Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dave Washburn wrote:

"However, I would argue that it is not enough simply to say "somebody 
says it that way, so it must be well-formed."  There
must be some guidelines of some kind for determining what is a 
well-formed clause and what isn't, or we end up back with Humpty 
Dumpty."

I consider it extremely offensive to speakers of minority languages 
and/or "dialects" to suggest that what they speak is not a well-formed 
language, apparently when its syntactic rules are different from those 
of the "standardised" form of the language and/or don't fit a theory 
nicely. If a community speaks in a particular way, it is the job of 
linguists to describe their language and adjust their theories to 
account for it, not to pass value judgments on it on the basis of how 
well it fits their existing theories.

Do I have any support on this list for my view?

Peter Kirk