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komponisto comments on Folk grammar and morality - Less Wrong
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My impression is that people tend to be exposed to grammar early on in school, in the form of a lot of arbitrary-seeming rules, which do not necessarily correspond with the colloquial spoken language. In English class in elementary and high school, I was taught never to split an infinitive (maybe I should say, "to never split an infinitive") and that the verb "to be" takes the nominative -- "that is I" rather than "that's me." Later, I learned that serious academic grammar scholars tend not spend their time issuing or enforcing random rules, but rather mostly observe and analyze how people use grammar -- regional and temporal shifts in the way the language is used. In that sense, language is value-neutral. Neither French nor English is "better" than the other in a general sense, French is not just degenerate Latin, Shakespeare and Chaucer and the author of Beowulf all use the grammar of English appropriate to their times. Valley-girl English and Ebonics and West Virginia dialect are all equally valid and internally consistent, according to this approach.
Can this same analysis be applied to moral codes? If it can, even in principle, then we have some problems. As I understand it, "morality" is all about values. I think EY has considered this issue seriously, and has alluded to it in Three Worlds Collide.
And indeed, they're not supposed to. "Grammar" in the sense of school consists of rules for signaling high status via speaking and writing. (The level of "arbitrariness" is what you'd expect given this.) Nothing to do with "grammar" in the sense of theoretical linguistics.
Linguists, however, are too hasty to jump to this conclusion in their attempt to explain that "evaluating" different language varieties is not their subject as linguists. There may be legitimate arguments (aesthetic, utilitarian, etc.) for why some forms of language are "better" than others; it's just that such arguments are strictly irrelevant from the point of view of theoretical linguistics (though not sociolingustics, etc).
And clarity.
In English, Irish and French classes I learned about parts of speech, regular and irregular verbs, cases and declensions, moods and tenses and conjugations, gender and agreement etc etc. These are not really theoretical linguistics, but they are prerequisites for it.