TehChef said:
While I understand that dictionaries are only reference works, it does make sense for them to be used as some sort of standard. I mean, if the dictionary says that a word is used one way, and this is the way that %99.99 of people use it, then why should it make sense to use it another way.
The problem being that all modern dictionaries have incredible biases toward past over present usage. Beyond that, there's also the question of regional and other dialectal variation. Finally, there's the largest issue, which is that dictionary editors tend to be "English experts" (experts on works IN the English language, not the language itself) rather than language experts. The issue isn't that it's not sensible to use the word the same way most people do, it's that dictionaries do not even come close to correctly documenting the current usage of all (or even a decent subset of) English words.
TehChef said:
In that case, the dictionary is being used as a standard. If we don't have something to use as some sort of standard, then language can devolve into nonsensicality.
Actually, this is completely faulty reasoning. Think about it - how would this ever happen? All changes in language are moves to make language more clear or more convenient. Otherwise, why would the change be adopted by the population? All joking about how "irrational" people really are aside, language is spoken by rational agents trying to maximize communicative efficacy. In essence, your goal in using language is to communicate something as clearly as necessary to achieve your goals and to do it as lazily as possible. Typically, there's a tension between laziness and clarity, but the system self-regulates for the best possible outcome.
TehChef said:
It's a hard line to draw, between the organic nature of language and the rigid standards of meaning. I think there should be some standard as to how we use our words, but also allow for the flexibility of creating and changing words. Honestly, unless you can point out another source, the dictionary is the best we have.
This idea about rigidity of meaning is an extremely, extremely common one and is based on some very mistaken notions. For one, you have no hope of actually restricting semantic change to any meaningful degree. There are contexts where people will (misguidedly) conform to the dictionary, like in a dispute over the meaning of a relatively obscure word, but it has essentially no impact on general language change. And this is probably fine. Plenty of languages have no published dictionaries and they don't really lose any communicative power. A dictionary is good for getting a better guess at what an unfamiliar word means, but you can also just ask someone familiar with it or circumlocute. In fact, I'd warrant that if you had some way to reasonably measure it, you'd find that communicative efficacy is improved in places without a belief in dictionaries serving as a standardization device.
To put it another, more dramatic way, what you're suggesting is akin to suggesting that if the population listed for a country in an encyclopedia is found to be overestimated, the encyclopedia shouldn't be changed, we should adhere to it as a standard and kill those extra people.
To put it another, shorter way, it just never really makes sense to make anything the "standard" for a natural phenomenon (just so we're clear, language is a natural phenomenon).
TehChef said:
Also, why are modern linguists embarrassed by dictionaries? And how should grammar be taught? I happen to enjoy grammar and language, so if you could point out some sources, I'd appreciate it.
Dictionaries use terms that simply don't make sense and they also say things that are patently false. The term "adverb" is probably the most famous example of an absurdly heterogenous category being treated as a single type of thing, but there are countless others. The pronunciation guides of most American dictionaries are absolutely terrible, often making use of hacked-together phonetic alphabets that lack several English sounds or make distinctions that aren't contrastive in English (a problem compounded by the fact that different dialects of English make different phonological distinctions). Even those that don't are full of mistakes in the actual pronunciations listed.
When you turn to meaning, you have even bigger problems. There still isn't really any agreement over how people categorise things psychologically (though we can be sure it isn't the "necessary and sufficient qualities" of a dictionary entry), so meanings of open-class content words like "bird" or "dog" are essentially impossible to properly define, though I don't think that's a big issue. There's also the problem of circular recursive definition, but again, not a huge problem so far as I can see. The much larger problem is closed-class function words like "of" or "more", which are often downright terrible in dictionaries. Look at a word like "that", specifically in the sort of "linking use". Dictionaries list this as a "conjunction". This is embarassing. If it's a conjunction, it should be able to appear in similar structural environments as other conjunctions. You have things like "Bill and John are leaving for the store in an hour." and "Bill or John are leaving for the store in an hour.", but you
never have something like "Bill that John are leaving for the store in an hour.". Saying that "that" and "and" belong to the same syntactic category (colloquially "part of speech") could not possibly be more wrong. You get even worse problems when you move from the syntactic mistakes to the semantic ones.
If you actually want to learn more about real grammar, PM me and I can point you toward some introductory articles/books.
TehChef said:
As for "fenestration" as a verb, I was merely pointing out the fact that verbs generally take the form of "to X". So, "to fenestrate" sounds more verb-like than fenestration.
The "verbs take the form 'to VERB'" thing is actually the result of antiquated grammar teaching. Essentially, the infinitival form of a verb in English, for independent reasons, can only appear in a clause with "to" ("to" and verb tense alternate in English). In some other languages, most notably Latin, there is no equivalent of this "to". Since "to" tends to appear next to the verb in English, several hundred years ago some people who weren't thinking even remotely deeply decided that the "to" was "part of the infinitive". This is why you get the "don't split an infinitive" prescription despite the fact that it sounds fine to quite literally all naive speakers of English. So in short, "to" actually has pretty much nothing to do with the verb.
TehChef said:
While I can think of one example of verbs ending in -tion that take the passive mode of speech, tintinnabulation, the vast majority of verbs take the active mode of speech. I guess I'm asking why "fenestration" should enter the lexicon as a verb instead of "to fenestrate"?
I'm not sure what you mean by "active" and "passive mode" here since it doesn't conform to any technical or traditional grammar description that I'm familiar with. I'm also not sure why "defenestration" wouldn't be a verb if "tintinnabulation" would be (since the "verb" form of "tintinnabulation" would then be "tintinnabulate", an
extraordinarily rare word, though I imagine you could find it in some dictionaries since it's pretty old). My point was that "defenestration" is composed of (at least) a root and an affix, "defenestrate" + "tion" (it's probably possible to further decompose the word, but that doesn't matter for this). The root "defenestrate" is verbal. The affix is one that derives nominals from verbals. So you can say that "defenestrate" is a derived nominal (a noun), or you can say that it's a nominalized verb. The latter is probably the less common usage, but, in a way, both make sense and I've seen both used in different contexts many times.
This is a cheap shot, but what does your standard for the English language have to say about "syntactical"?
