The Language Wars

Un paio di settimane fa è uscito sul New Yorker (che purtroppo leggo sempre in ritardo) una recensione interessante sul libro di Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English (FS&G), che racconta l'animata discussione tra linguisti prescrittrivi e descrittivi. "In the past half century or so, however, this situation [un generale permissivismo nei confronti della lingua] has produced a serious quarrel, political as well as linguistic, with two combatant parties: the prescriptivists, who were bent on instructing us in how to write and speak; and the descriptivists, who felt that all we could legitimately do in discussing language was to say what the current practice was". newyorker.