Re: Descriptivism, prescriptivism and the evolution of language
Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2016 3:34 am
Serpent wrote:Modern linguistics yes, but previously there have certainly been linguists who considered Latin or Sanskrit to be superior to other IE languages.
Finny wrote:...not to mention the sordid history of bilingualism research, and how until only a few decades ago, (primarily monolingual) researchers categorized it as a deficit in children and invented an endless array of restrictive qualifications to be truly "bilingual" (many of which persist to this day in language learning communities online).
That is true, but I definitely don't see it as a switch to embracing "moral relativism"; working in a descriptive framework is no more morally relativistic than working in one in any other science. I just see it as a shift to a more science-based discipline, rooted in the fact of how people actually use language and not our preconceived notations of it. Part of me feels it wouldn't be too far off to credit Chomsky for this, though I don't know enough about the early history of modern linguistics to speak definitively (the 50s were well before my time!)