is 伞 săn. This is the simplified character; its traditional equivalent is 傘 saan3, which one would expect to be used in Hong Kong Cantonese, but in fact the Hong Kong word for umbrella is 遮 ze1, which also means ‘cover’.14 When police launched a baton and tear gas charge against anti-government protesters in 2014, the protesters opened their umbrellas in defence. One of the locations of this conflict was 遮打 ze1 daa2 ‘Chater’ Road, named for Sir Catchick Paul Chater, a 19th century British philanthropist of Armenian descent. Following the usual practice, the Chinese name for the road was made up using two characters that sound like the two syllables of Chater’s name, without regard to their meaning. In this case, the literal meaning of 遮打 ze1 daa2 is ‘cover hit/beat’ or, in Hong Kong Cantonese, ‘umbrella for protection against a beating’ – but that is opaque to speakers of Mandarin. 遮打 ze1 daa2 was adopted as the name of what is called in English the Umbrella Movement or Revolution. It signifies the autonomy of Hong Kong culturally, and by extension politically, and it does this in the supposedly unified writing system which is invoked as a cultural justification for absorbing Hong Kong into the People’s Republic of China rather than granting it independence.
Talking with the postgraduate students at York was an occasion to witness people discussing the use of language prescriptivism to strengthen their national identity in pursuit of political freedom. One of them asked, ‘How can we ever achieve independence when we can’t even agree on a name for ourselves? Hongkongers? Hongkongese? Hong Kong something else?’ They considered how they might increase the distance between written Cantonese and standard written Chinese, to capture more fully the syntactic differences between Cantonese and Mandarin that generally get brought into line in writing. The linguists and non-linguists among them all recognized that performing linguistic difference, against the currently prescribed norm but in ways that will become the new prescription, is crucial to their future and their children’s.
In the ‘Black English trial’ (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District) that took place in my native Michigan in 1979, William Labov helped to persuade the court that Black English has a regular structure, rather than just being a cover term for haphazard errors in Standard English. And therefore, its speakers should have the same educational rights the US Supreme Court had granted to second language speakers five years earlier (see Joseph, 2017b; Labov, 1982). This liberation was achieved not by deconstructing prescriptivism, a strategy unlikely to have swayed the Court, but by extending the basic principle of prescriptivism to a nonstandard form of English. Treating its rules neither as thin constitutive ones nor thin regulative ones, but thick hybrid ones – showing that there are right and wrong ways of speaking it – made Black English a language in the legal sense.
Educational systems are bound up with languages. Population movements over centuries have led to a small number of languages carrying particular economic advantages and social and educational power. Linguists’ interventions in the choices made by minority language communities are important, and it is often the case that getting recognition and respect for their languages as being real languages means showing that they have norms of usage that are prescriptive in nature, that are teachable and testable. Our interventions need to be done with sensitivity and thought, not in a polarized way that denies the language community’s right to define its own well-being, its own basic values, and to not have these prescribed to them – even when what they seek from us is support for a prescriptivism that goes against our descriptivist grain.
To conclude: Hume’s Guillotine is based on the belief that descriptions should be value neutral. Yet Hume’s own argument shows how deceptive this is – how descriptions can in fact contain value judgements, and perhaps cannot escape doing so when it is human behavioural norms that are being described. I have tried to show how our linguistic descriptions tend to involve a selection or hierarchization with an evaluative dimension that means we are dealing with thick concepts. We are not, in other words, the polar opposite of prescriptivists. In our thickness, we and they overlap. Anti-prescriptivism is a relic of purifying tendencies that we think we have generally moved beyond. I call upon my fellow linguists to recognize our own covert prescriptivism; to ponder the significance of languages being Saussurean systems of value; and to embrace our hybridity. Hopefully.
Notes
(1)I am very grateful to the editors of this volume and to other colleagues for comments and discussion which helped to clarify issues raised in the following pages, both at the 2017 Prescriptivism Conference in Park City, UT, and at the practice run at the University of Edinburgh organized by my esteemed colleague Geoffrey Pullum. The prescription given by Galen of Pergamon in his treatise On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Passions of the Mind is to find a friend honest enough to speak the truth about the excesses one needs to overcome. I am fortunate to have Geoff as such a friend and mentor.
(2)On Saussure and modernism, see Joseph (2017a), and for an overview of Saussure, see Joseph (2012).
(3)Original (Latour, 1991: 57): ‘Si vous les critiquez en disant que la nature est un monde construit de mains d’homme, ils vous montreront qu’elle est transcendante et qu’ils n’y touchent pas. Si vous leur dites que la société est transcendante et que ses lois nous dépasse infiniment, ils vous diront que nous sommes libres et que notre destin est entre nos seules mains.’ Porter’s translation reverses the clauses in the second sentence.
(4)For a fuller view of Lowth and prescriptivism, see also Pullum (1974) and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2011).
(5)This is not to say that every linguist will agree on the precise definition of fricative, just as water ‘in every cultural context […] is densely encoded with social, spiritual, political and environmental meanings’ (Strang, 2004). Thin descriptive – thick – thin evaluative form a continuum of application in use of terms that helps us to understand what we do with them. They should not be taken as defining characteristics of terms, since this would leave them vulnerable to sceptical or phenomenological questions as to whether any ‘pure’ description is possible: see Proposition 2.
(6)In parallel, we may expect that descriptions are value neutral. Yet Hume himself has shown us how deceptive this is: how descriptions do in fact contain value judgements. Whether there can be value-free description is not a problem he takes up: his concern is simply that it is dishonest to disguise moral judgements as pure description. Actually, where ought is concerned, he ignores the deontic vs epistemic distinction – You ought to be nicer to Mary vs It ought to be nicer tomorrow. The latter contains a value judgement about weather, but no moral judgement, since it is not about behavioural norms.
(7)The sentence is from a book review (Sobelman, 1964) in which Chomsky is being criticized for using made-up sentences as data. The passage continues: ‘It is quite true that the sample English sentences generated by Chomsky sometimes have little resemblance to real English, and we can say, therefore, that Chomsky has erroneously attributed some sentences of Prescribed English to English proper.’
(8)On this passage, see also Boden (2008: 1955) and Sampson and Babarczy (2014: 82–84). Chomsky’s reference is to Veblen (1899).
(9)Veblen was born in Wisconsin to native Norwegian-speaking parents, but English was spoken in the home by his parents with his three elder and 10 younger siblings, and he started school in English at five. Chomsky’s parents were Yiddish speakers living in a mainly Yiddish language community, and young Noam did not have older siblings to help give him a head start in English. Hatcher was born in Baltimore, MD, where Chomsky’s parents married and lived before moving to Philadelphia, PA, and Hill was born in New York City.
(10)Before perform leisure, Veblen (1899) refers to ‘The performance of productive work’ and ‘the performance of labour’, with mass noun objects, but these do not seem to have caught Chomsky’s eye as ‘the performance of leisure’ did; so he may have taken as a syntactic incongruity what was in fact a personal reaction to a particular lexical collocation.
(11)I
