[lojban] Re: prescription & description (was: RE: Re: a new kind of fundamentalism

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

And Rosta scripsit:

> I think you may have missed the point I wanted to make. 

Yes, I had.

> (4') "'Less people' is not Standard E"

I think it would be better to say that people do say it who in other respects
speak some approximation to StdE, which is not a well-defined language
(what is its phonology, e.g.?) and can be expected to have fuzzy boundaries.
It is on the boundary of what can be tolerated in *written* StdE, whereas
it will pass in spoken StdE without much trouble.

Perhaps this can be best understood by saying that StdE is a mixture of
sharply defined StdE (which is like Latin or *there*-Livagian, i.e., a
given text either breaks Priscian's head or it doesn't) and spoken English
dialects.  In places where the written and spoken langs are sharply separated,
e.g. germanophone Switzerland, this problem doesn't arise: there is Swiss German
and there is _Schriftdeutsch_.

Now no standardization can standardize *everything*, so there is always
going to be something that has to be classified by hand, as it were.
Semantics is of course where this fact is most apparent.

-- 
John Cowan                              <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              http://www.reutershealth.com
Unified Gaelic in Cyrillic script!
        http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Celticonlang

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