Bibliographic record
Abstract
A is a dialect with an army and Navy, attributed to Yiddish linguist Max WeinreichIn Belgium, Canada, Spain, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, has been il most important factor in ethnic conflict wrote Safran (2010, p. 58) concerning violent clashes in these multilingual countries; he could have added, inter alia, fierce Urdu-Bangla battles that followed India's independence in 1947. But in Language Wars I speak of no one fires bullets, cannon balls, or other material missiles at enemy-the combatants use as ammunition words about which they fight.1 On one side of barricades we find defenders of our language,2 adherents to linguistic purism and prescriptivism who tend to label linguistic changes as corruption or bastardization. Opposed to them stand champions of linguistic descriptivism; they concur with Horace: will change if it be will of custom, in power of whose judgment is law and standard of language (aka Norma Loquendi, in Liberman, 2004).In following, I shall bring a sample of missives launched by brave soldiers of each camp against their enemies. Instead of listing thoughtful, well established arguments in favor of one position or other, I have selected a few emotionally laden ones. By focusing on affective, rather than cognitive components of their sources' attitudes, I hope to enrich our understanding of combatants and to provide us with an insight into their motivation.First, prescriptivists.3In 1797, English journalist William Cobbett attacked Noah Webster for grammatical inaccuracy and called him illiterate booby, inflated self-sufficient pedant, very great hypocrite, and something of a traitor (Liberman, 2005).George Orwell (2006) felt that the English is in a bad way It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but slovenliness of our makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. He went on, illustrating his complaints with such metaphors as mental vices and the decay of language.Urbanczyk, a Polish communist linguist (in Janicki, 2006) wrote about ... linguistic skill and correctness without which it is difficult to think logically and creatively and impossible to convey thoughts to others.While previous description of corruptors of implies that they are illogical and incoherent, others have impugned their moral character, as well: ... because purification implies getting rid of stain and thus evil, purification movements imply at some level that impure elements belong to impure persons (Shapiro, 1989, p. 156).The Conservative MP Norman Tebbit found a similar slippery slope: If you allow standards to slip to stage where good English is no better than bad English, people turn up filthy at school all these tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards there's no imperative to stay out of crime (Nunberg, 2011).Acocella (2012) accused descriptivists of self-righteousness, while Bryson (1987, p. 177) sounded off on misuse of apostrophe: the mistake is inexcusable, and those who make it are linguistic Neanderthals.Vitriolic appears in descriptivist camp, as well. latter often refer to prescristivists as peevers, police, and grammar Nazis.Though John Ruskin wrote about architecture when he expressed following sentiment, his words equally apply to purists of other disciplines, including linguistics: The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by silliness of their choice; and this more, because becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of ends of things (Ruskin, 1853).Liberman's (2008) appellation concerns some prescriptivists' lack of knowledge: . …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".