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Linguistics Question

NobleSavage said:
In the year 3000, will the English language be radically different?
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Well, it's unlikely an English speaker of 1014 would be able to easily communicate with a hotelier, bartender and waiter in New Orleans of today.
He'd still get drunk and laid, but it'd be a chore.
So probably.
 
NobleSavage said:
In the year 3000, will the English language be radically different?
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Given the history of change, and given that we can see some notable changes just within my lifetime (and while I may be old, I assure you I am not thousands of years old), it would be astonishing if it were not.

As the saying goes, English does not so much borrow from other languages, as bop them on the head, drag them into an alleyway and go through their pockets for loose grammar.

As China and her neighbours become wealthier and more frequent trading partners with the English speaking word, some dialects of Modern English are already starting to veer towards South East Asian grammatical structures, and it would be surprising if English did not continue to take both some grammar and some vocabulary from SE Asia in the fairly short term, much as it took from Indian languages in the last two centuries, and from Flemish in the couple of centuries before that.

You need not be a guru or a pundit to see that looting Indian languages has left English a richer language; If you sit on a cot, on the veranda of your bungalow, wearing pyjamas and a shawl and watching a thug with a bandanna drive past in a juggernaut loaded with shampoo, it becomes fairly obvious that English today is very different from English prior to the founding of the East India Company in the 17th Century.

The French try (with limited success) to keep their language 'pure'; the English never worried too much about that, and it has been estimated that perhaps as many as 45% of English words come from French (although the common Latin history of both languages makes this hard to judge with any confidence).

The history of English is one of taking words and grammar from anywhere, if a use can be found for it; This leads to a versatile and highly nuanced language, and there seems little reason to expect the process to cease.
 
The age of standardized spelling and easily recorded speech will tend to keep the language stable, as far as spelling and pronunciation are concerned. However, spelling and pronunciation haven't changed much in 200 years, and a person from 1814 would find it hard to comprehend most modern speech because English constantly invents new words and finds new ways to use old ones. I imagine the situation would be no different in the year 3000.
 
Consider the technological advances over the past fifty years. Now take that out to the year 3000! We won't even exist in one place. We will literally exist in a number of places, conversing with a number of people in our one language, at a minimum. Actually, I'm thinking Talosian.
 
Yes, I think despite print it will change. As an avid player of boggle (or scrabble) the arguments about new words and spellings is rampant despite the existence of dictionaries. Anyone arguing that it's in the "new" dictionary or cut down because it is now listed as "archaic" or "obsolete" knows this is a fast moving process.

Nite.
 
bilby said:
As China and her neighbours become wealthier and more frequent trading partners with the English speaking word, some dialects of Modern English are already starting to veer towards South East Asian grammatical structures, and it would be surprising if English did not continue to take both some grammar and some vocabulary from SE Asia in the fairly short term, much as it took from Indian languages in the last two centuries, and from Flemish in the couple of centuries before that.
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Vocabulary, yes, but grammar? Can you point me to any examples?
 
lpetrich said:
bilby said:
As China and her neighbours become wealthier and more frequent trading partners with the English speaking word, some dialects of Modern English are already starting to veer towards South East Asian grammatical structures, and it would be surprising if English did not continue to take both some grammar and some vocabulary from SE Asia in the fairly short term, much as it took from Indian languages in the last two centuries, and from Flemish in the couple of centuries before that.
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Vocabulary, yes, but grammar? Can you point me to any examples?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinglish has some examples, including sentences such as "Because I am ill, so I can't go to school" and "The dress beautiful", and points out that for English speakers, a common sequence is subject → predicate → object → adverbial, while the Chinese sequence is subject → adverbial → predicate → object. Chinese speakers tend to leave the most important information at the back of the sentence, while English speakers present it at the front. In addition, there is no “it” in Chinese, so the pronoun is often not used in Chinese English, which causes the speakers to always refer to the actual object.

To what extent these are 'errors' rather than 'dialect' is a matter of debate; However in places like Hong Kong or Singapore, where many people speak both Chinese and English, I would say that these are dialectically 'correct' forms of the local English dialect, based on the sheer number of speakers. Given that Mandarin Chinese speakers outnumber English speakers almost three-to-one worldwide, I suspect that this dialect will become markedly more common in the next few decades, unless the recent Chinese moves towards trade and openness are reversed for some reason.

There doesn't seem to me to be any justification for considering 'Chinglish' to be erroneous English (rather than simply a dialect) that would not also apply to other dialects of English. Of course, some would say that (for example) the Scouse, Geordie or Glaswegian modes of speech are simply erroneous English; But as there are clear (albeit different) rules being followed by those populations, I prefer to think of them as dialects.

