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

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 12:02:11 -0400 (EDT)

And Rosta scripsit:

> Even in English it is largely
> restricted to retired colonels writing to complain to broadcasters
> and newspapers.

Not on this side of the pond. William Safire writes a weekly column on
"usage", though to be sure he does lots of description too, mostly of
current slang and jargon. He has been doing this since 1979 and has
published ten fairly successful books full of columns. There are plenty
of other lesser lights, and many "usage books" are available as well
that are encyclopedias of hard-core prescription: "barbarous" is their
favorite word, closely followed by "illogical". One of the minor public
activities of linguists in this country is denouncing the denouncers.

Nevertheless, use "they" as a generic singular in public print, and
you can expect, if not actual denunciation from the pulpit, certainly
a stream of self-righteous private letters. Assuming you can get it
printed at all.

> Less hardcore in English are statements of the form "You should write
> in Standard English" but there is not even much of this in Lojban
> culture either, and what prescriptivism of this sort that there is
> tends to come from the Fundamentalists.

Agreed.

> So when it comes down to the statement "X is (not) part
> of Language Y", it is descriptive if based on the idiolects
> of Y's speakers, and prescriptive if not.

The underlying assumptions of this sentence seem bogus to me, but after
some thought I cannot explain exactly how. I will carry on anyway
(both in the BrE sense "proceed" and in the older AmE sense "raise a fuss"!).

> For another thing,
> the question of which dialect of Lojban is 'Standard Lojban' is
> not settled, so that even if we did have accomplished speakers
> of a dialect of Lojban, we could not take it for granted that
> their dialect was Standard. The fact is, for an invented
> language, the counterpart of description of natlangs is invention
> or stipulatiion.

Well, not always. It may be invention, or reference to something 
invented by others, or it may be in fact description. Xorxes, for
example, has certain idiosyncratic usages, but the rest of what he does
is very close to what sociolinguistically plays the role of StdL, though
not so named.

> (1) "People commonly say 'We was'"
> (2) "'We was' is not Standard English"
> (3) "You should never deviate from Standard English"
> (4) "'Less people' is bad English (or: not Standard E)"
> 
> (1) is clearly descriptive. (3) is clearly prescriptive. 
> 
> (2) is descriptive. (4) is prescriptive, because it conflicts
> with the reality of the idiolects of Std E speakers. 

No, I don't accept that. If "'Less people' is bad English" is prescriptive,
then so is "'Me see she' is bad English", though it *does* agree with
the reality of Std E speakers. To me, statements like #4 are essentially
equivalent to #2, but carry an additional freight, viz. "Non-standard E
is bad, not merely bad E, but bad tout court". #4 has a mabla in it
that #2 lacks, which is indeed why sentences like #2 (which are a matter
of the last fifty years or so) were first devised.

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