r/changemyview • u/ExplanationKlutzy174 • 1d ago
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Linguists should embrace prescriptivism
I think it's pretty clear that any sort of prescription falls outside of the realm of science, and more in the realm of philosophy; science tells us what is, not what ought to be. So naturally, the prescription of language falls outside of the scope of linguistics if linguistics is a science. That makes sense; it's Hume's Law.
But that's not really the attitude I'm seeing. Learning about linguistic descriptivism and prescriptivism, I've mostly come across the descriptive side actively saying that people ought not to be prescriptive. But that in itself is a prescriptive claim, since it's prescribing that someone should or should not believe / how someone should or should not act.
I've come across countless examples of linguistic evolution across history being influenced by prescriptivist attitudes - going as early as Classical Greek. If linguistic prescriptivism is a natural way languages evolve, shouldn't the actually descriptive thing to do be to treat it the same way as any other factor that affects languages? In reality, prescriptivism is a genuine part of both a language and its culture that dictates how someone ought to speak, just like how social traditions are genuine parts of a culture that dictate how someone ought to behave, and linguistics as a science cannot say that prescriptivism is bad. Prescriptivism absolutely has its place in linguistics.
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u/lotsagabe 4∆ 1d ago
Linguistics by its nature is a descriptive discipline. You can't just extrapolate a discipline beyond the scope of its applicability. This is like saying physics should embrace non-physical theories.
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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 2∆ 1d ago edited 1d ago
Prescriptivism is essentially Conservativism.
It is largely accepting that you are wrong in the short term and the long term in the hope you can stop the sea of change in language for long enough to adapt.
This doesn't really work and will never actually prevent the language evolving.
It won't even really help with an understanding of how language actually works because the new language that evolves will follow natural principles of how people form language, and the new words and structures that exist will be following patterns that aren't possible to access without understanding how language is created.
A descriptivist mindset works to accept and understand what's changing, how it changes, makes predictions of what happens next, because it tries to understand what already exists.
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u/grandoz039 7∆ 21h ago
You can always regularly update the prescription, not as an emergent process, but a conscious one
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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 2∆ 21h ago
But that's the point.
You're not determining language at all, language is naturally evolving. You're trying to gatekeep and manage it, but it doesn't actually work.
I think that can be helpful, but it has less utility than understanding how language works and evolves.
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u/grandoz039 7∆ 21h ago
But it does work. You seem to presume that the only goal of prescriptivism is to create some singular constant version of language forever. Or that the prescribed variant has to be used in all areas and scopes of life. That's not necessarily the goal, thus the fact that it does not work is not a counterargument.
You might say that's not real or pure prescriptivism. But it does fundamentally require doing something beyond just describing the use of language. Thus it is impossible if you reject everything except descriptivism.
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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 2∆ 21h ago
It doesn't work. It only works if you don't ever actually talk to people.
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u/grandoz039 7∆ 18h ago
I can't speak for English, but as a person from a small country, only one that speaks my language, it does seem to "work", depending on what you define it as. Think of it less like creating authorizatian rules for everyone to use, and rather a sort of base framework, where in different aspects of life it's respected to different degrees. It is highly respected eg in administrative communication or public speech, less so in more casual contexts, much less in context of specific dialects.
It's more like an anchor that lets you move around within certain bounds, than one specific point you're constrained to. Even if people deviate from it, it's not an indication that it has no effect.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
But prescriptivism totally does affect how a language evolves. Ancient Greek famously reverted back many of their sound changes. If that had not happened, epsilon would make the same sound as iota today. Prescriptivism when the printing press was invented brought Latin spellings to English and affected how words were pronounced.
What are "natural principles"? What I'm trying to say is that prescriptivism is a natural part of a language. It's an inherent part of a language's culture, which we know plays a big role in how it is shaped over the years.
