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Linguistics Question

Kharakov said:
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.
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I took care of that for you.
 
Since we don't know the political, economic and technological future, the question of how it will change and up to what point, is unanswerable.

  • Suppose the language teachers of the future are robotic. The evolution of language would then be frozen or almost frozen.
  • Suppose then, human children rebel against these machines and want to speak their own way, so cant becomes the norm.
  • Suppose a large asteroid crashes on Earth in 2015 -versus- civilization progresses unimpeded Star-Trek-like and with reverence to past classics, as the characters of ST TNG were.
  • Suppose Chinese becomes the new international language of art, science and civilization.
  • Suppose the "center of gravity" of the English language becomes enormous space stations or planetary colonies, and suppose the only link between these civs is a standardized English language which society through amazingly effective scientific/technological applications, successfully teaches to all speakers of English across the galaxy, preserving the English language from then on for"ever".


The turns and twists of history are unpredictable, and the evolution of language depends on them. It is theorized that the Great Vowel Shift was a product of was social mobility after the black death, among other possible culprits.
 
Of course - what great linguistic in the 50's could have predicted LOL? But stating that the future is unpredictable is both boring and axiomatic, while noodling out Late American is nifty. There are some immediate concerns -

While English spelling ever be simplified? It seems like such a great idea at first, but an irrational spelling system is one of the things that holds the Anglosphere together. English can't become phonetic, or even as close as Japanese, because of the wide variety of dialects attached to different nationalities. But we could do better, and some of it is happening by itself - night to nite, etc.

Will cursive continue? Do we need a script for extensive handwriting? I hate cursive, I stopped using it in HS. How far will this go, as we stop writing?

Chinese ideograms - have HUGE advantages over orthographic scripts, in that you can write any language with then (minus your agglutinations). If true advances are made in learning and such, so that it's not insanely difficult, it would be a good idea.
 
Movies (videotapes, DVDs, etc.) will tend to retard change. The fact that we still watch Cary Grant movies will have some tendency to keep us in familiar with the language of Cary Grant's times.

On the other hand, the internet will cause a Cambrian explosion of microcultures, which will act as incubators of change.
 
tantric said:
Chinese ideograms - have HUGE advantages over orthographic scripts, in that you can write any language with then (minus your agglutinations). If true advances are made in learning and such, so that it's not insanely difficult, it would be a good idea.
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Chinese ideograms are nothing but stylized hieroglyphics. The alphabet was created not by Phœnicians--despite what is commonly claimed- but by the Egyptians themselves, in order to write foreign names. The Japanese, who use Chinese ideographs, prefer to use the much more alphabetic katakana for foreign names. Learning 24 to 28 letters is much easier than having to learn thousands of ideographs. It is, moreover, impractical for polysyllabic languages, as the Koreans found out long ago (Korean script is alphabetic, although it looks ideographic because the letters of syllables are cluttered together, perhaps in order to resemble the prestigious Chinese script).

I have thought of an intermediary solution, one that would have made English spelling as complex as most orthographies: if only the great vowel shift had affected Germanic words, spelling weirdness would have been limited to vowel combinations such as "ea" in "each", and monosyllables such as "love" and grove". If Latinate words had been unaffected, it would have been wonderful.

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I believe the worst problem with English is that there are two mixed up systems of writing long-versus-short vowels. The Anglo-Saxon system was "oo"=long and "o"=short, whereas the French/Latinate system was open-syllable=long and closed-syllable=short. Mixing the two... now everything is a godawful mess.

That is how we got to the point you can't predict which are short and which are long. We have the classical examples finite/infinite, line/linear, have/rave, etc, as much as the combination of the Germanic spelling hard G in every position with the Latinate soft G in front of E and I (target versus gadget, even for words that are not Latinate).
 
How about cut spelling?

Th Space Race was th competition between th United States and th Soviet Union, rufly from 1957 to 1975. It involvd th efrts by each of these nations to explor outr space with satlites, to be th 1st to send there a human being and to send mand and unmand missions on th Moon with a safe return of th humans to Erth.
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Bliss symbols are MUCH easier than Chinese, but fail on cool.

Bliss_cinema.png
 
More questions:

Why didn't Esperanto catch on? That seems like a good idea to me.

Why can't the very important people declare that phonetic spelling is acceptable?

Why the hell did my English Lit teacher force us to read Shakespeare from a book? It was meant to be a play. We should have gone to a Shakespearean theater! Which I did later in life and found quite enjoyable.
 
It's actually not a good language , it's all European in an age where people were going beyond that. It doesn't DO anything with grammar - it's just pastiche Latin.

Compare to Lojban. WOW. For example, words are defined like this

x1 word x2 x3 x4 then x1-4 are given meanings in relation to the base word so that we need the word for 'travel' which is 'litru' which is defined as x1 litru x2 x3 where x1 travels via route x2 using means x3. That is words are defined by the way they relate to the words around them..so clear can be x1 klina x2 meaning x1 is transparent or clear to x2
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Are you kidding - in a phrase, the metric system. It would cost an ENORMOUS amount.

The better question is: where did your English teacher get off correcting your language? Your birth dialect is *yours* and you can't speak it incorrectly. Standard English should be taught as a foreign language, rather than that elitist crap.
 
How does it work in France? I've heard they have a government office that decides what is officially French?
 
NobleSavage said:
How does it work in France? I've heard they have a government office that decides what is officially French?
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Several countries have academies that oversee the country's language, e.g. the Académie Française in France, the Real Academia Española in Spain, etc. There isn't really such a government department in English-speaking countries though, AFAIK.
 
tantric said:
It's actually not a good language , it's all European in an age where people were going beyond that. It doesn't DO anything with grammar - it's just pastiche Latin.
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Latin isn't the best comparison for Esperanto grammar -- it seems more like most present-day Germanic and Romance languages. Esperanto is likely a much better fit for  Standard Average European, however.

It would be interesting to see how SAE features score in the WALS Online - the World Atlas of Language Structures. I've thought of doing it myself.
 
tantric said:
It's actually not a good language ,
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It's more than not a good language. Like your link says, Warning: Bad Language. Bad Bad Language! Sit, Language, Sit! Lie down! Stay!

it's all European in an age where people were going beyond that. It doesn't DO anything with grammar - it's just pastiche Latin.

Compare to Lojban.
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Exactly! Languages that go beyond Latin and European are better languages. Good Lojban. Good good Lojban. Who's a good language? You are!

The better question is: where did your English teacher get off correcting your language? Your birth dialect is *yours* and you can't speak it incorrectly. Standard English should be taught as a foreign language, rather than that elitist crap.
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:thinking:
The still better question is, where did your linguistics professor get off correcting my English teacher? Her birth prescriptivism is hers and she can't prescribe it incorrectly. Standard descriptivism should be taught as a foreign culture rather than that elitist all cultures are equal but mine is more equal than yours crap.
 
Don't be mistaken. Language academies (such as l'académie française or la Real Academia Española de la Lengua) are not dictators. They are merely sort of legislature chariman: they help the community agree and call out the winner in a vote. They don't dictate language modifications nor can they avoid change, except in rare occasions, and then only for the sake of standardization and agreement.
 
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