[kristopolous]

That's not true though. Every word of this sentence, for instance, has a correct spelling and grammatical rules as to where the words and punctuation go.

To English learners, that might be very difficult. I'm learning a new language now and I feel the pain. The textbook and instructor, in this case, is way more correct than the collective opinion of my fellow students.

The vast majority of things actually follow this pattern instead. Knowing what a programming function would output given a set of inputs isn't some gray area world of opinion.

When things are unknown, such as say Covid origin, again there's people way beyond my pay-grade doing investigative work here. Youtube comment threads and tiktok opinions are actually not as valuable as peer reviewed scholarship on the topic EVEN IF there's say, 10 youtube comments saying one thing and 5 papers in the Lancet saying another. The youtube comments don't become correct by volume here.

It's not some giant equal playing field.

[reverius42]

> Every word of this sentence, for instance, has a correct spelling and grammatical rules as to where the words and punctuation go.

As a linguistic descriptivist, hahahahahahahaha.

[trealira]

Are you saying that the way people naturally speak follows no rules whatsoever?

Linguistic descriptivism just means that, rather than hold up an ideal of a language and prescribe variants as wrong or right, linguists should simply describe the language based on its use. That doesn't mean that the language (or variants of it) has no grammatical rules. It just means that, rather than holding up some prestige variety as "the language," and unprestigious ones as "uneducated errors" that shouldn't be studied, that you study all of them and determine how they work and how they're developing.

No matter where you go, people speak languages with a limited set of phones, which are mapped onto morphemes, which combine by particular rules to form words, which themselves form larger groups, like phrases and sentences (often the line between these things isn't clear cut). But languages all have rules of their own.

To imply that descriptivism means languages have no rules would be like saying that physics has no laws, because a physicist makes empirical observations instead of just deciding whatever the laws of physics ought to be.

[webmaven]

I think the claim isn't that "language has no rules" but rather that the "rules" are far more context dependent and subject to change over time than would ordinarily be implied by the use of the word "rules".

Even at the lowest level of phonemes to morphemes, accents introduce a huge amount of variety, and it doesn't really get more orderly as you increase the level of abstraction.

[kristopolous]

An grammar so no because no rules yes Have. then its they're simple she Great understand your of problem in yes?

Or did I break some rules there?

We're not talking Oxford commas here. There are fundamental structures.

For instance, If I made that "are there fundamental structures" then it's a question.

Basic grammar is very real and not some subjective ephemeral thoughtstuff with wildly different opinions. It's so obvious that you don't even question it.

That's the way most things are - how to operate a faucet, close a window, put on a shirt, open a cabinet, use a fork... Most things in life aren't controversial.

Even the controversial ones like what's art and what's music, it's just a small periphery that's questioned. A symphony played by an orchestra is music, a painting in a museum is art - even these subjective categories substantially have extremely wide agreement.

True controversy is an outlier. (Ie, is 4'33" by John Cage music?)

You can claim whatever you want but with just things that's just exercising the freedom to be wrong.

[reverius42]

It was more the correct spelling claim I object to. Considering all variations of English.

[kristopolous]

The point stands. Things are often depicted too binary and simplistic. Many subjective things also get smuggled in as if they were objective to hide their ideology and the word "truth" is used to stop people from questioning things.

I'm totally onboard with that.

At the same time, when talking about the physical world, most things are not like that. Humans for instance, get around by moving limbs called feet and not flapping feathered wings like a bird. This is the level of obvious I'm talking about.

The secondary point was that many things are this level of obvious and also specialized. For example: how does the animal cacomantis castaneiventris get around? Unless you have some kind of specialized knowledge you wouldn't know that's a type of bird.

The internet is awash in unspecialized people opining on specialized knowledge that is only controversial to the untrained eye in the same way that students don't get As on every exam they take. You need to actively work around people talking out of their bounds if you want your training data to be accurate