Let's take a detour from n-grams and
probabilities and let's talk about
prescriptivism. This is the impulse that
some people have to tell you that your
spelling is bad and you should feel bad!
So this week we've been looking at
n-grams,
and we're going to use them for spell
checking, but before we do that, let's
take a brief critical look at spelling,
spelling rules, and who decides what the
spelling rules are, essentially who wants
to control language. Have you noticed
this in your life? People are obsessed
with correcting how other people write,
and they probably told you in school
that if you don't write correctly, you're
not gonna get into university, you're not
gonna get a job, no one's gonna love you
on Facebook. And these people definitely
agree, and they want to correct your
orthography. Please take a minute to
watch this video about people who
correct orthography in graffiti, and
then come back to our video.
Welcome back. Wasn't that insane? And
people are obsessed was telling others
how they should be writing but why? Why
do people care it cannot possibly be
because it makes the message easier to
understand, or clear. We can all
understand text that has some spelling
variation. For example, here you have
"Your" music is annoying. Everyone can
understand that they mean the music
belonging to them, no one read this and
said, oh they think - they think I am
the music. Everyone can understand the
text with spelling variation but people
warn you that if you don't write there,
their and they're with their correct
spellings, there's gonna be terrible
consequences. People say that if you miss
the apostrophe in it's vs. its that
it's going to destroy the language, and
they say that this is going to ripple
into all of society, that "Society is as
lax as its language", "Because what else
is bad grammar and the misuse of
apostrophes but bad manners?"
Bad manners, really? No. Spelling
rules and particularly spelling rules in
English are arbitrary; they're nothing
but memorization and it takes us all
years of training to learn them. For
example, it takes years for children to
learn that words like lead and lead are
pronounced differently even though
they're written the same. And it also
takes people years to learn that words
like two too and to are written with
different glyphs even though they're
pronounced exactly the same. So these
spelling rules are arbitrary. There's no
reason why lead and lead are the same
but two and too and to are not. This is
some historical accident that they
landed there. Because they're arbitrary,
you need to memorize them and so only
the people with enough resources and
time to dedicate themselves
to studying these exceptions, to
memorizing them and to rep - and to
replicating them, can ever hope to learn
how to spell English correctly. So if you
have enough time and resources to buy
books and enough time to - to dedicate to
reading and writing and practicing, you
will learn the rules, otherwise you won't.
However, this is not the way people treat
spelling. They treat it as something that
has to do with intelligence. If you don't
write correctly, it means there's
something wrong with you, and people feel
that they need to be correcting you all
the time. Why? Writing is a wondrous thing
but most importantly is a wondrous
technology. Writing and language, be it
spoken or signed language are very
different. Writing is the technology to represent
spoken language. Language itself, spoken
or sign language, is more like an
instinct. We learn how to speak similar
to how birds learn how to sing: it is
just something that our human brains do.
However learning how to write is like
learning how to use a tool or a
technology: it takes years, it takes
practice, and it takes effort. Indeed,
there are many differences between
differences between speaking, which is
more like an instinct, and writing or
spelling your language, which is more
like a technology. Speaking happens
automatically. Children do it without any
instruction. At no point when you were a
baby, were your parents in front of you
with a whiteboard telling you that the
way you make sentences in English is by
putting a subject first, now let me tell
you what a subject is. No one did that to
you, you learned it automatically and
instinctually. On the other hand, when
you're learning how to read and write,
someone had to give you explicit
instructions and this happened for
years and years and years until through
practice, you learned that lead and lead are
different. Back to speaking. The rules of
speaking tell you how to generate new
structures. The rules for English we have
in our brain tells you that - tell you
that sometimes you need a subject,
sometimes a verb, sometimes you can have
a direct object, sometimes you don't, so
you can make thousands millions of
constructions. The rules in spelling a
language are usually arbitrary. There's
no visible reason for why they are the
way they are. And they are - they amount to
just a list of exceptions like lead and
lead, to and too and two, there's obviously
many patterns in writing, but for some of
the rules the - the only explanation
that people can give you is because it's
so, because I said so. You write to and two
and too like that because that's the way
it is. Finally as for speaking, every baby
can learn to speak any language. If you
put them in the context where they can
hear a language, they will learn it.