Which dialect(s) come to dominate the use of the English language in the future will be determined by the number of speakers and by the degree of interaction they have with the rest of the English speaking world. Chinese is unlikely to replace English, as English is well entrenched as the language of technology and engineering; But it seems to me that Chinese is almost certain to strongly influence English, as more and more English speakers are going to be people who have one or other of the variants of Chinese as their first language.
 
English is already evolving, by its international language status.
I've often noticed, in international meetings, that the native English speakers are often the ones needing clarifications more often: all of us foreigners are used to communicate with each-other through some vaguely-English-based common trade language, but native English speakers, who have been lied into believing this is supposed to be the language they were taught at school and/or by their parents, are often disoriented by it.
 
dx713 said:
English is already evolving, by its international language status.
I've often noticed, in international meetings, that the native English speakers are often the ones needing clarifications more often: all of us foreigners are used to communicate with each-other through some vaguely-English-based common trade language, but native English speakers, who have been lied into believing this is supposed to be the language they were taught at school and/or by their parents, are often disoriented by it.
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Do know of any examples of this on the net? I'd love to hear an mp3.
 
Not really.
Note that I'm exagerating too. It's still recognizable as English. But I really saw English colleagues get dumbfounded by some mistakes while the foreign language participants guessed the speaker intent and continued the discussion like he had talked proper English, and that on several different occasions.

A memorable one was a "must not" uttered by a German to mean "need not". All of us German, French, Portuguese, Spanish colleagues understood he had simply forgotten it didn't work that way and applied negation directly to the "must" in the draft specifications and carried on to the next point, while our English colleague was at a loss trying to understand why we suddenly would want to forbid a feature that would still be nice to have.

(the problem is when that kind of thing creeps to the written documents, as without the context, it can generate big misunderstandings. I - and a couple project managers who agree with me - have been known to drive colleagues crazy with requiring consistent wording)
 
The greatest change in spoken English that I see is the growing use of Spanglish. It is affecting both English in the U.S. and Spanish in Mexico. We seem to be in the process of merging into a common language along the border, and it is spreading.



Maybe in a couple hundred years people in Australia and the U.S. will need translators to speak to each other, someone fluent in both Spanglish and Chinglish.
 
One thousand years!? It's really an awfully long time by today's standards and in the meantime there are so many things that could go wrong in so many ways that the issue of what language people will speak is moot.

One aspect for example is the speeding up of communication and an increase in the transfer of people across borders and even regions of the world. Another is the aging of the population. A few centuries ago, the faster renewal of generations due to shorter adult life meant faster renewal of language. Now, we will have old timers holding sway over the airwaves and what not. What has become generalised is to see your own language is mere conventions and therefore to be less worried about changing them.

Language is dependent on so many other things: technology, trade, communication, geopolitics, standards of living, culture, entertainment, jobs, conflicts, even religion. The future of any language has to be chaotic. Unpredictable.
EB
 
Speakpigeon said:
One thousand years!? It's really an awfully long time by today's standards and in the meantime there are so many things that could go wrong in so many ways that the issue of what language people will speak is moot.

One aspect for example is the speeding up of communication and an increase in the transfer of people across borders and even regions of the world. Another is the aging of the population. A few centuries ago, the faster renewal of generations due to shorter adult life meant faster renewal of language. Now, we will have old timers holding sway over the airwaves and what not. What has become generalised is to see your own language is mere conventions and therefore to be less worried about changing them.

Language is dependent on so many other things: technology, trade, communication, geopolitics, standards of living, culture, entertainment, jobs, conflicts, even religion. The future of any language has to be chaotic. Unpredictable.
EB
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The way we are going things will be all thumbs in 886 years.
 
ever since the word "literally" has been redefined to mean "figuratively", I think I can confidently say that English will be unrecognizable in the year 3000, irregardless and unrespective to any other evolutions.
 
Malintent said:
ever since the word "literally" has been redefined to mean "figuratively", I think I can confidently say that English will be unrecognizable in the year 3000, irregardless and unrespective to any other evolutions.
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The rep button will not do what I want, regardless of how many times I hit it.
 
Well before Y3K, well before Y3K...

And it's not the contributions posted on this website which will stay the course.

I suggest we build English-speaking AI-machines milling around among us to preserve the language. For the moment they can't really speak English let alone have proper conversations despite recurrent Turing-test claims. Do you think we could do that before Y3K?
EB
 
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