Comment by nollidge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nollidge | Hacker News Reader

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> But grammar is just a set of arbitrary rules that some person or group of people decided were correct.

That's like saying the evolutionary tree of life is just a set of arbitrary rules someone came up with. It's not, it's a description of an existing evolved system.

Grammar wasn't handed down from on high by an authority, it's an evolved, undirected cultural artifact. There were definitely influential actors, like the (IIRC) monks who first developed the capitals, lowercase, and italics we now use without a second thought, or Noah Webster's personal preferences for spelling which he published and we now largely accept.

> To me, it says, "I went to a good school system and was taught correctly!"

I'm not sure. I guess it depends on the test - if it's asking "which is the past participle form of 'run'", then I'd agree, that's just memorization. But if it's simply asking "which sentence is more correct" and one of the sentences has an improperly conjugated verb, that's not something one even needs to be formally taught if they've read much.

If you can't string a sentence together such that it can be read unambiguously, how can I expect your code to be readable?

> I've met more people who couldn't figure out their and there or you're and your to save their lives who were both fantastically good software engineers and effective communicators.

I'd be willing to bet if you laid out two identical sentences, one with "your" and one with "you're", these people you speak of would be able to choose the correct one. They may not always use the correct one in the quick, ad-hoc process of writing a sentence, but I'm sure they know right from wrong if asked to scrutinize.

Natural selection was not a conscious choice. There have been many choices in grammar that have been decided almost arbitrarily by higher authorities. Sure, many of these choices may have been based on their own experiences, but they were not necessarily the best choices. They were decided by a small group of individuals, but again, the choice was not strictly a natural selection of grammar rules. Language more often follows this pattern than grammar because people are more likely to argue over grammar than language itself, excluding etymology, of course.

> There have been many choices in grammar that have been decided almost arbitrarily by higher authorities

Just because somebody makes a decree about grammar doesn't mean it'll be widely accepted, any more than an organism obtaining a genetic mutation means it'll become spread throughout the population in subsequent generations.

My point is just that there wasn't any overarching plan. People design their own use of it, but whether or not that becomes popular enough to be considered "the rule" is analogous to natural selection - messy, convoluted, frequently arbitrary, but good enough.

> it's a description of an existing evolved system.

This is not how the people who get angriest about grammar see it. They demand that splitting an infinitive is wrong, they demand that the passive voice is wrong (and those demands get stronger the more often they themselves use it), and they demand any number of other idiot things of the language, because they don't know the difference between grammar and style, and they fail to realize that dictating style requires taste, which they lack entirely.

> "which sentence is more correct" and one of the sentences has an improperly conjugated verb

Hm. Don't give this test to people who speak AAVE [1]: You'll be considered racist.

[1] AAVE is 'African-American Vernacular English', or what the conservative yammer-heads called 'Ebonics' back in the 1990s. It has a rich inventory of verb conjugations considered incorrect by standard English.

> Don't give this test to people who speak AAVE: You'll be considered racist.

Perhaps, but probably not. In my understanding most AAVE speakers (and other "low-class" dialects, for that matter) are bidialectical with Standard American English and can code-switch to it in more formal situations. And, those who aren't able to do so likely haven't been exposed to the education and training necessary to even be qualified for a job like this in the first place - they surely would've picked it up along the way.

Well, you'll be getting closer to looking like you're discriminating based on race, and that likely isn't worth it from a legal or PR perspective.

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