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From:  Joe Martin
Date:  Thu May 14, 1998  10:47 pm
Subject:  linguists


I feel maligned;
On Thursday, May 14th, James Womack wrote;

Oh, we have it, but sort of unofficially. It is usually confined to the
linguists
and higher education centers. It's that way because even they know that
trying to impose this on the masses is a waste of time.

This is in regard to what is known as prescriptivism: the promotion of one
variety of language as "correct." A basic tenet of linguistics is that
there is no such thing as correct or incorrect language, only different.
No linguist would say otherwise. The task of
linguistics is to desribe language as it exists, not as some people think
it should be. For example, they were the people who defined ASL as a
true language in the first place; without them people would still negate
it as "poor English," or "no Language," and so on.
:-) Remember, "linguists are our friends." :-)

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