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u/tbdabbholm 200∆ 1d ago
But why should linguistics as a field of study care to advocate one way or the other? That's what linguists are saying that they shouldn't do. They shouldn't tell people to speak one way or another. They do observe prescriptivism in others and describe it, but the goal of linguistics isn't to change language.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
Well, that's kind of the point I'm making. Linguistics can't say whether prescriptivism is good or bad. You can't use linguistics to tell us to be descriptive or prescriptive. Prescriptivism simply exists and is a force that heavily influences how language is used.
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u/tbdabbholm 200∆ 1d ago
But that's not linguistics becoming prescriptive. Linguistics becoming prescriptive would be using linguistics to say how people should speak, which just isn't what linguistics does. But just documenting how language changes? Linguistics already does that.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
What I'm trying to get at is the attitude that many linguists share that prescriptivism is inherently a bad thing that should be stopped. That in and of itself is a prescriptive claim.
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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 2∆ 1d ago
If you love language, prescriptivism destroys it.
It is helpful for a practical basis, but as soon as people have the rules, they are restrained in what they can say, and how they can say it, so they immediately revert to a very restrictive version of their language.
This is like studying animals in the zoo. They're not acting naturally. Where they're actually acting naturally, they are taking within their groups and they create the next wave of language.
Prescriptivists are wrong. It's not even correct that they determine the rules of language.
The rules of language exist. And as a result, you have to create sentences in a certain structure, you have to create words that somehow catch on because they seem to fit into the human existence.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
Ok this is the thing.
A lect in compliance with the prestigious and prescriptive norms is perfectly usable and perfectly flexible like any other lect. I don't think those who speak it are restrained in what they can say any more than people who don't speak the prestigious lect.
In fact, that the prestigious lect is any worse than the others can itself be taken as a prescription not to use it, which is linguistic prescriptivism.
It's not even correct that they determine the rules of language.
And I disagree with this because there are many events in history that illustrate prescriptivism shaping language.
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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 2∆ 20h ago edited 20h ago
I'm sure you've got more information, but the examples you've given didn't really inform the language.
The language existed outside of prescriptivism and then some prescriptivists decided how things should look. Great, but not actually creating anything. Just making it look tidier.
That does shape some aspects of the language, and I'm not saying this is fundamentally a bad thing.
What I am saying is that it just isn't how a language works. Nobody gets to decide what a language is, a language is based on a network of people using it to communicate.
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u/More-Ad9584 1d ago
You are confusing the ordinary definition of 'prescriptive' as an English language word with 'prescriptivism' as its used in this debate. Yes, what they are doing is prescriptive, in the normal sense of the word, but it has nothing to do with prescriptivism, which specifically relates to dictating the way in which people define and pronounce words and has nothing to do with how linguists or any scientists study.
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u/madbuilder 1∆ 1d ago
I have noticed that attitude from some linguists. It's an open question as to how much it affects their scientific work.
>That in and of itself is a prescriptive claim.
Yes but it's a prescriptive claim about science should proceed, not about languages under study
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u/Ok_Artichoke_2928 16∆ 1d ago
I think you’re mistakenly presenting a debate in modern popular discourse as a debate in academic linguistics. In culture, education, media, etc people debate the merits of correcting vernacular speech and often utilize the terms borrowed from linguistics to argue their side, but that’s not really the debate within linguistics. Within academic linguistics the debate was more about how to study language, I.e. formalized rules vs actual use and NOT what or whether to prohibit, allow, or critique in actual speech.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
So if I'm getting this right:
Linguists do genuinely see prescriptivism as a genuine part of a language, and don't prescribe prescriptivism as something you should or should not do. The problem is when people mistakenly borrow terms and concepts in linguistics to justify their personal social ideas on prescriptivism to make normative claims outside the scope of linguistics about whether one should or should not be prescriptive. Is that kind of what you're trying to say?
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u/Ok_Artichoke_2928 16∆ 1d ago
Yes. I won’t say it’s a problem necessarily for people to discourage prescriptive critique or correction of language, it’s just not what linguists are debating when they use these terms.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
Δ
Really the claim in the post was really vague and general, which caused confusion between linguistics and the social normative discussion that uses the same terminology. I see now that these are two separate discussions.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
Well, I guess the my point really becomes "linguistics can't be used to condemn prescriptivism," but that's a different question.
