Talk:Corruption (linguistics)

This is by far the worst article I have ever encountered on wikipedia. Please someone fix it! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.190.101.102 (talk) 06:14, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Origin of the term bastardization

To preface my comments, I'm no linguist or etymologist make sure to keep what I say in that context. I had always thought that the reason the word bastardize means what it means is because the word bastard itself has been bastardized. By that I mean that as opposed to simply meaning an illegitimate child, it has become a curse word which people throw around in the heat of arguments or use to describe politicians. While some bastards may in fact be illegitimate, the meaning has changed. That's why it's called bastardization. Is that true? Is there some sort of etymologist that could answer that question authoritatively? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.51.112.76 (talk) 03:21, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

What?

what is the defination and type of corruption?

This article is inarticulate

I fixed what I could, but I don't even know what this ungrammatical sentence from the history section is supposed to mean, so I took it out. Whoever knows what it should probably make it make sense and put it back in:

In cases it would be implied, and in others an accidental fault on one side.

NickelShoe 21:37, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

NPOV

does not mean descriptivism. While I happen to hate prescriptivism, calling it a "notion" and refusing to actually use the word "corruption", which is the title of the article, is clearly a POV, even if it is the correct one. NickelShoe 22:47, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

NPOV actually does mean descriptivism. Describing something in the terms of what it is instead of the terms of what certain people think it should be is exactly what neutrality means. I stand by my use of the word "notion," but I don't have a problem with the way you phrased it, so that's okay. However, using the word corruption to describe these language changes is to give the notion of linguistic corruption validity and to tacitly approve those classist (etc.) prescriptivist ideals. Dave 01:36, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was PAGE MOVED per unopposed request. -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

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Corruption (grammar) → Corruption (linguistics). This article deals with all forms of linguistic corruption, not just grammatical corruption. –  AjaxSmack  01:46, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Add "# Support" or "# Oppose" on a new line in the appropriate section followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~. Please remember that this survey is not a vote, and please provide an explanation for your recommendation.

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Discussion

Add any additional comments There is a factual error in the article, it claims that "GOP and HIV" are not acronyms. They are acronyms: GOP is "Grand Old Party" and HIV is "Human Immunodeficiency Virus." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.173.96.157 (talk) 05:41, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Partial Rewrite (Attention from Expert)

As a recipient of B.A. degree in Linguistics, I have gone through this article and raised it to a minimally acceptable level of scientific accuracy. Note especially that "corruption" and "bastardization" are not actually linguistics terms in the sense of being widely used by the academic linguistics community (I challenge anyone to find them in a modern glossary of linguistics terms). They are folk terminology originating with the subjective (and not well-supported) opinion that changes arising from errors or non-standard usage constitute degradations of the language. The overall quality of the article could obviously use some improvement, which I will leave to more experienced editors. Evzob (talk) 17:15, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

why does this article exist?

What is the point of this article? It doesn't have a topic and is sort of a dictionary definition for two different and vague words. Corruption (linguistics) is also obviously the wrong name for a non-linguistic term. I will nominate it for deletion unless someone can convince me otherwise. Bhny (talk) 16:51, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

I think it warrants treatment in Wikipedia because of its status as a culturally prominent concept (not just a pair of words). But I definitely agree about the name change. Would suggest Corruption (language). GeoEvan (talk) 08:39, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Naive and almost patronising PC attitude, overuse of ", and related

I find the contents of this article troubling through the excessive use of quotation marks around "corruption" and a general stance that one might consider linguistic political correctness. In addition, it is not very informative and of rather low quality in other regards.

The contents are in so far almost useless that they fail to understand that a given change can, at one and the same time, be both a corruption (in the unqualified, current sense of the word) and something that does not hurt the language (except with regard to backwards compatibility) in that both variations of the language as a whole (before resp. after the corruption) have the same degree of expressiveness and precision.

The same problem shines through with formulations that almost seem to want to ridicule the term and subject matter with attempts at ad absurdum argumentation through e.g. the development of French from Latin.

As I see it, there are two roads that can be taken: Either the discussion of corruption (as opposed to change) is deemed to be entirely uninteresting and the article deleted, or the article is re-written to discuss the topic in an encyclopedic manner, including a severe reduction of quotation marks, less POV, and a more factual approach. (In the latter case, unrelated to my main point, I strongly encourage the addition of some examples together with an analysis of the respective change.) Pointing out that a corruption need not be harmful to the language is legitimate even in a so revised article; however, the current state, where the article is basically a propaganda piece for this one aspect, is not.

A similarly weird attitude (and possibly the source of the problems) is found in an above comment, where self-proclaimed (based on a B.A. ...) expert Evzob claims:

"They are folk terminology originating with the subjective (and not well-supported) opinion that changes arising from errors or non-standard usage constitute degradations of the language."

This statement is on the simplistic level of the first chapter of an introductory text book from a politically correct U.S. college and misrepresents the topic severely in that many (real) experts today and many, many, in the past have been of the opposite opinion.

I state for the record, since I will not be returning for a discussion, that my own opinion is that language change is to some degree necessary and to a high degree unavoidable, but that errors based in ignorance, sloppy writing, and incorrect use (compared to the current norm) should be resisted. ("Petrified with fear, he ran away...", e.g.) Ditto those changes that definitely hurt the language, e.g. through increasing ambiguity, as with using "who" where the case calls for "whom" (admittedly an already lost battle). 80.226.24.9 (talk) 19:37, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I would be totally fine with the article being deleted and redirected to language change. I agree that the overall quality is not high, but it is not encyclopedic to refer to an unscientific pejorative term ("corruption") without clearly denoting it as such. GeoEvan (talk) 10:50, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Who are you to claim to know better than the experts that actually exist (and not just in your head)? WP:RANDY much?

"Petrified with fear, he ran away" is not linguistically incorrect. Grammatically, it's fine. It's just illogical (to some extent) from a semantic point of view (and in fact, this example nicely illustrates why "grammar nazis" are despised as annoying, simple-minded pedants with tunnel vision, who miss complications such as the obvious fact that you can be petrified for a moment and then run away – and that's probably exactly what this sentence was intended to convey, which is completely grammatically correct, as the past participle can stand in for a clause introduced with the subjunction "after").

But those issues are merely stylistic (and in this case even related to content and not form), not something that linguists typically concern themselves with. Linguists these days do not set and police norms, at most they describe these norms and the actual usage, which frequently deviates from them. Norms as set by grammarians are clearly secondary to actual usage.

I bet you don't even have a B. A. in linguistics, else you wouldn't adduce such an even more ridiculous example as the increasing obsolescence of whom. English has been losing case distinctions for centuries and still not degenerated into a mess of ambiguity. Speakers found ways around the problem. You still dismiss entirely regular language change as "degeneration" that should be resisted, which is why the quip "French is technically a corruption of Latin" (and French is an excellent example for case loss which hasn't resulted in any reduction of expressivity at all) is entirely apropos – and by the way, reductio ad absurdum is an entirely valid reasoning technique, correctly applied here and hits the bull's eye; you don't have anything to counter, you just show you don't like it.

Ironically, the only naive and patronising attitude here comes from you, and adds to the evidence that people who complain about "political correctness" are invariably ignorant or worse. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:23, 5 November 2016 (UTC)