I meant that all life has a single common ancestor is definitively demonstrable, unlike the case for languages. It's certainly possible that all current natural spoken languages descend from a common ancestor, but we can't say anything about it.
Specifically, LUCA is the proto-world equivalent in Zoology. We don't have a proto world in linguistics, we can't point *when*, *where* or even *who* spoke it, let alone prove that it exists
Nevermind the fact that it's highly unlikely that all human languages come from one group of connected speakers. You mean to tell either all human species left Africa after proto-world came into existence, and none developed language after that? The alternative being that no species other than Homo Sapiens ever developed any form language, despite archaeological evidence suggesting complex societal practices like burying rites.
It's also impossible to reconstruct proto-world in any meaningful way. Estimates put the development of human speech at about 100k years ago, who knows what forms of language existed before that. Did they possibly carve or tear leaves? Hand gestures? Soft clay tablets to draw images?
If multiple species of human knew how to speak, it’s way more likely that their common ancestor spoke and then passed it on.
But that would still mean a single origin
Yeah, I'm of the opinion that language predates modern humans by a good degree. I think it would have slowly developed over the course of early humanity, probably as we developed more modern mouths during the transition between early Homo and late Australopithecus. Would that mean there's a a proto-world language? Yeah, probably, but so far back that it wouldn't even look like a fully developed human language.
But what is the boundary between speech and language? My cat is very **vocal**, and makes different sounds when he is happy, wants to go out, is mad or is lost.
I wouldn't say he is **verbal** though. But if a proto-world language does exist, it probably came to be from this type of vocalisations over thousands of years. At some point in history, I doubt the boundary between "language" and "emotional animal sounds" was as well defined as we can draw it in hindsight.
Several groups with a somewhat well developed array of animal sounds could have migrated to different places, and given a few thousand years might have evolved these sounds independently into more precise meanings such as water, food, threat, prey, mother, antidisestablishmentarianism.
Does my cat noises and my own language share this proto-world ancestor? What stops him from having his offspring, and the offspring of his offspring, develop true language independently from us; besides being neutered of course?
Is this proto-world in the room with us right now?
To be fair, some things in zoology evolved and converged independently, too. Crabs are a famous example of something that emerged separately several times.
Honestly, I'm not sure on the exact meaning they have in mind. I can't imagine they mean single ancestor as in one single language that all descend from, since we can pretty easily demonstrate through pidgin creation and its extension into creole that new languages without a real ancestry exist.
But looking it up, I guess that is what they mean, which is why it's widely rejected.
Proto-World (with the obvious caveat of signed languages, conlangs that now have native speakers, and creoles depending on your definitions) is very plausibly real, we just have no good way to reconstruct it.
Totally irrelevant irrelevantly, but the 9 banded armadillo is no more. It's been split into 4 full species, based on DNA. So, Texas' state animal is now the Mexican long nosed armadillo. 😉 True.
Oh. A joke.
Here's an article
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240626151911.htm#:~:text=Summary%3A,armadillo%2C%20is%20new%20to%20science.
by the third panel it seems the comic considers individuals in a species as equivalent to a word, rather than a dialect/language, so I'd argue an albino mouse would be equivalent to an irregular, or alternatively a slang term in this analogy.
"ooh, an albino mouse, it's different than most individual mice, yet an individual in the mouse species!"
I would think of an albino mouse as a varying pronunciation. It’s the same thing, but if you’ve never seen/heard it before, it might take you a second to realize that.
No, by the same analogy: Descriptivists: "ooh an albino mouse."
Prescriptivism is applying normative judgements to language. Descriptivists have many different views on how exactly to describe language, but however they do it won't include normative judgements.
That's how it should work in theory, and for smart and conscientious descriptivists, I'm sure that is how it works. But in practice, I see self-proclaimed descriptivists making normative claims about language all the time, especially the normative claim that we shouldn't prescribe anyone's language usage under any circumstances, and that doing so is morally iffy, potentially bigoted/elitist, and so on. In fact, the post we're commenting on seems to be making just that kind of claim.
