by John McWhorter. Finally finished - it's really not that long, I was just interrupted. It is full of all sorts of arguments about the formation of the English language. He makes some good points, but his arguments are a little too strong, which makes me hedge and pull back a little and say, "Ok, it's possible, but..."
There are just a few quotes I would like to cite:
"Linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is a usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage."
"Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years."
"All of this (the history of change of the English language through time) is seen as noble, historical, a matter of our mighty and open language coming to be. But somehow, there seems to be an idea that the process had an inherent end point, beyond which we are not to go. It's as if somebody, somewhere had been endeavoring to meld a chunky Germanic tongue spoken by some restless warrior tribes into precisely the English we have right now, that they officially declared themselves finished sometime not long ago, and that from now on, we are not to mess up their creation."
"No language makes perfect sense. That's another way of saying: there is no known language that does not have wrinkles of illogicality here and there."
"There is a canny objection one sometimes hears out there that English is easy at first, but hard to master the details of, while other languages are hard at first but easy to master the details of."
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