I defiantly do not want to see people's typos move the language forward, especially when it's native speakers always making the same silly mistakes, for some reason (could of, they're/their, your's, etc.). I do like non-native speakers translating and incorporating their local sayings into English prose.
The possessive apostrophe originated as a mistake or idiosyncrasy, credited to one of two people in the early 1500s depending on who's making the assertion, that became widely adopted.
Possession should be, in static, unchanging, OBJECTIVELY CORRECT DON'T YOU DARE GO CHANGIN IT English, written "peoplees" (or something like that but you get the point).
Merely calling "'" an "apostrophe" was a mistake for over a century, as the word was a well-defined rhetorical term that was later adopted to describe the mark sometime during the mark's slow acceptance.
Grammarly makes people sound like soulless automatons who have been trained to write by similarly soulless and robotic corporate ad copy writers.
Sometimes it seems like half the English language is just Shakespeare or some other writer making up shit that sticks-- and that's awesome.
> OBJECTIVELY CORRECT DON'T YOU DARE GO CHANGIN IT English
Your point is well taken, but this attitude toward the orthography and grammar of English emerged several centuries after the 1500s. There was nothing resembling an accepted orthography when the personal apostrophe emerged. Everyone was winging it.
Prescriptive grammar peaked in the mid to late 1900s or thereabouts. Linguists are more relaxed about their approach to language these days. Most publications have a style guide, but if you don't have an editor, there's no reason to cargo-cult it.
Not until my dying breath. The English language is a mess because of its haphazard evolution mostly driven by immigration over centuries.
Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
(My pet peeve is native speakers unable to pronounce "aesthetics" correctly. Drives me nuts. )
I do see where you are coming from but alas, language is an ever moving democracy. As much as many would like to define it in certain terms - it is largely beyond control.
This is why the English of Shakespeare doesn't hold up today because we are constantly adding and changing these things in a wonderfully organic fashion. It just makes it difficult to define.
The question is should we define it or is it like catching the wind with a net?
Another example is the word Monetize. It used to mean to turn a item into a form of money like currency. Almost nobody uses it like this nowadays. Decimate is another one.
Decimate meaning "kinda reduce the number" instead of "kill one person in 10"? I think it's been used with the first meaning in every language (including latin ones) for a long while.
> Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them
Why does it bug you? They are different classes of mistakes but both have driven the language over the centuries. Why are native mistakes wrong but immigrant mistakes good?
Because in my limited experience (I am fluent in only two other languages apart from English), "native grammar mistakes" only happen to native English speakers.
For example, I know Italian and French, yet I cannot think of any weird misspelling only native Italian or French speakers do. I always wondered if it's because of education or how grammar is taught in Anglosaxon countries that is ultimately the root cause of these errors. It is a peculiar phenomenon.
I'm French. I can't list them off the top of my head right this moment, but there definitely are annoying errors that natives do that are in the same category as "could of".
> The English language is a mess because of its haphazard evolution mostly driven by immigration over centuries.
No. Every language evolves, even those in countries with zero to very little immigration.
Usually towards simplification. I've lived enough to notice my native Romanian getting 'dumbed down' and we can count immigrants here on just a few hands.
However, in the 2000s I've ran across a collection of 1920s articles written by someone complaining romanian is changing and getting dumbed down. His examples of correct language felt overcomplicated and pointless, and his examples of 1920s dumbed down were academy style in the 2000s :)
> Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
Every language evolves. English evolved haphazardly, and gained all its rules, inconsistent pronunciation, and exceptions because of its very history and immigration by Angles, Saxons, Celts, Franks, Vikings in a period where a reference text like the King James bible didn't exist yet. At least that's how I understand it.
You can make a really ugly, low quality change to a language, wait for a new generation to grow up with it and it will now be accepted as perfectly fine. There isn’t any objective notion of quality here
That doesn’t imply it’s perfectly fine, it might just mean that the arbiters have lost their ability to detect quality. Which is exactly what I think has happened.
What you call signs of quality are cultural signifiers. My native language is French, a language that has an actual gatekeeping administration (English doesn’t). The french I grew up with(not in the country of France) may be considered lower quality by some people because they aren’t used to it, but really what they mean is that I express a different set of cultural signifiers they are used to.
Unsurprisingly signs of language qualities have a tendency to reinforce the language spoken by people in power.
I don’t think those are the same things. I had in mind an example more like this:
A town is full of carpenters that make furniture. They understand the variety and quality of various woods, from oak to ash to ebony. These carpenters can easily discern the quality difference between one wood and another.
Over time, the carpenters die out and are replaced by people that can’t tell the difference. To them, an IKEA table made of compressed wood is the same as a handmade table made of high-quality wood. Ergo they have no ability to discern the quality difference and think they are all the same: wooden tables.
In terms of language: if language is merely becoming more simple and following its own rules less, then that seems like an analogous situation. It’s not simply becoming something else, it’s becoming dumber, less complex, less adherent to the rules that previously defined quality. It’s not doing this as a consequence of pursuing new levels of quality, but merely because the previous ones are decaying. I don’t think comparing two languages like French and English together is quite the same thing.
It’s a big debate indeed and I don’t want to get into it here, but I think I come down on the side of, “some standards are not purely popularity contests, but are based on other things.” There are a lot of reasons I think this way, but even if someone doesn’t agree, I do think a purely consequentialist approach is illustrative.
Would we have better food if the top chefs in the world designed our meals, or if the entire population voted on them? For some topics (including the arts) I think a purely subjective approach has worse outcomes.
But that's how languages evolved and will keep evolving. Whatever you take now as rules and whatever you write now thinking to be correct, was probably a mistake, shortcut or misunderstanding ages ago.
So what? 500 years later, a typo could be part of the English language taught in school. It doesn't mean that every single typo has to be accepted from day one as valid. Otherwise the mere concept of typo, or even the concept of English language itself, stops meaning anything.
I don't get the urge many English speakers have to justify any deviation (i.e. any typo) as valid and indisputable. There's grammar nazis, but there's also illiterate people :)
