the word 'romantic'.  (Falling in love is not among those meanings.)

Your position seems to me to be something like a form/content distinction, in that misuse of the content denies that the form is that form.  It is (as I now see it) as if a process-server carrying a writ that is improperly issued is no longer a process-server.

In other words, you cannot find any exception to the semicolon rule you deny exists without exception.

You start by making a claim, whether you realize it or not, about the The French Academy which is not true -- to the best recollection of a 30 year old memory of mine. I did not do any online research or such to verify, but certainly neither did you. There is no debate without facts, and at least I did enlist facts to my side on  the matter as far as any claim that the The French Academy or Nazi Germany were any sort of prescriptivist entity as you seem and only seem to define the term. That makes it a phantom claim based on an invisible definition.

No. They are bound up in objective meanings -- the defining of both phrases as discrete concepts, and they do not match.  The whole game behind the anti-concept is based around the de-constructionist, philosophical disintegrationist approach; for example, that words mean, punctuation is, grammar works, subjectively as anyone wants them to be.

That would be your problem with 'prescriptivist', wouldn't it? Your concrete metaphor for such is wrong at the outset.  On the other hand, for me to go into detail about the terms I have used as example for anti-concept. i.e., human life for human being requires going off into tangent about abortion -- nobody here wants to do that. However, it is no tangent for you to explain what you are talking about in detail, and you have not. I said there is no point discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin when you can't explain, at the very least, what an angel is, nor is it a valid response for you to object "How dare you reject my beliefs and assumptions on angels!!"

I call him simply a grammarian.

And I call them Corra and their womyn of the '90's.

Predict how successful Corra and their womyn of the '90' will be in eliminating grammatical gender. This is not a yes-or-no question but rather one that requires some historical precedent. Inserting new words like latino and african-american which otherwise would not evolve naturally  is not at all the same as changing grammar. We no more understand how grammar changes than we know how Man evolved from some species of simian now extinct,  but it certainly was not by direction of some orchestrators.

Even many simplest (and logical) changes in spelling and punctuation suggested by Noah Webster in a time of widespread illiteracy were rejected or ignored, and that is at the periphery of grammar.

Spelling and punctuation are the least important and interesting aspects of grammar. I would only include them under the umbrella of this discussion because they are the most susceptible to any 'prescriptivist' grammarian assertion, but, even so, see how little over the last two centuries reformers have been able to accomplish. We have public and not publick on both sides of the Atlantic but not color instead of colour.

English grammar and pronunciation strangely changed more rapidly in the old country after the Revolution than in America. 'English' as she is goodly spoken in England changed more in New England with the folks back home than it did elsewhere in America 17th-19th century - which is to say: I parked the car in Harvard Square in Bostonian is closer today to standard U.K English than American (17th-21st century) English not because New Englanders retained the old ways, but rather other Americans did. There is no good theory for this except to suggest that language is inherently far more chaotic than any would-be 'prescriptivist' would have it.

With respect to a thesis suggested by your last sentence above, I hold to an admittedly minority opinion about language: that language is naturally private which exists to communicate merely as a side-effect benefit. Every individual primarily creates a word for a concept internally and unique to him. The sharing of the word-concepts comes later. The 'sharing' of course is short-circuited by Mommy as 'prescriptivist grammarian' suggesting X for baby's Y, but in fact, baby is bilingual for a while, perhaps, until around two years of age. After that, 'education' becomes a reverse-order language acquirement in which concepts are learned second-hand through word sharing. I would also suggest that geniuses retain private-language concept-formation but with stronger or weaker translation ability.

Yes, I am saying that. Because language is inherently chaotic -- because I theorize that language is something which is held individually and not societally -- it is as tough to steer as the weather.  A Corra 'prescriptivist grammarian' is Mommy suggesting to a fully grown person "X" for "Y" when he has already decided "Y" is good enough.

Perhaps it was the sheer volume of diversity within the forming US that necessitated holding-on to the common language so tightly; lest it meltdown into a melded multilingual chaos on a page for which no structure could possibly exist? Grammar as concept would have had to be scrapped and completely reinvented.

There is misconception of the meaning to American Exceptionalism and the melting pot to be that the resulting product would be a mixed-culture hybrid, and the simple response to that is that it is a misconception, and the 'holding on to' a common English is part of the picture.   

Why English underwent such a rapid change from Middle English into Modern English with the vowel shifts and dropping of declensions -- Chaucer's Aprille with his shoures soute became April with its sweet showers is a mystery, but that rapid change continued unabated in England until the Victorian Era. In America it simply slowed down - retaining Thee's and Thou's, for example, for quite some time. And why should have the Thee's and Thou's gone away when they are retained in most Indo-European languages? Some changes can be explained by external forces like the Norman upon the Anglo-Saxon (Old English into Middle English) but I think not much. actually, then or now.

grammar = studies of the basics of linguistic units - and that includes spelling and punctuation, but it is fair enough to consider that grammar is the logic of putting those words together, and it is possible to string words together without logic, but then we are not really talking about language.

Why hasn't plantation-negro language gone away 150 years after the end of slavery?  What hasn't it sunk in that Herman Cain and Ben Carson and every black American professional I have come across do not speak plantation negro. There's often that hint in accent, or whatever, but not that word and syntax of the low-born.  Every ethic group learns proper English even if it is accented with regionalism or other such attributes - except Black and west-coast Chicano - one might add white hillbilly to the list except that is always because of poor education. Blacks in Washington D.C., Chicago, NY, have the most expensive education in the country and yet so many come out of it not caring if they do not speak as every successful black person in the country (with whiff of 'blackness' to their voice).  My answer is that how one speaks is always an individual choice but that a culture of the down-low inhibits movement to the right choices.

I don't comprehend what you write here.  Let me say that punctuation is grammar but of a part that arbitrarily delimits what is grammar and therefore, being arbitrary, must by its nature be immutable to the extent the grammar has not changed.  If grammar changes organically then spelling and punctuation may change with it. From Chaucer to Modern English the word "Aprille" was actually pronounced with three syllables with an "e" at the end. The language grammar changed such that the word pronounced becomes "April" and the spelling ought to (and did) change but then remained fixed forever until the grammar of the word changes again, but unfortunately English has sometimes gone awry and not changed spelling as it ought to have done: "knight."  My objection to spelling changes when the grammar has not change (as opposed to reform of spelling when the grammar has changed) is that it is illogical. Can't is pronounced the same as cant but is grammatically different in every other way. So why go there by removing the apostrophe?