And yet those who study living languages for a living linguists of stature, if you will) insist that what they do is descriptive, not prescriptive. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/prescription.html
i.e. if a large group of people say it in a particular way, they are doing what they do, not doing something else incorrectly.
But the idea is to not make that call at all. That would be prescriptive.
> Some people say "aks" instead of "ask", but the vast majority of people would agree that's wrong.
I'm told that's a regional variation. In other words, in some places, people speak like that. That's descriptive. so is "most people speak like that in region A and don't have a problem with it, and most don't in regions B,C,D,E".
To me, that's not the line between prescriptive and descriptive linguists. I think both say what's right and wrong, but there's different connotations to their answers. Prescriptive linguists see the language as more static and more rooted in the past. Descriptive linguists see the language as more dynamic and based in the present. I think a prescriptive linguist would basically say that "aks" is wrong "because it's wrong", and that a big chunk of the population using it wouldn't make it right. A descriptive linguist would say it's wrong because if you use it you'll sound stupid to most of the population. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the word, though, and if enough people start using it, it will become "right".
Obviously, this division is very fuzzy and is really a question of degree.
> I'm told that's a regional variation. In other words, in some places, people speak like that.
I'm not aware of any regions where this is actually used by the majority of the population, unless we define regions to be arbitrarily small, in which case we've just gone back to "someone says X".
> That's descriptive. so is "most people speak like that in region A and don't have a problem with it, and most don't in regions B,C,D,E".
This kind of description can be useful, but there's still a judgement call. I might go ask a descriptive linguist about the term "aks", and they might explain that it's common in certain neighborhoods around major cities but that educated urban types don't use it, that in the south rural residents don't use it but some suburban residents around the hub cities do, etc. And that's all great and educational, but then I'm going to ask "Is it American English?" I'm either going to get a hand-wavy "it depends" answer that involves repeating the descriptions above and telling me nothing useful, or a straight answer that is effectively prescriptive.
The questions are not just "does anyone say X?", but also "should I say X?". If descriptive means being unable to answer the latter at all, then descriptive means being nearly useless.
But "does anyone say X?" does go a long way to answering "should I say X?".
I'll leave your pet example of "aks" which I really know nothing about so if you say it's widespread yet is nobody's dialect, then all right.
If you know that that English people almost use the word "pants" to mean "underwear" then it's clear that "does anyone in London say pants meaning trousers?" is "no" and when wanting to purchase trousers the answer to "should I say pants?" is also "no".
The only American dialects that I know anything about is from recently watching "The Wire". "does anyone talk like that?" Apparently so. it's not right or wrong, it's a way of talking. "Should I talk like that?" depends on whether I'm talking to inner-city Baltimore gangsters.
Agreed, though I think part of the issue is with regional divisions. There is no true "American English" that spans the country. So "does anyone say X" may not be sufficient. If I want to be a newscaster and fit my language to the country as a whole, neither Boston pronunciation not Southern slang is likely my target. I'm looking for the subset that's acceptable to the majority of Americans. How big that majority needs to be is a judgment call. How widespread a certain term/construct/etc actually is also seems like a judgment call, as the info probably isn't gathered via scientific polls.
> I'll leave your pet example of "aks" which I really know nothing about so if you say it's widespread yet is nobody's dialect, then all right.
I think "aks" has fallen in usage. For a time, it was popular among certain groups, but I haven't actually heard anyone say the word in a long time (though that could also be indicative of my social circles changing rather than the actual usage overall). It's just a convenient example, but not to my knowledge a very realistic one anymore.
> If you know that that English people almost use the word "pants" to mean "underwear" then it's clear that "does anyone in London say pants meaning trousers?" is "no" and when wanting to purchase trousers the answer to "should I say pants?" is also "no". The only American dialects that I know anything about is from recently watching "The Wire". "does anyone talk like that?" Apparently so. it's not right or wrong, it's a way of talking. "Should I talk like that?" depends on whether I'm talking to inner-city Baltimore gangsters.
Fair enough. And maybe in that case it's just about framing. If you specifically ask about language general enough to span the US, maybe purely descriptive linguists can give you a useful answer.
Of course. You should hear the way they speak in the North of England ;)
But if I say "the blue-winged teal is an American bird" I do not mean that every bird in North America is a blue-winged teal. I mean that the blue-winged teal is found only in North America.
As is the phrase "I could care less".