Love-Hounds-request@GAFFA.MIT.EDU (09/26/89)
Really-From: Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu> >> These are not the first Joycean references in Kate's work. > [IED:] This statement intrigued IED, also. Could you enlighten him > about any other possible Joycean allusions? Since IED is such an expert on the intricacies of my interview with Kate, it should not tax his memories very much to recall that Kate's lyrics to "My Lagan Love" were based on "The Dubliners" by James Joyce. Of course, these lyrics were mostly written by John Carder Bush, not Kate, but they are a definite Joycean reference in one of Kate's songs. > [IED:] Finally, IED didn't take umbrage against you, Julian, for > correcting his spelling of Vaughan Williams's name. On the contrary, > he shares with you a respect for spelling which often leads him into > breaches of the sad protocol devised by our present social order, > which has become so complacent in its illiteracy that it actually > views bad English as a virtue, and the consciousness of error as a > sin. This is a complete misrepresentation of the truth, Mr. Marvick. No one (whom I know) "views bad English as a virtue". What I have been saying (and it's also the truth) is that language is a means of communication. As a means of communication, it is something that can be used well, or it can be used poorly. But it can't in any real sense be used "correctly" or "incorrectly". The perfect use of language, if such a thing could exist, would communicate exactly what you wanted to communicate. The rules of "Standard Written English", one particular dialect of the English language, are argued by its most reasonable supporters to be the dialect which will allow clear communication with the greatest fraction of the English-speaking populace. However, this argument (even if it were true) only holds up if your audience is the entire English-speaking populace. If your audience is only a subset of the English-speaking populace (e.g. inner-city blacks), then the prose that will communicate the best might stray significantly from Standard Written English. In this case, following the rules of Standard Written English might very well be a poor use of language. Regarding "correct" spelling, there was not even such a thing as correct spelling in English until the invention of the printing press. Is it IED's claim that all writers that wrote before the invention of the printing press wrote "bad English"? Before the printing press, the "correct" spelling was whatever could be readily figured out by the reader. Every writer was allowed to spell a word however he wanted, so long as the reader could make sense of it. Shortly after the printing press was invented, people decided that if a lot more people were going to be reading, it made sense to make it easier on people by having words always look pretty much the same. That way the reader wouldn't have to spend as much effort figuring out what each word was and could devote more effort to what the book meant. It is certainly a better system to have some standards for how common words should appear, than to have them appear in a myriad forms. Life would be more painful if the word "the" might be written "thugh", "thuw", "thu", "tha", "thuh", etc. For longer, more esoteric words, the need for a standard spelling is not as clear. It certainly is useful in some ways: it means that there is a definite place we can put the word in a dictionary. It also means that the range of spellings that people actually use is likely to be more constrained, and thus easier to figure out by the reader when the spelling used does stray from the standard spelling. However, it seems to me that much more damage to good communcication is caused by pedants mindlessly criticizing others for their spelling than is caused by the masses "incorrectly" spelling "paralell". In the later case, I think that almost any reader, unless they are very dim, can figure out without much thought what word was intended. The following is a good paragraph on prescriptive grammar from the Linguistics book *An Introduction to Language* by Fromkin and Rodman (second edition, p. 10): With the rise of capitalism and the emergence of a new middle class, there was a desire on the part of this new social group to have their children educated and to have them learn to speak the dialect of the "upper classes". This led to the publication of many prescriptive grammars. In 1762 a very influential grammar, *A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes*, was written by Bishop Robert Lowth. Lowth, influenced by Latin grammar and by personal perference, prescribed a number of new rules for English. Before the publication of his grammar, practically everyone -- upper-, middle-, and lower-class speakers of English -- said "I don't have none."; "You was wrong about that."; and "Mathilda is fatter than me." Lowth, however, decided that "two negatives make a positive" and therefore one should say "I don't have any," that even if "you" is singular it should be followed by the plural "were", and that "I" not "me", "he" not "him", "they" not "them", and so forth should follow "than" in comparitive constructions. Because Lowth was very influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak "properly," many of these new "rules" were legislated into English grammar, at least for the "prestige" dialect. Note that grammars such as Lowth wrote are very different from the descriptive grammars we have been discussing. They are less interested in describing the rules people know than in telling them what rules they should know. |>oug
Love-Hounds-request@GAFFA.MIT.EDU (09/27/89)
Really-From: stewarte@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (The Man Who Invented Himself) Was I only dreaming, or did Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu> actually say: >Regarding "correct" spelling, there was not even such a thing as >correct spelling in English until the invention of the printing press. In fact, I believe that non-standard spelling lasted much longer than that. It wasn't until Samuel Johnson put together the first English dictionary that there was a real move towards standard spelling, and that was in the mid-1700s (exact dates anybody?). Many educated folk of the 18th century, including Thomas Jefferson, continued to spell idiosyncratically (and I'm sure that they spelled idiosyncratically idiosyncratically!). I could go on, but I've gotta run. Be thankful. -- "Neal Armstrong and Steppin Fetchit did lots of walking in their time." -- Scruffy the Cat /* uunet!sco!stewarte -or- stewarte@sco.COM -or- Stewart Evans */