You may want to check this out. I highly recommend this Web site to anyone who is interested in the subject of grammar, and also to those who are incapable or unwilling to punctuate, capitalize, or otherwise attend to the needs of their sad, broken sentences.

http://www.grammaruntied.com/blog/?p=88

Peter, by the way, I’m not suggesting people change how they pronounce lose or loose. But if someone spelled it looz and loos, no complaints from me.

How can evolution favor simplicity and regularity? There are no predators, so where’s the pruning process?

The complexity is happening in other places, like technical language.

There are predators all around. There are memes that are displacing other memes. If a meme shows that one usage is more useful than a different usage, that old usage will fall to the side and become arcane.

How can evolution favor simplicity and regularity? There are no predators, so where’s the pruning process?

You’re right to pounce on the weakest point of my argument, which is the assumption that language evolution is always towards regularity, rather than more irregularity.

In a sense I’ve made a circular argument, because I define spelling simplification as evolution, and I define evolution as simplification and regularity.

I need a lot more evidence to back up my claim that language evolution favors simplicity and regularity. But that’s my claim.

I will indeed teach my children to use English correctly (a shifting set of rules if ever there was one), but it certainly would be much easier if the exceptions didn’t outnumber the rules.

The evolution that goes on will stem from more mixing, not less. There are now more non-native speakers of English than native speakers (non-native in that English is not their first language). Control of the evolution of the language is out of our hands. In the future, what you and I consider English will be a quaint dialect of something bigger–and by “future,” I don’t necessarily mean after we’re dead.

So, what happens to the grammarians? I can only speak for myself. I think it’s important to know how things are “supposed to be,” and to try to figure out the rules–which are based on usage, after all (for example, it’s now okay to wantonly split infinitives). Your supposition that grammarians are against linguistic evolution is false. But evolution is slow and heavy, and language has history and weight too. Remember that language is really an agreement among all the people who speak it. It takes time to change that agreement, because it takes time for those changes to propagate. It also takes tremendous momentum. So if you start pronouncing “lose” to rhyme with “nose,” you’ll get a lot of “huh?” in response. And if everyone in California started pronouncing “lose” that way, it still might take a hundred years for people in New York to do the same, so say nothing of the billion English speakers elsewhere.

Now, to your point about clarity being paramount. I agree. The language is flexible enough to preserve meaning through the “mistakes” that are really evolution. It’s really fault-tolerant. But remember that some “mistakes” are just, well, mistakes. Not all “mistakes” end up changing the language for the better (if at all). It’s true that “presently,” which means “in a moment,” is changing to mean “now” because so many people make that mistake. But what about the use of the apostrophe in plurals? This is a mistake that people make all the time. There’s no consistency. So, you let this evolution happen, and what is the benefit? What’s the rule that’s evolving here? Doesn’t that particular evolution contribute to the inconsistency that frustrates you so? And why not use apostrophes or “presently” correctly, for now, among people who know what it means? In the future, if its meaning changes, the grammarians will document that fact, not try to keep the dinosaur alive.

The grammarian is your friend–trying to discover order in a tremendously challenging language, and preserve that order where it relates to meaning. Grammarians are not just arbitrary self-appointed police. And by the way, those of us who are interested in grammar, etymology, spelling, etc. have extra tools of meaning at our disposal when talking to other people who pay attention to these things. I would argue that without caring about this stuff the English language is a great tool–but caring about it makes it into music and poetry too. I didn’t choose the word ‘wantonly’ above by accident, but because I hoped that someone, somewhere, would enjoy it and all its little ripples of meaning, and the little implied joke there with the word ’split.’

I think what you are really railing against is the kind of grammarian who flames. Well, that kind of person is just in it for the attention. It’s okay to teach your children to use English correctly–they’ll learn the real English anyway, and they’ll have more tools at their disposal when they do. And it’s okay to strive to be not just an efficient practitioner of the language, but an excellent one.

I approve. …as someone with no “journalism” training, no linguistics degree, who likes random hyphens, ellipses, and starting sentences with “And”.