Quote:
Originally Posted by espire
In common spoken French, I wouldn't doubt it, but I know that for a fact, there should be a difference. At least there used to be one, long ago. In Ontario, we're still being taught archaic French, I guess  |
These sorts of things like "there
should be a difference" or "there
used to be a difference" can be very influential in prescriptive specifications of languages (as opposed to descriptions of how people actually talk). A very interesting example of this arose in the first attempt at standardizing modern spoken Chinese (before Putonghua). There was this so-called fifth tone that had existed historically but was no longer actually used, but apparently for historical fidelity, the standardizers decided that it just had to be put in. Thus, they standardized a language with a set of records recorded by the linguist Yuen Ren Chao, but since it didn't correspond to any actual dialect, there wasn't anyone who could really teach it (the joke was that Chao was the only speaker of this language).
They had to scrap the whole thing and start over (and that's when they generated Putonghua).