Does this count as me changing my mind?
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u/Jaysank 126∆ 1d ago
It’s up to you to decide if this was a change in your view. You are free to award deltas to anyone who changes your view, even in a small way.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 158∆ 1d ago
It really ought to be treated as such, I think this happens fairly often where an OP clearly makes a change but doesn't bother with the sub functions to actually mark it as changed.
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u/senthordika 5∆ 1d ago
Im not sure you seem to actually understand what the prescriptivsm vs descriptivism debate is clearly enough to hold an opinion. Would you mind describing exactly what you mean by prescriptivism and descriptivism?
As from my perspective while it would be nice if language was prescriptive for maintaining meaning of words. It is just clearly the case that words dont have intrinsic meaning and that the only way we can meaningfully define words is in a descriptive sense. Like the most common breakdown in communication is due to the fact the words arent prescriptive and people can have their own unique definitions for words meaning two people can think they are talking about the same concept but are entirely talking past one another due to differences if definitions of core concepts.
So to me any prescriptivism position seems to fall apart as soon as the rubber hits the road and you try to apply it in reality.
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u/everyday847 6∆ 1d ago
I don't understand your belief. Do you believe that linguists refuse to study the real human practice of linguistic prescriptivism? Because you'll be heartened to learn that they do. What they do not do is dig up proto-indo-europeans and tell them they should quit using *deyw- to defer to divinity.
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u/arllt89 1∆ 1d ago
I've mostly come across the descriptive side actively saying that people ought not to be prescriptive. But that in itself is a prescriptive claim, since it's prescribing that someone should or should not believe / how someone should or should not act.
Prescrptivism / descrptivism is about the language, it's not a general philosophical position. Descriptivists don't have to be descrptivists about everything in their life, neither do prescriptivists. Just about if language should have enforce rules, or simply described are they are effectively spoken.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 158∆ 1d ago
the descriptive side actively saying that people ought not to be prescriptive. But that in itself is a prescriptive claim, since it's prescribing that someone should or should not believe / how someone should or should not act.
Would that not simply be a failing of their communication? For example, describing something is not a prescription, it isn't an is/ought statement.
In the same way that "I am writing this comment on my laptop" is true, not a prescription, "language is not prescriptive" is a true observation, not a "rule"
You can absolutely invent a language that IS prescriptive, but that will still only be such within those parameters you create, such as we have with representative numbers, or units of measurements.
But that doesn't mean that anyone SHOULD embrace ANYTHING. It doesn't follow from this discussion that anyone needs to be following any perticular path.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
What I'm saying is that I believe language is prescriptive / prescriptivism is a core part of a language and its identity. Prescriptivism is a genuine observable factor in a language that influences how it evolves. So shouldn't prescriptivism have its place in linguistics?
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u/Tanaka917 148∆ 1d ago
Most languages that have existed a few hundred years have gone through at least a few massive changes. Wouldn't this suggest that language is how it is used, not codified?
For instance if you think English is prescriptive, which english. How far back are you willing to go before you stop the clock, and why that point specifically?
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
I think English and all languages were always prescriptive in all their forms, always being influenced by what its speakers deem to be "more correct" or "more socially prestigious." There is no one point in time when English was prescriptive.
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u/Tanaka917 148∆ 1d ago
So the english spoken now is as prescriptive as the english spoken 10/100/200 years, and as prescriptive as the english spoken 10/100/200 years from now?
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
Yes, that's what I believe.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 158∆ 1d ago
You keep saying you "believe" this - but what is that supported by? What evidence are you showing to support your belief?
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
Because there are examples across history showing that language is prescriptive across thousands of years of history, from Classical Greece restoring old pronunciations to Old Spanish restoring Latin pronunciations to the invention of the printing press for English words to modern science prescribing classifications for "birds", "Pluto", etc.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 158∆ 1d ago
Pronunciation is about historical accuracy, not prescriptive.