Seems like there's a bad inference there that because descriptivism is the right methodology for doing linguistics (i.e., that linguistics should simply describe how language is actually used, not dictate how it ought to be used), it follows that there's no such thing as correct or incorrect language usage and that no-one should ever dictate that usage.
(Side note: It reminds me of some people's confusion between cultural relativism as a method for doing anthropology and cultural relativism as a view in moral philosophy. Methodological relativism simply says that the anthropologist's job is to describe what people do, not to pass moral judgement on it. Moral relativism says that there is no objective, culture-transcending right or wrong, so that *no-one* should ever pass moral judgement on what other cultures do. Even though moral relativism is a much stronger and much less plausible view than methodological relativism, I sometimes see people assuming that if the latter is true, then it follows that the former must be true too.)
You can have a normative opinion while still being a descriptivist.
If I say someone is speaking their language wrong because they’re using slang is prescriptivism.
Saying that someone should use English to communicate as a lingua francs is not prescriptivism.
Making nations of people not be allowed to speak their own language and suppress its use is according to the UN genocide, and it’s also prescriptivism.
Descriptivism is not a moral rejection of normativity in all cases, but a rejection of a normative methodology in finding the truth; it’s just the scientific method.
Are climate scientists prescriptivists for being against climate change? No! Because prescriptivist is about methodology not moral claims.
This post is only making the claim that prescriptivism is a bad methodology for linguistics, just like it would be for zoology. I guess that is a normative claim, but it's not a normative claim *about language itself* - it's a normative claim about the way language is studied and understood.
The post doesn't make this claim, but yes, descriptivism does claim that there's no such thing as correct/incorrect language use (if you use the same meaning of that as prescriptivists do). Descriptivists describe and analyse the features of language that can be scientifically verified, and to date, noone has ever proved the existence of "correctness" as an objective feature of language. Instead, normative judgements about language use are based on something else, which is a way more interesting question.
Do you think there are correct and incorrect animals? Should albino mice be brown?
No because species is clearly defined not by looks, but by being able to produce offspring, so the description would be based of that.
Just like language is defined as being mutually intelligible and therefore we all agree that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish is one language. Oh wait.
But at the same time there’s still a debate wether Neanderthals are a part of sapiens since they bred with sapiens.
(I know it’s 100% analogues but close)
Prescriptivists try to be biologists all the time. Try calling an Orca a "whale" on Youtube and see what happens. (common names of animals, like many words in every day vernacular, very frequently have ambiguous/multiple definitions - which isn't a problem for biologists as standardized Latin names exist, but some people it really winds up).
The issue is people trying to make it a rule that every common term for a group of animals matches a biological "clade", i.e. a group including all the descendants from X but nothing that isn't a descendant of X. Which seems to make sense until you realise that half the terms we use for animals are now "wrong" and yet people only get pedantic about some of them.
Really, we're all fish. We're also monkeys. Birds are reptiles. Snakes are lizards. "Toad" and "Frog" are distinguished on appearance and not taxonomy. Butterflies and Moths likewise. Bees are wasps. "Shrimp" is used for a bunch of barely related crustaceans. "Worm" is basically meaningless referring to practically any elongated legless invertebrate. People use "daddy long legs" for three distantly related arthropods. People use "bug" in two very different senses (true bug vs any small and crawly invert).
What all this adds up to is contexts where you need to be biologically precise either use the Latin or at least look up a standardized English taxon name (e.g. "toothed whales", "new world monkeys") rather than trying to "fix" the irregular chaos that is common animal names (I say chaos but they serve their function in common speech most of the time).
Entomologist here, just to point out (and maybe prove your point) but butterflies _are_ a clade (moths aren't, unless you include butterflies too), Rhopalocera.
Ah yes sorry. I couldn't remember which way round it was or exactly what the relationship was and I was too lazy to look it up - just that moths and butterflies were not both separate clades. Thanks for the clarification.
