Piwin -> RE: Will I ever be as good as the old masters? (Feb. 12 2016 18:07:41)
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It reminds me of the bestselling book "Eats, shoots and leaves", which was based precisely on that premise. The joke being this: A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. "Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. "Well, I'm a panda," he says. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves"[:D]) Interestingly enough though, you can find examples in the works of some of the most reknown writers in the English language that wouldn't stand the scrutiny of today's grammarians. Jane Austen is known to have at times separated subject from verb, or verb from object, with a comma. Other grammar rules are often flouted precisely to ensure clarity or greater effect ("to go boldy where no man has gone before" just doesn't have that much effect, or the famous example attributed to Churchill that shows how unclear a sentence can be if we stick to the rule all of the time: : "ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put"). Another funny example is when President Obama had to retake his oath in 2009 because Chief Justice Roberts couldn't stand the split infinitive and made him say "to execute faithfully" so as to not reproduce the "mistake" in the official oath "to execute faithfully the office of the President". When it is true to say that rules of grammar "are established" for my own mother tongue (French, which is and has always been an artificial language imposed by law on others, as opposed to a "natural" language), this is much harder to defend in the case of languages that are not created by legislative bodies. In fact, current theories are more along the lines that grammar is to a certain extent innate, a product of human evolution (there is a very interesting case study on Mexican Sign Language, showing that deaf children (for whom sign language is a mother tongue) create a grammar far more complex in that language than their non-deaf parents and teachers (for whom sign language is a "second language")). All of this being said, my point was only that we can't assert whether changes are good or bad unless we know what the aim is. If the aim of language is clear communication, then yes, we can very easily say that there are better and worse ways of achieving that result (depending on who your audience is). In the case of poetry, where the aim of language extends beyond mere communication, it gets more complicated. And no one seems to know what the aim of music (or any art form for that matter) is, hence we cannot make any statements on what is better or worse to achieve that aim. We can only judge against man-made standards that don't necessarily match what the natural purpose of music may be (if there is a purpose to it at all...it may just be an evolutionary by-product of something else).
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