alt Hacker NewsDr Dre is a professional poet and a very successful one by any standard. His whole stock-in-trade was American urban colloquialisms most of which can be traced back to English rural and working class and predate the colonization of the Americas. The early development of English "prestige grammar" and word usage dates back to the court of William the Conqueror and the reintroduction of romance linguistic influence on Anglo-Saxon English that lead to the development of Middle English by the 13th Century. What you understand as English "prestige grammar" today is a moving target, consistently evolving but still full of contradictions and single-case rules. Many popular European languages today have been modified to exclude these linguistic anomalies, making them more consistent, less error prone and easier to learn. I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
*stock-in-trade: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stock-in-trade
Sorry, in this thread, I had to!
> I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
This has already been happening in English, for centuries. Compare these examples given in the article to modern English:
> 3) ...howe and by what certaine and generall rule I mighte trye and throughly discerne the veritie of the catholike faithe, from the falsehood of wicked heresye... (1554) > 4) You maie (saide I) trie and bring him in, and shewe him to her. (1569)
I suppose after more than 450 years, one might expect even more simplification, but it is perhaps the fate of a lingua franca to have more "backward compatibility" than less widely-used languages.