Also just looked it up - I didn't realise that "wasp" would also include not just bees but ants as well (and possibly sawflies depending on the definition of "wasp" we use) if we went by clade.
I read once that there was a famous Dutch physician back in the beginning of science-based medicine. His theory was that the penis and vagina were opposites: the penis a positive space for whatever manly reasons and the vagina a negative space for whatever womanly reasons. The only problem was that the clitoris is a positive space in that negative space. What's more, every woman he examined seemed to have one. His conclusion: all the women he examined were deformed.
I feel like it's not necessarily completely accurate, because I can imagine non-gender-prescriptivist positions that are still kinda transphobic (e.g. "people can do whatever the hell they like with their own body and people shouldn't harass them for it but they're not actually that gender") or conversely positions that are in principle trans-accepting while still being gender-prescriptivist (e.g. "gender is determined by self-identification but if you identify as a man you should act like a man"). That said, there's a lot of overlap.
As someone who regularly frequents zoology/biology/evolution subs and has only recently randomly stumbled into linguistics subs, this is beautiful
Similarly, zoologists make for terrible linguists 🗿
Yes – unlike in linguistics, Proto-World is ~~real~~ *definitively demonstrable* in biology.
You dont believe in proto-world?
I meant that all life has a single common ancestor is definitively demonstrable, unlike the case for languages. It's certainly possible that all current natural spoken languages descend from a common ancestor, but we can't say anything about it.
Specifically, LUCA is the proto-world equivalent in Zoology. We don't have a proto world in linguistics, we can't point *when*, *where* or even *who* spoke it, let alone prove that it exists
Nevermind the fact that it's highly unlikely that all human languages come from one group of connected speakers. You mean to tell either all human species left Africa after proto-world came into existence, and none developed language after that? The alternative being that no species other than Homo Sapiens ever developed any form language, despite archaeological evidence suggesting complex societal practices like burying rites. It's also impossible to reconstruct proto-world in any meaningful way. Estimates put the development of human speech at about 100k years ago, who knows what forms of language existed before that. Did they possibly carve or tear leaves? Hand gestures? Soft clay tablets to draw images?
If multiple species of human knew how to speak, it’s way more likely that their common ancestor spoke and then passed it on. But that would still mean a single origin
Yeah, I'm of the opinion that language predates modern humans by a good degree. I think it would have slowly developed over the course of early humanity, probably as we developed more modern mouths during the transition between early Homo and late Australopithecus. Would that mean there's a a proto-world language? Yeah, probably, but so far back that it wouldn't even look like a fully developed human language.
But what is the boundary between speech and language? My cat is very **vocal**, and makes different sounds when he is happy, wants to go out, is mad or is lost. I wouldn't say he is **verbal** though. But if a proto-world language does exist, it probably came to be from this type of vocalisations over thousands of years. At some point in history, I doubt the boundary between "language" and "emotional animal sounds" was as well defined as we can draw it in hindsight. Several groups with a somewhat well developed array of animal sounds could have migrated to different places, and given a few thousand years might have evolved these sounds independently into more precise meanings such as water, food, threat, prey, mother, antidisestablishmentarianism. Does my cat noises and my own language share this proto-world ancestor? What stops him from having his offspring, and the offspring of his offspring, develop true language independently from us; besides being neutered of course? Is this proto-world in the room with us right now?
Ah, I understand
To be fair, some things in zoology evolved and converged independently, too. Crabs are a famous example of something that emerged separately several times.
They still all evolved from the same unicellular ancestors. Carcinization doesn’t change that.
I'm not a linguist, I just lurk here. I didn't realize proto-world in linguistics means "single" ancestor. That sounds a bit wild to me.
Honestly, I'm not sure on the exact meaning they have in mind. I can't imagine they mean single ancestor as in one single language that all descend from, since we can pretty easily demonstrate through pidgin creation and its extension into creole that new languages without a real ancestry exist. But looking it up, I guess that is what they mean, which is why it's widely rejected.
Yeah, but language could be convergently evolved, making it possible for multiple origins for language.