However spelling is something that you
can only do if you have enough time to
devote to learning, to reading and enough
monetary resources to get the books that
you need to read and to practice so that
people who have the leisure time to read
and read ever more will get better and
better at memorizing the exceptions and
the patterns of spelling, whereas people
who don't have that time will not be
able to get the patterns of spelling
which are arbitrary and need to be
memorized.
It doesn't need to be this way. There -
there's many - language could be written
without any spelling rules and English
was an example of this. Before the
sixteen hundreds, English had no formal
orthography so people could spell words
however they wanted, and did this 
- not did - this did not stop people from creating
beautiful works of art. For example
Chaucer lived in the late 1300s. He wrote The
Canterbury Tales and he writes the word
not in at least five different ways not,
noght, nawt, naught and yeah it's like he can't
even write English! Shakespeare for
example can't even write his own name.
Look at all the forms that he has for
his last name Shakes -pere
Shakes -pare so this is a person
who can't even write his own name. It's
because the language at this point did
not have fixed spelling rules that told
you that one word needs to be one way,
the other word what can only appear in
some other way. So you could write a
language without spelling rules and
people could still understand it. But how
were all these spelling rules born? When
people invented the concept of spelling
mistake. Because of time constraints,
we're gonna focus on European languages
here but this is true of most large
literate societies. But in European
cultures in the 1600s, there was an
ascendance of people into the middle
classes. There were people who had you
know a little bit more money and then
the elites had to find ways to
distinguish themselves, from you know the
up-and-coming people. So the conc - so this
concept of spelling mistake was born,
that you could write in ways that were
not acceptable. In France the Academie
Francaise is the body that regulates how
you should write the French language and
their mission when they started was to
"clean the language of the filth it is
caught either from the mouths of the
people,
or in the crowd of the court and
tribunal we're in the bath speech of
ignorant courtiers." So it's pretty clear
what they think about the language of
everybody else. When people came up with
this idea that you could write in wrong
ways, they they went away with it. Some
languages developed academies where
writers decided amongst themselves which
spellings were gonna be good
based on their own dialects, or in the
forms that they preferred. French and
Spanish orthography worked like this.
Other languages like English did not
develop formal academies, but people
called mavens took upon themselves the
job of telling us how to write. People
who wrote dictionaries, people who wrote
style books, they were the ones who
decided what looked right and what
looked wrong according to their
preferences. In many countries for
example the people who regulate
education also regulate writing. These
people are guided by an impulse called
prescriptivism. Prescriptivism is the
impulse to regulate language and to
control it in ways that are conservative,
elitist or authoritarian, so telling
you how to write because they know
better and they know how you should be
writing prescriptivism is the conscious
attempt by language users to control or
regulate the language for the purpose of
enforcing perceived forms. Whose, I'm sorry,
perceived norms. Whose norms? Probably
the norms of the elites that is
proposing how you should read and write
who could control this powerful tool of
literacy so that they are the ones who
have the most access to this tool and
they control that other people can gain
access to it only by gaining access to
the norms of the elite. This impulse is
related to another one called purism the
idea that there's some platonic pure form.
form of the language English, Spanish, Mandarin,
that there's a pure form where that's
spoken, by you know, the classical writers
or the, you know, the people who are
authorities on who are the best amongst
us all, and that if we use those forms
this would unify us linguistically and
by extension would unify us
politically and civilizationally. So
this this is an idea that if we all just
wrote the same way together, then the
nation would be great and it would move
forward because we all have one
objective and one purpose because people
and the elites are the ones who decide
how you should spell. The question you
should be asking yourself is not
whether you should correct people or not
on Facebook,
it is who is deciding what the right answer
is, who is - who is deciding what right
spellings are going to be, how are they
making those decisions, and why are they
interested in continuing with, for
example, historical spellings or the
spellings that have come from before.
