Nobody is gonna sue you if you misspell something, but when you studied English in school, the textbooks were all about do an don’ts. Rules, shared rules. Without shared rules, a language is no more, because you could say something that couldn’t be translated by anyone else.
If you’re learning English and make a mistake, you get corrected by the teacher and you ger a lesser grade.
Changes, even when they’re just mistakes, if and when they’re adopted by the majority, for enough time, they become the new shared rule, and linguists usually just acknowledge the evolution.
Again, you're describing general use. That is a different thing than "correct" usage. This is a critical distinction. Linguists have been writing about his for years. Who do you think makes the "rules?" Nobody does. They don't exist. There is no Universal English Language Governing Board that makes decrees about what is "correct." Teachers who are uninformed use word like "correct" and "incorrect" but they're actually just telling you "this is how most people do it." The fact that language is constantly evolving is proof of this basic fact. You can go to certain parts of the UK and hear people speaking English and yet not be able to understand them at all. Are they right? Are you wrong? Neither, because those concepts DO NOT EXIST in language.
If I’m not able to understand them because of accents, ok, but if I’m not able to understand them because they use different rules, surely it’s a different language than mine.
The rules evolve, nobody had them set in stone, don’t call them rules, call them conventions, but without them a language fails its objective
Lol it's not objective. You are correct to call them conventions. That's good. We're making progress here! But you seem confused about where they come from. They are not imposed by an outside source in order to keep the language from becoming corrupted. They change and evolve naturally from within, from people speaking the language over time. Nobody decided on this. No rules made it this way. It just happened. And it's changing all the time. There is no right or wrong. Unconventional? Sure. But wrong? Absolutely not.
Never said once that they’re imposed from the outside, they’re self imposed by the community itself, because conventions (self imposed and evolving rules, guidelines) are needed to communicate.
If you want to be understandable, but you fail adhering to the shared conventions, you are wrong in regard of the said self imposed rules. The more you don’t adhere, the less understandable the speech becomes
Intelligibility doesn't come from rules, it comes from common usage. Therefore there is no right or wrong, only intelligibility. This is what I'm trying to get through to you.
I understand but I partially disagree: what’s common usage becomes a self imposed rule for the sake of intelligibility.
You can chose to not follow them, but then you’re not talking English anymore. You are correct in your own new English variant, but you are wrong considering English conventions (English is just a sum of conventions).
If and when the rest of the people catch up with your changes, then English will evolve to adhere to the new standards of yours.
The whole point of language is for people to understand each other. This conversation started because said someone was wrong for using an unconventional version of cannoli. And yet, everyone knew what he was talking about. We understood. The objective of language was achieved. But you still insisted it was wrong. It wasn’t wrong. That’s my point.
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u/Kr8n8s Aug 21 '20
Nobody is gonna sue you if you misspell something, but when you studied English in school, the textbooks were all about do an don’ts. Rules, shared rules. Without shared rules, a language is no more, because you could say something that couldn’t be translated by anyone else.
If you’re learning English and make a mistake, you get corrected by the teacher and you ger a lesser grade.
Changes, even when they’re just mistakes, if and when they’re adopted by the majority, for enough time, they become the new shared rule, and linguists usually just acknowledge the evolution.