Claiming that " a compound sentence without a comma is a run-on sentence " is an example of prescriptive grammar; it only takes a little common sense to see that this does not reflect the actual state of the world . contribs 15 : 37, 9 November 2009 ( UTC)
32.
The traditional prescriptive grammar rule stated that, when expressing pure futurity ( without any additional meaning such as desire or command ), " shall " was to be used when the subject was in the first person ( " I " or " we " ), and " will " in other cases.
33.
While your regional dialect may retain, on a day-to-day speech and informal writing basis, some features of English that are considered archaic in most dialects, it is generally not a good idea to use them in Wikipedia articles, even when some of them may still be considered " proper " in some prescriptive grammar books or dictionaries.
34.
According to prescriptive grammars, the same applies to the first and second person plural past tense endings "-[ my,-[ cie ", although this rule is often ignored in colloquial speech ( so " zro "'bi "'li [ my "'we did'is said to be correctly stressed on the second syllable, although in practice it is commonly stressed on the third ).
35.
As Gowers explains, Jespersen " held that ` of greater value than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descriptive grammar which, instead of acting as a guide to what should be said or written, aims at finding out what is actually said or written by those who use the language'and recording it objectively like a naturalist observing the facts of nature ."
36.
The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is PG ini's Ac tdhyy + ( " Eight-Chapter Grammar " ) dating to c . the 5th century BCE . It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i . e ., an authority that defines ( rather than describes ) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for Vedic forms that had already passed out of use in PG ini's time.
