| HN Mirror

Other than a few synthetic languages, that true of every other language, so I don't understand why you are singling out English.

Well, I guess there are a few language academies which try to define a language, but those are post hoc. If you accept that, then I can declare myself the explicit definer of English language, no?

I can say that the past tense of "to God" is "to Gods", but English has a general rule that the "d"/"ed" form usually forms the past, while "s" is used for third person singular present tense. (There are exceptions, of course.)

I could say that in Swedish "att Gud" is conjugated in the present as "att Gudo", but Swedish has a pretty strong rule that present tense verbs ends with an -r. The exception being the modals and archaic forms like "äro" in the song "Vi äro, musikanter".

Tossing the 'explicitly defined grammar' aside, which is the realm of the prescriptivists, we're still left with the meaning of rule used by the descriptivists. What are those rules? In terms you use, what are the rules which describe what "other people will naturally agree with."

In case you couldn't tell, I'm a descriptivist, in the Language-Log-fanboi sort of way. Quoting from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3985 :

> Bloom finishes with some more invective against "these do-as-you-please linguists" who pretend that "utopia is at hand, that everyone is a revolutionary, that linguistic anarchy will set you free." I would love to meet one of these anarcho-linguists, since they sound like a lot of fun, but I'm afraid that they only live in the imagination of folks like Bloom and Acocella, following the path of their distinguished forebear in descriptivist strawmanism, David Foster Wallace.

> Actual linguists and lexicographers who answer to the "descriptivist" label tend to be quite concerned with precisely those matters Bloom claims that they neglect. Is a particular linguistic form considered to be erroneous? If so, what motivates the ascription of error? Would the person who produced the form in question recognize it as an error and chalk it up to a slip of the tongue or pen? Or is a linguistic variant disparaged because it is associated with a stigmatized dialect, and if so, how does the relationship between the "standard" and "non-standard" forms reflect broader social dynamics over time? And finally, which registers of a language are appropriate for which social situations, and how do speakers and writers navigate changes of register in their daily lives?