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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Actually, not everyone agrees that that's how it works...whether society should value descriptive over prescriptive policies on its language is a huge debate among linguists. Just as programmers continue to argue over OOP vs functional, JavaScript vs CoffeeScript, etc

Edit: whoops, forgot to link to arbitrary example

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/prescrip...

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>whether society should value descriptive over prescriptive policies on its language is a huge debate among linguists

There's no such debate at all, whoever told you that is not a linguist.

Linguistics is a science and it is inherently descriptive. It describes what it sees in natural language. It doesn't make judgment as to the worthiness or corectness of something. That's what laymen do, but they cannot reinforce their views through linguistics, only through distortion of linguistics.

> Linguistics is a science and it is inherently descriptive.

One might go so far as to say that, because linguistics is a science, it is therefore descriptive.

However, there are linguists working in institutions that do prescribe the proper use of language – e.g. [0] in France and [1] in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. The idea to pass laws to change spelling may appear somewhat strange to others, though…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwischenstaatliche_Kommission_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_for_German_Orthography

> However, there are linguists working in institutions that do prescribe the proper use of language ...

That may be, but such behavior contradicts their supposed status as scientists, i.e. dispassionate observers of nature. Imagine a scientist in the Australian outback, yelling at a Platypus, "You're doing it all wrong!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus

> The idea to pass laws to change spelling may appear somewhat strange to others, though ...

One might as well try to stop evolution in its tracks.

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