: Re: Efficiency or correctness in communication? The language industry has a long tradition in the pursuit of correctness, based on manually drafted rules. However, the end goal has always been communicative

@Annie587

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Hmm, but the whole point of "correctness" is that if everyone follows the rules, then we have a common ground for understanding.

For example, there's a rule that a pronoun should agree in gender and number with its antecedent. So if I see the sentence, "Bob gave his girlfriend her book", I know immediately that the book belongs to the girlfriend and not Bob, because the girlfriend must be female, while "Bob" is almost surely male, and so "her" must refer to the girlfriend. If we threw out this rule for whatever reason and said that "her" could refer to a man or to a woman, then the sentence becomes ambiguous.

Occasionally people say, Why do we make such a big deal about spelling? If you write the word "difference" and I write it "difrans", we both know what it means, so what difference does it make? My version is shorter and more efficient. But in real life, the problem is that if you write "difrans", I can't be sure if you mean "difference" or "deference" or "diaphragm" or maybe dozens of other words. I may be able to figure it out from context, but at the very least that's extra effort. And if you use your own spelling for every word, where do I begin?

Thus, correctness should increase efficiency, not be its enemy. Correctness should reduce the effort required to decypher the meaning of a text.

Of course any given rule could be a bad one. Like the silly rules, "Never use a preposition to end a sentence with", or "Be sure to not split an infinitive". But the issue there isn't that rules are bad, but that these particular rules are bad, because we end up writing sentences that are awkward and hard to understand ("That is a rule up with which I shall not put") just to conform to an arbitrary rule.

So to convince ME to "prefer efficiency to correctness" ... first you'd have to prove to me that those are in conflict. A language with no rules at all ... I'm not sure how that would even qualify as a language. It would surely be impossible for people to communicate with it.

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