this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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I'm a descriptivist but that doesn't mean that there aren't rules and that we can't point out things still being wrong.
Descriptivism still describes rules as they're used in the real world. Breaking those rules still subjects the speaker/writer to the consequences: being misunderstood, having the spoken or written sentence to simply be rejected or disregarded, etc.
"Colour" and "color" are both correct spellings of the word, because we are able to describe entire communities who spell things that way. "Culler" is not, because anyone who does spell it that way is immediately corrected, and their written spelling is rejected by the person who receives it. We can describe these rules of that interaction as descriptivists, and still conclude that something is wrong or incorrect.
Orthography isn't really a part of grammar, so it's easily possible for natives to make mistakes when writing that might make a word difficult to understand. It's much harder for spoken language to be misunderstood among the population that a native grew up in, because the words they use don't come out of nowhere (despite the old prescriptivist argument that you can even see in this thread saying "I'm just gonna call houses xytuis because any words are ok!") Obviously now with mass communication people pick up language from all sorts of places, so you might have words be unrecognizable even within a locality.
Even so, an individual's (native) idiolect can't really be "wrong" to descriptivists in the way orthography can. It'd just be chalked up to differences from the local language or dialect.
Well, there's still register switching, which is an important part of the study of linguistics. A native English speaker might freely switch between the different ways to say the same meaning, depending on context and audience ("sorry" versus "my bad" versus "apologies," or "you're welcome" versus "don't mention it" versus "my pleasure").
There are perceived formalities, common membership in different groups, unspoken social relationships and positions that are reflected in speech.
These systems can be described with rules, and we can recognize that sometimes one register is inappropriate or poorly fit for a particular situation, and that some registers have different rules of grammar.
It's funny because a ton of these common errors are due in a huge part to the fact that we don't use the native alphabet for English. Lots of stuff has to be transposed in creative ways to deal with the romanization of English.
Native alphabet?
The Latin alphabet is not the original alphabet system used for English. There are modern alternatives that have been suggested to help eliminate some of the confusion created by using a non native alphabet, the Shavian alphabet for instance would theoretically solve much of the issue.
It's kind of what happens in other languages as well... English speakers like to quip that there are x number of dozens of ways to spell Mohammed. And for sure, in English, it probably feels that way. But there is actually only one proper way to spell it you just have to use the Arabic alphabet to do so.
the shavian alphabet on Wikipedia
https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/origin-english-alphabet/
Here is a decent explanation of some of the evolution behind the alphabet. It's funny that a lot of what we consider special characters in modern typography are in fact actually original letters of the defunct alphabet systems. It's been under our noses the whole time, we just don't really teach that alot of these characters were once part of the working alphabet system. &, for instance... Was the last letter of the alphabet for some time. The story behind @ is even more interesting.
One who culls is a culler.
"Culler" is a word, but it certainly will not be received by a reader as the same word as "color."
True. My brain brought forward a seal clubber.