[Coldlight]

Originally Posted by Qilin

I'm not exactly familiar with the terms you used,

I am also sorry for not being clear with this part. I used those terms because I thought those were the most precise terms to best describe our opposing viewpoints. Watering it down a bit, one could take descriptivist to mean liberal, and prescriptivist as conservative, in the context of language usage.

but can I take this to mean that it's impossible for us to come to an agreement on the nature of language?

It seems that is the case. Just as it is here, there is an ongoing "war of words" in many other places regarding the nature of language. I think the first part (before the W3C section) of this blog post best describes the two sides without being overly biased. Our dispute over the usage of "shounen" in English is just one of the many language usage skirmishes being fought in other places. Ironically, "shounen" hasn't even been accepted as an English term yet and we are here disputing over how it should be used in English.

Whatever the case, let me just clarify my position:

Words in themselves are meaningless. They only gain meaning through how people use it. In a sense, they are merely symbols with mutually agreed representations.

This is the position of descriptivism. "The masses define what a word means." As someone from the opposing camp, I beg to differ, and I'd like to let the experts define the word. In this case, the "experts" are the smaller group of people who know best about the subject, and the Japanese, who created the word themselves. Thus to me, "shounen" is still just a demographic.

One significant change the term has experienced, for example, is how the term's usage began to spread outside the Japanese community and how it began to be interpreted across different cultures and contexts.

The spread of the term's usage outside the Japanese community is a significant change, yes, but when it first jumped the barrier over into the English community, it still meant what it should be, a demographic. Only really recently has the misuse of the term been spreading, and as such it is not an interpretation, but a misinterpretation of what it really is.