Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I've recently come to the position that really, there isn't truly such a thing as incorrect grammar. There's grammar that doesn't fit the norm for the people one is speaking to, and if it's different enough to impair the ability for the intended audience to understand what you're communicating it can be impractical or inadvisable, but since grammar isn't an intrinsic part of the universe outside of human creation, and since the way it's used changes whenever people "break it's rules" in numbers over time, it can't actually be wrong. After all, someone could view something written in a very closely related foreign dialect as another similar language written correctly, or one's own language written incorrectly, and there isn't really a non-arbitrary way to decide which is the case.
This is just practically and technically wrong. You're lightyears off.
Of course there are incorrect grammars. They wouldn't be called grammar. While the tolerance for these errs is greater than the textbook, if you stray too far then the meaning you're trying to convey would be lost.
No, grammar isn't some kind of made up notion. Without grammars, it's just a bunch of words with no meaning.
Grammar is literally just some made up notion
You literally wouldn't be able to write this without it...
I mean, what would be the altenative? Throw a bunch of relevant words in random order and hope that someone would understand?
I bet this one would convey anything but what you'd mean originally.
What I wrote is grammatically incorrect, there is no full stop. You understood what I meant with no ambiguity despite an incorrect use of grammar. I literally did write that without adhering to grammatical rules and it didn't impede either of our abilities to communicate.
Of course it is correct! Let me break it down for you.
Subject: Grammar
Verb: Be -> Is
Adverb: Literally, Just
Pronoun: Some
Adjective: Made-up
Object: Notion
The lack of full stop is indeed an error. But the structure of your sentence is still valid.
Yeah almost like in different contexts different grammar is appropriate exactly like the original comment said you evolutionary col-de-sac
I think you guys are fighting about different things; you need to have a unified definition of grammar.
One is saying that without some rules on how the words relate to one another we couldn’t convey our meaning.
The other is saying that grammar, I think perhaps “proper grammar” is made up by humans, and so doesn’t have any intrinsic worth compared with something else made up by humans.
Both are correct, the important thing is that whichever grammar we collectively decide on. Intrinsically worthless or not, we need to have some unified definition, codified or not, so that we have the necessary degree of specificity for a given situation to transfer information between parties.
I like to say, for instance, "pool-go" instead of "go to the pool" when I'm amongst friends, because I'm pretty sure I heard constructions like this in a novel once where aliens learned to talk English. But incorrect, or at the very least uncommon usage like that definitely straddles the line between comprehensible and unintelligible.