Quote:
Originally Posted by riverkid  I never said it was a matter of opinion, 2006. Isn't that what you are expressing, an opinion of how you want language to be? Language doesn't conform to opinions, it never has and it never will. It can't.
Can you imagine the muddle language would be if we tried to conform to all the silly prescriptions that have been touted as rules over the years.
In actuality, it's simply a matter of language fact. Nonstandard does not equal incorrect. It simply means that it doesn't match Standard English. |
riverkid
You implied that my calling the sentence "incorrect" is a matter of opinion (because maybe somewhere what I called "incorrect" is 'standard English'). So we both are expressing opinions about the English language.
Although the rules of a language do slowly change over time, there always are widely accepted rules as to what constitutes correct spelling, grammar, etc of the language. One cannot have a language with no rules, where nothing can be called "incorrect".
Finally my comment on "language fact". If one is
studying a language as a research project, one can say that the fact is that this variation of the language is spoken here and that variation is spoken there. (even so, there will be a lot more that is the same than is different)
So when one is
teaching a language, one cannot teach that anything can be correct and that nothing is incorrect. What you call "standard" is correct for the language spoken in that particular place and is largely correct for other places too.
That's my opinion.