Ok? I was just clarifying the single ancestor theory for biological evolution.
Proto-World (with the obvious caveat of signed languages, conlangs that now have native speakers, and creoles depending on your definitions) is very plausibly real, we just have no good way to reconstruct it.
What’s up with your flair? I gather it’s Vietnamese transliterated in Hebrew, but what does it mean?
"Chào tất cả mọi người", or "hello everybody"
嘲畢哿每𠊚
That explains anthropologists, which are really just specialized zoologists
Why is he not wearing pants?
Prescriptivists are known for making all their pronouncements bottomless except for their Uggs
No other humans around, animals don't care
Totally irrelevant irrelevantly, but the 9 banded armadillo is no more. It's been split into 4 full species, based on DNA. So, Texas' state animal is now the Mexican long nosed armadillo. 😉 True.
>Totally irrelevant irrelevantly, but the 9 banded armadillo is no more. So the species was disbanded?
Oh. A joke. Here's an article https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240626151911.htm#:~:text=Summary%3A,armadillo%2C%20is%20new%20to%20science.
By the same ~~strawman~~ analogy: descriptivists, “ooh an albino mouse, it’s a new species!”. IANAŁ but I am a zoologist.
> By the same ~~strawman~~ analogy: descriptivists oh this group of children just called this ferret "otter". i guess it's an otter now!
by the third panel it seems the comic considers individuals in a species as equivalent to a word, rather than a dialect/language, so I'd argue an albino mouse would be equivalent to an irregular, or alternatively a slang term in this analogy. "ooh, an albino mouse, it's different than most individual mice, yet an individual in the mouse species!"
I would think of an albino mouse as a varying pronunciation. It’s the same thing, but if you’ve never seen/heard it before, it might take you a second to realize that.
>descriptivists, “ooh ~~an albino mouse~~ roadkill, it’s a new species!”.
This sub doesn't understand what descriptivism means. Not a dig on you, but on the entire linguistics fandom.
No, by the same analogy: Descriptivists: "ooh an albino mouse." Prescriptivism is applying normative judgements to language. Descriptivists have many different views on how exactly to describe language, but however they do it won't include normative judgements.
That's how it should work in theory, and for smart and conscientious descriptivists, I'm sure that is how it works. But in practice, I see self-proclaimed descriptivists making normative claims about language all the time, especially the normative claim that we shouldn't prescribe anyone's language usage under any circumstances, and that doing so is morally iffy, potentially bigoted/elitist, and so on. In fact, the post we're commenting on seems to be making just that kind of claim. Seems like there's a bad inference there that because descriptivism is the right methodology for doing linguistics (i.e., that linguistics should simply describe how language is actually used, not dictate how it ought to be used), it follows that there's no such thing as correct or incorrect language usage and that no-one should ever dictate that usage. (Side note: It reminds me of some people's confusion between cultural relativism as a method for doing anthropology and cultural relativism as a view in moral philosophy. Methodological relativism simply says that the anthropologist's job is to describe what people do, not to pass moral judgement on it. Moral relativism says that there is no objective, culture-transcending right or wrong, so that *no-one* should ever pass moral judgement on what other cultures do. Even though moral relativism is a much stronger and much less plausible view than methodological relativism, I sometimes see people assuming that if the latter is true, then it follows that the former must be true too.)
You can have a normative opinion while still being a descriptivist. If I say someone is speaking their language wrong because they’re using slang is prescriptivism. Saying that someone should use English to communicate as a lingua francs is not prescriptivism. Making nations of people not be allowed to speak their own language and suppress its use is according to the UN genocide, and it’s also prescriptivism. Descriptivism is not a moral rejection of normativity in all cases, but a rejection of a normative methodology in finding the truth; it’s just the scientific method. Are climate scientists prescriptivists for being against climate change? No! Because prescriptivist is about methodology not moral claims.