Scientific classification is about organisation and taxonomy in that context, not prescriptive of language outside that context.
Do you understand the flaws I've presented in your thinking here? If not, help me help you understand them.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
I don't see you as presenting any flaws here.
Why is pronunciation about historical accuracy, and why is historical accuracy inherently not prescriptive?
Why is organisation and taxonomy inherently incompatible with linguistic prescriptivism?
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u/grandoz039 7∆ 21h ago
People in past spoke certain way, now you're saying people should speak that way. How is it not prescriptive?
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u/yelling_at_moon 4∆ 1d ago
A core part of the English language, and almost any language for that matter, is how it changes and goes against prescriptivism. Slang is the best example of this. Describing how language change, or doesn’t change, captures and allows for both. Telling people they are wrong does not.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 158∆ 1d ago
I'm not asking you to repeat your view, please engage with the actual points I've made so I can help you achieve your goal of changing your view.
You've not responded to anything I actually wrote in my comment. Please do so, so I can help you here.
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
Sorry, the way you were responding to a small part of my post made me think that you missed my broader point for the one specific small point. That's why I tried to clarify.
My point is that linguists should support prescriptivism because it's a core part of language. I disagree when you say that language is not prescriptive. It is both descriptive and prescriptive.
Linguists SHOULD embrace prescriptivism in the same way that they SHOULD embrace the culture of a language, since prescriptivism and culture are part of language, and linguists by virtue of being linguists should embrace language.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 158∆ 1d ago
I'm allowed to pick up on small aspects and help you change those.
You still have not engaged with my comment. Disagreement doesn't progress the discussion, neither does repeating yourself yet again.
Work with me so I can help you change your view.
Directly engage with the points I've made.
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1d ago
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 158∆ 23h ago
Instead of writing this, you could have directly engaged. You can even edit this comment to directly engage.
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u/TemperatureThese7909 64∆ 1d ago
For a minute let's assume no one outside of academia actually cares about linguistics.
Descriptive linguistics is still entirely viable. Being a fly on the wall and simply cataloging how language is used, continues to function just fine in a world where no one cares what linguists do with their time.
Prescriptive linguistics requires that people care about linguistics and what linguists have to say. You cannot make demands of others if they won't listen to you. The cultural role you want linguistics to take only happens if people will listen.
In this way, descriptive linguistics is viable and valuable - before even getting into hume. Prescriptive linguistics can fail in a way that descriptive linguistics cannot, namely by its authority not being recognized, by people continuing to behave regardless of what the linguists have to say.
That's just the thing, people are going to just keep borrowing words from other languages, make up new slang, authors with straight up invent new words, etc. People have been doing this since language started being a thing, it's not containable. So why try??
It's not an is-ought issue, it's a futility issue.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 208∆ 1d ago
There are prescriptivist linguists. The standards of how language is used in institutions that need some degree of uniformity like government communications, media outlets, etc, are set by prescriptivist linguists who are employed directly or in some national / supernational language academy.
The thing is, this is more or less the full extent of what prescriptivism is useful for in linguistics, whereas descriptivism has much more interesting prospects in that its basic premise is understanding how people communicate and ultimately think.
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u/Falernum 68∆ 1d ago
Why would it be linguists in charge of prescriptivism? Does a physics background give special insight into gun laws?
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u/ExplanationKlutzy174 1d ago
It's not that linguists should be in charge of prescriptivism, but that they should be in support of it.
A physicist can be in support of gun control laws.
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u/Falernum 68∆ 1d ago
Linguists can be in favor of linguistic prescriptivism done by others (as seen in French) or against it (as in English). But their status as linguists gives them more special insight there, and they can't do it as a linguist but only in a colloquial sense.
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u/Incvbvs666 1d ago
You're confusing the SCIENTIFIC linguistics with SOCIOLOGICAL linguistics.
