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Caius -> RE: Is good grammer a reasonable standard? (5/7/2010 2:14:50 PM)
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As someone with a background in linguistics, I can never seem to walk away from this discussion. In empirical work, linguists find it necessary to distinguish between what is called 'descriptive grammar' and 'prescriptive grammar'. Descriptive grammar are those rules which, due to the syntactic nature of the language, when broken make the statement in some way obscure, nonsensical, or just outright unintelligible; most all native speakers of that dialect will recognize the oddity naturally without having to be told it is somehow flawed. So for example, double negatives -- in English double negatives are considered jarring and usually to amount to a positive (unlike some languages where they stay a negative). Prescriptive grammar, by comparison, are rules imposed for cultural reasons usually deriving from some (typically asinine) concept of propriety. For example, the not ending a sentence with a preposition rule someone noted earlier and every English teacher who was never particularly liked by her pupils drilled into you. Know where that comes from? This obtuse tradition is a veteran, arising hundreds of years ago when the English scholars of the time (dominated by the clergy) decided to apply their Latin sensibilities to the structure of English, spawning this and probably many other rules that died out because they were just unworkable and felt like unnatural and unnecessary rules. Because it never made any sense - English and Latin differ massively in their word order and syntactical form. No preposition is ever found at the end of a Latin sentence because in Latin the preposition is a part of the same word as the verb and the verb in Latin is not found at the end of a sentence, therefore neither will you find the preposition there. But in English, as in all surviving Germanic languages, you can put that sucker all over the place without risk of making word-soup out of your sentence. People will still understand you fine.
This all has relevance to new trends in speech and even internet communication. The lesson we learn from the above is that you can't constrain language very easily, because we all inherit and remarkably uniform way of using it (because we literally have much of it hardwired, mostly identically, into our brains and learning only alters it so much) and most of us instinctively know that kind of bullshit for what it is. People will not be stopped from using their innate language tools to adapt and adopt any form if it proves useful enough. And that's the way it should be. We're talking about one of the most highly evolved of human capacities. Again, not that you could stop it even if you tried. Another thing that becomes undeniable when you study the structure of language is how quickly it can change. You (general you, not OP) think you could talk an English speaker of a few generations back, so long as you stuck an occasional 'prithee' in where appropriate? No, you'd spend nearly as much time gawking and attempting to communicate through gestures as if we sat you down with a modern Uighuir. So, goofy as we may find them, we better learn to try to decipher the changes occurring now (even if they do at times seem like the laziest of shortcuts) because the process is only accelerating now that we have vast new ways to communicate with the written realm and more languages are directly influencing one-another than at any previous period in history by far. Not to mention media and other institutions trying to find every bizarre way to use language to influence you in ways that quite frankly long ago passed into the vein of Orwellian. And this word of warning goes double for people who stand by one language as somehow more pure, refined, or powerful and refuse to consider that anything else should ever be spoken around them. They're going to have conniptions when they see what's coming if they don't learn to have some perspective on language.
However, most of the above is peripheral, at best, to the OP's question, and I think she is unfairly catching flak for misinterpretations of her stance. She's clearly stated that she is not judging their level of language skill so much as the veracity of their claims as to where they are from, based on their language. That is not just reasonable, I'd say she'd be an idiot if the idea didn't occur to her. All I can do to address her question there is to say that I think you should go with what you believe the language is telling you, but don't allow it alone to make up your mind. Feel the person out, or better yet, just confront them with your suspicions directly. If there is a reasonable explanation, they can give it. And there are reasonable explanations; as someone else pointed out already, they might very well be the member of an insular emigrant community. Rarer and rarer, but it does happen. I seem to recall Texas has an ample little south-east Asian population.
Hey, wanna hear a linguist/kink joke? How do phonologists do it? With constraints.
Trust me, that's fucking hilarious.
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