And also why do you feel that in
yourself? We'll come back to that in a
moment. In - societies that speak
European languages, correct spelling has
become a symbol of social class again,
because only the people with enough time
and resources to devote themselves to
reading and to memorizing the arcane
rules of spelling are the ones that know
the correct spelling. People with less
time to devote to scholarization and to
reading are not going to get all the
correct spellings.
This variation in these possibilities
can generate variation in how people
write and variation is done in our
societies has taken on two meanings:
the first one is descent. If you write
differently it might mean that your
message is on the fringes of society
that it's contestatory or subversive.
This is why for example graffiti are
usually written with the replaced
letters or other spellings for words. You
can see it in things like fanzines but
also in social media when someone wants
to sound very cool or very distinct,
sometimes they will change their
spelling, writing night with nyt for
example. So variation in spelling can
mean deviating from, you know, established
norms and descending from them but sadly
variation in spelling has also taken on
associations of ignorance, and even
dirtiness. The idea has formed that
writing correctly is something that
makes you smart, that makes you a good
member of society, and that makes you a
clean member of society. You can see
memes like these all the time: good
grammar is like personal hygiene you can
ignore it if you want, but don't be
surprised when people draw their own
:conclusions. This one is from Spanish
chatting with someone bad orthography
it's like talking to someone with bad
breath. So the association is alive and
well, that again, not having the same
spellings as everyone else makes you
ignorant and frankly makes you a dirty
person with bad breath. Which is another
association that people from the elites
like to throw at people from lower
social classes. So it's another way in
which this pattern is replicated. The
saddest part is that English did not
develop an academy; all of its
regulations have been created by
dictionary writers, by journalists who
think that they write better than
you, so they're the ones who they should
be who should be dictating style. But
everyone else has been happy to buy into
that advice, so that now people in middle
classes for example police each other
for the correct spelling.
You see these again on the internet all
the time. People ready to jump on other
people if they don't spell correctly and
people thinking that you're stupid if
you write wrong, that you need to be
killed if you use the wrong spelling. Why do
we feel that in ourselves?
Mostly because our educational system
has instilled us with the idea that
being good at writing means being smart
and frankly means being better than
people who are - who do not have all of
those spelling rules, rules that are arbitrary
and that are difficult to learn. So we
have fallen into a position where we're
all policing each other and replicating
this pattern of violence towards lower
classes, and this unfortunately happens
in many societies where force is - where
spelling regulation and spelling
correction has some implications of
force into it. The one on the left is for
Spanish we have this verb called haber,
to exist, which is written with an h
because somebody thought it looked cool
because Latin had an h on the equivalent
word, and now we're all doomed to use
this word that has no sound and makes no
sense. Unifying Chinese characters is its
whole another story.
Someone in 220 BCE uniformed all of the
languages and forbid any form of the
characters that were different from the
ones he wrote. In the 1950s the
government started a change of languages
of the characters that has continued to
this day, and this is of course from the
government so these patterns of trying
to regulate writing
happen in many large societies. So before
we make spell checker and before you
jump on that person on Facebook, try to
ask yourself why are you feeling that?
You did understand what they write.
Languages could be written without a
fixed orthography, but in many of our
societies the correct way of spelling
has been determined by elites and has
become a marker of social class, and so
people who do not replicate the correct
orthography are seen as subversive or as
ignorant, and we are we all feel ready to,
you know, to pound on them and to protect
the - the rules that we have learned from
when we were kids. I guess the general advice
is, as with everything, don't judge a book
by its cover. If someone has bad
spelling, it doesn't mean that they're
dumb it means that maybe they haven't
had the time to read as many books as
you have and so they haven't had the
time to learn those fancy spellings for
English words. And whatever your language
background is ,this happens in all large
literate societies, so always be on the
lookout for these kinds of things.
