Don't be an asshole! (Previously Re: esn esn on mod nar erom)

[Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu>]

> From: juli@lafayette.dartmouth.edu (Julian West)

>> As someone else pointed out, English spelling wasn't reasonably
>> standardized until LONG after that.  Printing presses became widely
>> used around 1500, and in the early 1700's people were still
>> complaining

> I don't remeber who "someone else" was, but I do remember that |}
> took credit for it! In a later posting he said (and I paraphrase)
> "As I have already pointed out, there was no regularized spelling in
> English until the 1700's."

Damnit, Julian!  Stop being an asshole just because you disagree with
me.  Your paraphrasing of me is ridiculous.  If anything, it seems
like you are trying to advertize to everyone that you don't know the
difference between spelling and grammar.

In the very same message that I said that spelling was not
standardized until after the invention of the printing press, I said
that prescriptive grammars did not become common until the 1700's.  I
did not know that standardized spelling did not also become common
until the mid-to-late 1700's until someone else pointed it out, but it
does not surprise me in the least.  The 1700's does fall in the more
general period of after the invention of the printing press, does it
not?

In any case here is the quote of mine that you are paraphrasing.
Notice that is does not mention spelling at all:

> The problem with prescriptive grammars is that they never indicate how
> people usually communicate.  As I mentioned in a previous message,
> until the late 1700's it was considered perfectly acceptable to say "I
> don't have none".  Some people decided they needed to feel superior
> and trained themselves not to use this form so that they could label
> those who did as inferior.  However, despite the fact that Standard
> Written English declares that "I don't have none" is an unacceptable
> sentence, it continues to be a very widely used and accepted one.

The following is part of a previous article of mine that I refer to in
the above extract.  It is a quote from the Linguistics text book, *An
Introduction to Language*:

>     With the rise of capitalism and the emergence of a new middle
>     class, there was a desire on the part of this new social group to
>     have their children educated and to have them learn to speak the
>     dialect of the "upper classes".  This led to the publication of
>     many prescriptive grammars.  In 1762 a very influential grammar,
>     *A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes*,
>     was written by Bishop Robert Lowth.  Lowth, influenced by Latin
>     grammar and by personal perference, prescribed a number of new
>     rules for English.  Before the publication of his grammar,
>     practically everyone -- upper-, middle-, and lower-class speakers
>     of English -- said "I don't have none.";

Julian, please give everyone a break, and if you are going to argue
with someone on an issue, listen to what they say.  And don't accuse
people of crimes they didn't commit.  It makes people like me really
mad.  And makes you look like a fool.

|>oug