Experimental Blog #75

Comments on "You Are What You Speak" - Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene

Prescriptivism is a point of view that emphasizes "rules" of "correct" language: either spoken or written. There have been numerous attempts in both England and America to, as if, codify such rules of writing, speaking, grammar, and punctuation.
Descriptivism, sometimes called a part of linguistics, is about the inevitable historical evolution of all languages. The author describes the "muddy continuums" of all of Medieval Europe's Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages; when every village had its own dialect.
Diglossia is tne natural tendency for all languages to develope 2 forms: a "high" form and a "low" form, or a formal and an informal, or, sometimes, a written and a spoken form.

Whorfianism is a once once respected view that " a person's access to reality is conditioned by the language he speaks", but is now mostly rejected except in "weaker versions of the idea"; now language might "incline" people, but not completely "restrict" or "define what they can or can't think."

Of the roughly 6000 spoken languages in the world today, only several hundred have a written form.
The author himself speaks 9 languages, and his grammar and punctuation seem perfect. He uses colons much more often than semicolins. His rule seems to be that, however you use colins, semicolins, and commas, you should be consistent.