What do Americans mean by “socialism”?

[Chris]

I could name several - William Bullokar, William Lily, John Wallis, Lindley Murray, John Dryden...

We didn't just start following grammatical rules, Chris. Someone made those rules and we said, "Hey, good idea," and followed them. Design.

What languages did they invent.

About the only artificial language design by anyone is Esperanto. But it's not much used, is constantly expanding in technical jargon and some committee greets natural evolution of it by branding them new languages.

[kilgram]

I could name several - William Bullokar, William Lily, John Wallis, Lindley Murray, John Dryden...

We didn't just start following grammatical rules, Chris. Someone made those rules and we said, "Hey, good idea," and followed them. Design.

No, here I disagree.

What has been done in every language is recopilate how the language is talked and then from it provide the rules, but always based on the usage of the language. It is not something like an academic says from now on we will start to say the things in this way instead of the other and the people start to apply those rules.

And more you should know when your language does not have any academy like Spanish, Catalan or French.

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[Mister D]

I think we may need some clarification here. I think we can all agree that virtually everything related to social life, language included, results from conscious human decisions but I believe Chris has something else in mind when he speaks of design. From this POV, I would say that design entails conscious human planning with regard to an end result. Feudalism, for example, originated in conscious human decisions but no one sat back, envisioned a feudal society and worked to create it.

[Chris]

No, here I disagree.

What has been done in every language is recopilate how the language is talked and then from it provide the rules, but always based on the usage of the language. It is not something like an academic says from now on we will start to say the things in this way instead of the other and the people start to apply those rules.

And more you should know when your language does not have any academy like Spanish, Catalan or French.

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There have been all sorts of efforts to reform language and to get people to conform to grammar rules and such but it never really works and the rules changes. Used to be the rule that possessive for words ending in s called for just an apostrophe: Chris'. But now the rule has been simplified and Chris's is proper.

[Chris]

I think we may need some clarification here. I think we can all agree that virtually everything related to social life, language included, results from conscious human decisions but I believe Chris has something else in mind when he speaks of design. From this POV, I would say that design entails conscious human planning with regard to an end result. Feudalism, for example, originated in conscious human decisions but no one sat back, envisioned a feudal society and worked to create it.

Exactly. Most of what we consider the social order, including language, happens by man's actions, and you would assume there was thought and decision behind it, some of it, though some is maintained just by experiencing the culture you grow up and live in. Some things are done by conscious design and planning toward an end, like the US government created by the Constitution, or Esperanto, where people actually sat down and designed and planned it before anyone ever spoke it.

[Chris]

I think once you understand that language evolves, rather than progresses, then you can tie it to human evolution, for language requires not just evolution of physical vocal structures, but also neural structures, some of whom, like Chomsky, would say these are the syntactic and semantic structures. What's even more fascinating, though, is at some point in the evolvolution of language, language changes man, how we thing, how we argue, how we solve problems.

The blurb for the following video: "Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation."