Bonni Sollars

"Yup. It's that prescriptive vs. descriptive thing, which I've tried to
explan to my sister but she doesn't want to hear it, she prefers to
think that her college instructors are idiots. Which they may be, but not
because the linguistics tecahers is teacher desciptive phonology and the
English teacher is tecahing prescriptive presciptive phonology..."

Dar, Say What? Please explain what all that means so I don't feel so
stupid.
Bonni

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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On Wed, 27 Feb 2002 12:03:31 -0500 Bonni Sollars <BSOLLARS@...>
writes:
> "Yup. It's that prescriptive vs. descriptive thing, which I've tried
> to
> explain to my sister but she doesn't want to hear it, she prefers to
> think that her college instructors are idiots. Which they may be,
> but not
> because the linguistics teacher is teaching descriptive phonology and
> the
> English teacher is teaching prescriptive phonology..."
>
> Dar, Say What? Please explain what all that means so I don't feel
> so stupid.

Maybe cleaning up the many typos would help, too ;-) I did that... and
don't feel stupid, this is just my area of interest - start a thread
about recent movies and I'll be clueless.

Prescriptive grammarians, people like college English teachers, are
focused on correct vs. incorrect, and they think things should be done
correctly. They *prescribe* the "right" way to say things or write
things. This is a fairly new idea, by the way....

Linguists are concerned with describing the ways people communicate. They
don't judge, and they don't consider one way more correct than another.
One caveat - this is applied to groups of people, not individuals. A ten
yr old born and raised in Tucson who said /y/ for /l/ would be considered
to have a speech problem. However, in some regions people say "yellow" as
yell-oh, other places it's pronounced yah-ler. Linguistically speaking,
this is all equally correct and fine and good.

So, my 21 year old sister is taking both a linguistics class and an
English class this semester. In her linguistics class one day, they
learned about phonology (basically, the study of a language's sounds and
the pronounciation of words), and about the regional differences in the
pronounciation of some phonemes. Then she went straight to English class,
where the teacher told them they'd be tested on their ablity to use
standard symbols and letters to write the pronounciation of words (like
in a dictionary). Of course, my sister had just learned that there were
regional variations in pronounciation, so she told the teacher that she
couldn't ask them to do that, because some people pronounced things
differently and it was okay to do so, and any way someone pronounced a
word was right.

Then the teacher blew her off, which wasn't good but my sister had been
pretty rude, as I heard it. So she stopped going to that class, which is
why after 4 years of college she's a sophomore still. I did try to
explain the whole thing to her, but she'd already decided that the
English teacher didn't know anything so I didn't make much of a dent.

dar

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Bonni Sollars

Dar, thanks for the explanation. It's really a funny story.
Bonni