Prescriptive vs Descriptive

Neither.

Prescriptionism is a way to add an additional layer of friction to language and prevent it from changing too fast or for enormous pockets of different dialects to emerge. But it's obvious that it's a ruse.

read DFW's review of the usage dictionary for HarperCollins. most wonderful analysis I've ever read of this subject

Explain

They are both correct.

Language requires consistent patterns of usage and grammar in order to work. This is the inarguable underlying mechanism of language. You can't Finnegan's Wake your way through a conversation and expect another human being to understand you. This is prescriptivist.

Language also changes over time and can be used in ways that act contrary to the underlying mechanics. This is descriptivism.

Users of a language transfer from prescriptive to descriptive as their mastery of the language increases. It is not an either/or situation.

>You can't Finnegan's Wake your way through a conversation and expect another human being to understand you.
stop having pleb friends user

dishwater frank Water near ultima

This
Real friends should understand you on a unconscious level

Let's say 80 and 20.

Descriptivist here.

>Language is too flexible for any hard and fast rules apart from when it's not

wow amazing

I love this place sometimes.

Do you live in Lorain, Ohio?

What is the difference?

More like Feels vs Reals.

Prescriptive is a must because I don't want writings from a few hundred years ago to become foreign language. We have English and we must preserve it.

>strawman
In every day language people break "rules" all the time. The rules in formal writing are arbitrary and can be anything really. But most measurements and rules are set at some point just for ease of communication. It's just more convenient to have prescriptivist rules as a baseline but really it's arbitrary and doesn't reflect the way how grammar and language are used outside the bubble of academic writing.

That's entirely wrong; English simply has several subsets of rules, and it maintains itself to them quite well. The biggest problems that English has are that, for whatever reason, both academia and common speakers refuse to recognize the existence of distinct dialects and that common speakers of English refuse to adhere to the rules when requested to do so, choosing instead to insist that there are no rules.

>false dichotomy
It's both. It's descriptive, but if we didn't have any rules then we couldn't communicate with it. We use rules to establish the connection between context and meaning, between signifier and signified, which allows us to describe things in a meaningful, understandable way. If we did not have a set of axioms by which to distinguish one piece of language from another, we could not communicate, and we would have no information to exchange were we not attempting to describe anything. The two ideas work in tandem to create language.

Here I 9 seven be up you and;
I'm sure you agree.

Prescriptive is superior.

There should be fines for using incorrect or informal language in official communication.

yes how did you guess

"TIME IS MEASURED IN DISTANCE FROM GOD. Entropy dissolves oneness, knowledge sieves mystery, age breaks down our attempts at order. Children read fairy tales where every sentence is aphorism, old men ramble of dead names and changed places without moral or end, the body loosens its grip on homeostasis, map approaches territory so we describe but concede all attempts to constrain—“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”"

You have the typical lobotomized look most people who live in Ohio have