Hello, we are talking about language

Via Languagehat here is a fascinating and quite angry (we love angry) post on Slovak language and our linguists reacting to the recent publication of a new comprehensive dictionary of contemporary Slovak.

I am no expert... though being a native speaker I sort of am... but then again... ah, never mind. Just read the damn thing if you are linguistically inclined. It's worth it.

For example, this observation about our linguists is spot on:

Those same linguists fail to understand that, to use a metaphor, Slovak is no longer a proprietary project. It's been open-sourced for at least 60 years. It's a child that has grown up long ago and no longer needs protection. And yet, some still insist it wear a coat when going outside even in May and some others even try to forbid it to stay out after 10pm and date that cute tall kid that just moved in next door. People like that suffer from a dangerous delusion: they believe they can actually control a living thing like a language (and, for that matter, its speakers). To them, codification is not a completed process, but something they can repeat over and over again. Moreover, they detest any behavior they do not approve of and either try to pretend it does not exist, or, worse, claim that any action (words or phrases or usage) not conforming to their expectations is an aberration and should be swiftly and decidedly suppressed.

This of course comes as a no surprise when you realize how deeply the totalitarian impulse to control is embedded in some people's minds - linguists being no exception. An example of such a linguists seems to be one Ábel Kráľ who

believes that any variation in speech is first and foremost a mistake or a persistent error. Being a phonetician, Kráľ even goes so far as to suggest that any failure to correctly (orthophonetically) pronounce a phoneme has psychological causes and refers to Piaget to prove his point (p. 80). God forbid there should be regional or dialectal variations. May the Lord keep us from the evil Easterners and their short vowels and penultimate accent or those devils of Záhorie or Myjava and their lack of palatalization.

Then again, I should point out here that I am an elitist who believes that the existence of a strict "Standard" or "High" Slovak in the public arena serves an important role of weeding out the plebs. It tells me a lot about a person if he can't even talk properly. But I certainly don't condone the antics of a few geezers who are out of touch with reality and would think themselves the engineers of human speech.

Anyway, all this language talk reminded me of this:

Why can't real-life linguists be more like this?