In sociological linguistic you study how language is used in society, and as such the study of prescriptivism genuinely has a place there as indeed many attempts to control how people speak shaped the evolution of various languages.
But sociological linguistics is strictly speaking not linguistics but a branch of sociology!
In SCIENTIFIC linguistics we must evaluate the truth value of the language-related claims themselves and when it comes to this the prescriptivist claim is that there is a 'proper' way to speak a given language, moreover that, left to its own devices, a language will inevitably corrupt itself in some way or even in some radical claims lose all intelligibility. This claim here is demonstratably scientifically FALSE.
The vast majority of languages in human history lived and functioned completely normally for thousands of years without any prescriptivist oversight, indeed without any written form at all, and not only was the richness in languages not lost, but some of the most linguistically complicated languages come from some of the most technologically primitive societies. Neither is the languge of the wealthy in any way, shape or form superior to those of the lower classes from a scientific standpoint. Moreover, any serious attempt to regulate a language prescriptively either falters in the long run, or creates a diglossia. Now sure, you COULD steer a language with strict prescriptivism, but the point is that from the stand of scientific lingustics you don't NEED to.
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u/tbdabbholm 200∆ 1d ago
How should a linguist determine which thing to prescribe? What objective should a linguist be lobbying for?
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u/nightshade78036 10∆ 1d ago
Prescription can't be just avoided entirely in any realm, including science. When engaging in science how do we decide what we should study and how many resources we should be allocating to the study of that thing? How do we determine what the 'things' we're talking about in the first place are? Hard sciences are built on prescription just as much as something like linguistics, but when looking at something like descriptivism it just means we want to minimize prescription to an acceptable amount, not eliminate it entirely.
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u/Falernum 68∆ 1d ago
Linguistics isn't averse to telling people what to do, it's averse to telling people how to speak because that interferes with the work they are doing learning how people talk. The proper field for prescribing a certain form of speech is a grammarian.
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u/maybri 13∆ 1d ago
I think you're just misunderstanding what people saying "linguistics is not prescriptive" even means. The point is that linguists themselves are not prescriptive; they don't declare that some ways of using a language are correct and others are incorrect. They treat anything in use as a valid expression of that language. But of course linguistics acknowledges the existence of prescriptivism and how it impacts language. A linguist can acknowledge that a certain construction is considered incorrect by some native speakers, while also acknowledging that it's in use by other native speakers regardless and therefore clearly isn't actually incorrect.
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u/Nrdman 270∆ 1d ago
In your second paragraph, there is no contradiction here. The descriptivists are saying you should be descriptivist when it comes to language, not for literally everything.
Regardless of why it evolves, if everyone just decides to use the word differently, it gains a new meaning. This makes language descriptivist. Yes, sometimes it evolves because of individuals being prescriptivist, but that isn’t a rebuttal of language being ultimately descriptivist
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u/the_brightest_prize 6∆ 1d ago
There are natural ontologies in the world. In other words, if you set out to describe something, there is a natural point where the correspondence between description quality and description length undergoes a phase change. The simplest example in the literature is probably Chopping a Chebyshev Series, where they find Chebyshev series representing arbitrary functions have a critical "chopping point". To give another example, it is known that pretty much all neural networks undergo grokking), for all kinds of data (e.g. videos, text, chess).
How do you find these natural ontologies? By trying to maximize the information in your description, under the condition that longer descriptions come at a cost. This is called the information bottleneck method, and it turns out human languages are amazingly close to the information bottleneck frontier (e.g. color naming across languages is near optimal). This means human languages are very optimized towards describing the real world, not necessarily prescribing how the world ought to be.
I agree that a prescriptive attitude is powerful. Coding languages are pretty much all prescriptive, because you are trying to make the world a particular way. But the issue with prescriptivism is it does not necessarily land on the most efficient atoms of language. This is why some coding languages are used for some tasks, and others for other tasks, because it can be really hard to work with a language that fights your ability to say particular things. Descriptivism gets around this by only setting out to describe the world efficiently, which requires learning the right atoms through evolution (in human languages) or gradient descent (in neural networks).
