Timeline for Will grammar errors become correct after enough people use them for enough time?
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| Sep 5, 2022 at 23:56 | comment | added | levininja | Something you could add to your answer is the example of Latin. The reason Latin and Italian are different today is basically identical to the example of what happened with standard Arabic; only it was the Catholic church freezing the language. | |
| Aug 21, 2022 at 23:03 | comment | added | Kevin | @Kosmonaut: I'm reminded of this OED article: "And eighteenth-century grammarians like Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray regularly tested students on thou as singular, you as plural, despite the fact that students used singular you when their teachers weren’t looking, and teachers used singular you when their students weren’t looking. Anyone who said thou and thee was seen as a fool and an idiot, or a Quaker, or at least hopelessly out of date." | |
| Jul 2, 2013 at 16:02 | comment | added | cobaltduck | Re: "undergoing regularization" and "the language is fixing itself." An episode of Science Channel's "Through the Wormhole With Morgan Freeman" featured an experiment where subject 1 was shown pictures of imaginary fruits along with invented words to name them. When asked to identify the pictures by name, he got none right. He was then asked to write down what he thought the words for each fruit were, and the next next subject was taught using these words. Repeat two or three times, and the final subject was able to identify every picture correctly. Amazing. | |
| Mar 10, 2011 at 20:44 | comment | added | Kosmonaut | @ShreevatsaR: Yes, Latin and Standard Arabic seem to have a lot in common, only their rises and falls are hundreds of years apart. Of course these countries are entitled to keeping only SA as an official language if they want to — they are sovereign nations. | |
| Mar 10, 2011 at 20:28 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | The practical benefit is that all educated people are forced to have a language common. :-) About the hypothetical Dutch situation, wasn't it roughly the case in Europe for many centuries, when Latin was the language of education? When the situation gets completely hopeless with Arabic (likely with the rise of TV and internet… I don't know whether mainstream TV shows are in the different dialects, or they're used only as regional markers) perhaps languages will be recognised, but until then, if Standard Arabic is an influence against the dialects drifting even further apart, good luck to them. | |
| Mar 10, 2011 at 20:26 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | The governments probably don't want to lend legitimacy & independent existence to these dialects/languages. Maybe they feel Standard Arabic provides some sort of cultural unity. If that's their goal besides maintaining the language of the Quran, they're perfectly entitled to it. If they taught the spoken dialects formally, they'd start being used in books etc, making it less necessary to learn Standard Arabic. (And don't say the dialects can't gain any more since they already exist: in many languages there's a minor revolution when authors start using the spoken version instead of the formal.) | |
| Mar 2, 2011 at 22:36 | comment | added | Kosmonaut | @ShreevatsaR: Well, the problem is that the standard language is considered the only language in those countries. So, in contrast to, say, Holland, where everyone learns English along with Dutch, you only learn the Standard Arabic. It would be like if people only learned English in Holland but spoke Dutch day-to-day. Ideally, the various countries in the Middle East would teach their "dialect" (which really is already its own language) AND Standard Arabic. People manage fine with two formally taught languages. | |
| Mar 2, 2011 at 20:34 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | This situation with Standard Arabic seems wonderful to me. (We have a similar situation back home, with Kannada and Tamil at least.) If not for these standard versions that everyone was taught and near-fastidiously followed in formal speech and all writing, the different "dialects" would more or less have to be considered different languages, as they can often get mutually unintelligible. | |
| Nov 23, 2010 at 15:45 | history | edited | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Oct 23, 2010 at 0:24 | vote | accept | ErikE | ||
| Sep 27, 2010 at 16:16 | vote | accept | ErikE | ||
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| Sep 27, 2010 at 5:09 | comment | added | ErikE | Hmmm. I appreciate all your interaction, Kosmonaut. I'm surprised that my question is such a moving target to you. Perhaps I need to take some writing skills classes so I can start my question the way I want it to finish. However, reading everything at once I am not so convinced that I'm jumping around all that much. Many of the sentences from my first-posted question would fit very naturally at the end of my second update. The ideas have a fitting circularity to them. | |
| Sep 27, 2010 at 0:07 | history | edited | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Sep 26, 2010 at 23:39 | history | edited | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Sep 26, 2010 at 23:14 | history | edited | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Sep 26, 2010 at 17:17 | history | edited | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Sep 26, 2010 at 16:51 | history | edited | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Sep 26, 2010 at 16:40 | history | edited | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Sep 26, 2010 at 15:56 | history | answered | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |