barryg@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Lee Gold) (06/22/85)
The 18th century grammarians were notorious for this sort of thing.
In addition the ruling out the double negative (long common in English as
an intensive rather than as a logical affirmation), they also...
-o- Introduced the "b" in "debt" and "doubt" based not on longstanding
spelling in English but on the fact that the Latin cognates had a "b"
-o- Set up the "I/we shall; you/he/they will" pattern
-o- Condemned the use of "yeah" vs "yes" (Yeah goes back to Chaucerian
times).
-o- Wrote the first (and very authoritative) dictionaries.
-o- Condemned the split infinitive (again on the grounds that Latin
couldn't have one--because the Ltin infinitive was all one word)
All this stuff caught on, in an age of rising middle classes desperately
trying to talk and write like their betters. I don't think the social
climate today favors sweeping adoption of such things.
For myself, I'll stick with the SFan usage of hesh, hiser, and himer for
the nongendered pronoun. If we're really going to revise the pronoun
structure, I vote for readoptino of the dual case of Anglo Saxon days.
It'd be nice to have a concise way of saying (I+another), (you+another),
(hesh+another).
--Lee Gold