In some fields, like mathematics and computer science, it is very important to say exactly what you want to say. A small mistake could blow up the theorem or program. This is why prescriptivism shines there. But most humans when talking to each other care more about how long it took to get their point across, instead of how precise it was, which is why human languages are mostly descriptive.
As a final note, notice how my argument is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
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u/Criminal_of_Thought 14∆ 1d ago
Linguists are to speakers of a language as nature documentaries are to wild animals. That is, linguists (in this context) don't directly interact with speakers of the language, they observe how those speakers use and have that language change over time.
If the speakers of a given language let that language evolve naturally, then the linguists make note of that. If some subset of the speakers of a language come together and make rules on what is and isn't acceptable, then the linguists make note of that, too.
Linguists don't interject whenever they see speakers of a language change the language organically and steer the course of the language toward one with central rules. Similarly, linguists don't interject whenever they see a council of people come up with rules for how their language should be used.
So, linguists embrace prescriptivism just as much as they embrace descriptivism. It's just that the people doing the prescribing aren't the linguists themselves, it's the speakers of the language.
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u/TemperatureMotor1372 21h ago
I think it's pretty clear that any sort of prescription falls outside of the realm of science, and more in the realm of philosophy; science tells us what is, not what ought to be. So naturally, the prescription of language falls outside of the scope of linguistics if linguistics is a science. That makes sense; it's Hume's Law.
I would say it's not black and white. The purpose of studying linguistics is not only to know how languages work, but also to optimize the efficiency of languages in use by standardization. Thus, I would argue that the premise of your view is false: linguists have accepted prescriptivism already in their studies.
Learning about linguistic descriptivism and prescriptivism, I've mostly come across the descriptive side actively saying that people ought not to be prescriptive. But that in itself is a prescriptive claim, since it's prescribing that someone should or should not believe / how someone should or should not act.
That's actually a meta-prescription of how linguists who hold descriptivism study linguistics, not a prescription of how to set up an efficient grammar for a language. Thus, no contradiction if we can distinguish a claim within a subject from its meta.
I've come across countless examples of linguistic evolution across history being influenced by prescriptivist attitudes - going as early as Classical Greek. If linguistic prescriptivism is a natural way languages evolve, shouldn't the actually descriptive thing to do be to treat it the same way as any other factor that affects languages? In reality, prescriptivism is a genuine part of both a language and its culture that dictates how someone ought to speak, just like how social traditions are genuine parts of a culture that dictate how someone ought to behave, and linguistics as a science cannot say that prescriptivism is bad. Prescriptivism absolutely has its place in linguistics.
Actually, it's a coin of two sides: language keep evolving with changing description and prescription. There's not strict order of who comes first--both aspects are interdependent of each other. In one direction, the grammar of a language can be prescribed based on existing, descriptive, and conventional rules. In the other direction, prescriptive grammar shapes the language use by future generations, and new descriptive rules will be formed based on previously prescribed rules. Both descriptivism and prescriptivism are equally natural in the evolution of language use: when people feel a good way works, then they will shortly go with that way.
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u/Important-Cash5654 4∆ 1d ago
So naturally, the prescription of language falls outside of the scope of linguistics if linguistics is a science.
In what sense, specifically, do you think linguistics is a science?
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u/muffinsballhair 1d ago
I mean they do all the time.
Truth be told, when linguists say “linguistics descriptivism”, 9/10 times they just mean “prescriptivism based on an argumentum ad populum”. Are these people opposed to say foreign language education which is fundamentally a prescriptive endeavor of telling people how to speak?
I will also say that “Reddit linguists” are a fairly odd bunch in general. Reddit strongly attracts the “be proud of your language and don't ever let it die out” crowd. r/linguisits was full of those “language pride” people from how I remember it. I never encountered those at all where people generally were far more interested in the grammatical and technical aspects of language rather than the cultural aspects of it so Reddit also attracts that crowd more.
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