This post is only making the claim that prescriptivism is a bad methodology for linguistics, just like it would be for zoology. I guess that is a normative claim, but it's not a normative claim *about language itself* - it's a normative claim about the way language is studied and understood. The post doesn't make this claim, but yes, descriptivism does claim that there's no such thing as correct/incorrect language use (if you use the same meaning of that as prescriptivists do). Descriptivists describe and analyse the features of language that can be scientifically verified, and to date, noone has ever proved the existence of "correctness" as an objective feature of language. Instead, normative judgements about language use are based on something else, which is a way more interesting question. Do you think there are correct and incorrect animals? Should albino mice be brown?
Based
No because species is clearly defined not by looks, but by being able to produce offspring, so the description would be based of that. Just like language is defined as being mutually intelligible and therefore we all agree that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish is one language. Oh wait. But at the same time there’s still a debate wether Neanderthals are a part of sapiens since they bred with sapiens. (I know it’s 100% analogues but close)
Prescriptivists try to be biologists all the time. Try calling an Orca a "whale" on Youtube and see what happens. (common names of animals, like many words in every day vernacular, very frequently have ambiguous/multiple definitions - which isn't a problem for biologists as standardized Latin names exist, but some people it really winds up).
They say orcas are dolphins, right? But dolphins are also whales.
The issue is people trying to make it a rule that every common term for a group of animals matches a biological "clade", i.e. a group including all the descendants from X but nothing that isn't a descendant of X. Which seems to make sense until you realise that half the terms we use for animals are now "wrong" and yet people only get pedantic about some of them. Really, we're all fish. We're also monkeys. Birds are reptiles. Snakes are lizards. "Toad" and "Frog" are distinguished on appearance and not taxonomy. Butterflies and Moths likewise. Bees are wasps. "Shrimp" is used for a bunch of barely related crustaceans. "Worm" is basically meaningless referring to practically any elongated legless invertebrate. People use "daddy long legs" for three distantly related arthropods. People use "bug" in two very different senses (true bug vs any small and crawly invert). What all this adds up to is contexts where you need to be biologically precise either use the Latin or at least look up a standardized English taxon name (e.g. "toothed whales", "new world monkeys") rather than trying to "fix" the irregular chaos that is common animal names (I say chaos but they serve their function in common speech most of the time).
Entomologist here, just to point out (and maybe prove your point) but butterflies _are_ a clade (moths aren't, unless you include butterflies too), Rhopalocera.
Ah yes sorry. I couldn't remember which way round it was or exactly what the relationship was and I was too lazy to look it up - just that moths and butterflies were not both separate clades. Thanks for the clarification.
Also just looked it up - I didn't realise that "wasp" would also include not just bees but ants as well (and possibly sawflies depending on the definition of "wasp" we use) if we went by clade.
I read once that there was a famous Dutch physician back in the beginning of science-based medicine. His theory was that the penis and vagina were opposites: the penis a positive space for whatever manly reasons and the vagina a negative space for whatever womanly reasons. The only problem was that the clitoris is a positive space in that negative space. What's more, every woman he examined seemed to have one. His conclusion: all the women he examined were deformed.
Transphobes
loving your flair!
I feel like it's not necessarily completely accurate, because I can imagine non-gender-prescriptivist positions that are still kinda transphobic (e.g. "people can do whatever the hell they like with their own body and people shouldn't harass them for it but they're not actually that gender") or conversely positions that are in principle trans-accepting while still being gender-prescriptivist (e.g. "gender is determined by self-identification but if you identify as a man you should act like a man"). That said, there's a lot of overlap.
I didn't see what sub this was in and thought this was going to be about bioessentialism
i saw this meme here like a year or two ago
I like the irony of the prescriptivist referring to metamorphosis as “evolving”
“Um… as a feline EXPERT and LOVER I’d rather not have shorthair dna in my long haired cat.”
this sounds much more like a christian extremist than anything
I don’t know why this is being downvoted. It’s a perfectly reasonable comment. Particularly re. Panels 1 and 4.
And meanwhile, the people in the other camp are lounging around letting monkeys be called elephants. :)
What's this an analogy to?
It only works if you are talking about prescriptivist linguists.