Posted on 01/10/2005 10:26:26 PM PST by nickcarraway
One of the smaller, but no less bloody skirmishes in the Culture War is being waged on the linguistic front. For those new to the field there are essentially two camps: one made up of linguists, lexicographers, academics or language liberals; the other of conservatives or prescriptivists, the so-called "linguistic luddites." The conservative's anguish over the decline of the English language, the linguists charge, is no different than his distress over the decline of culture in general. This "whining," writes linguist Alan Pagliere, is a mix of nostalgia, self-righteousness, and ignorance of the reality of the laws governing and of the myriad variables involved in language change.
Indeed, the battle cry of the language liberal might be, "Languages change. Get over it." Most linguists judge that language change is neither good nor bad, and, anyway, resistance is futile. Languages, like hemlines, will change whether we want them to or not. This indifference to standards is reflected in the latest editions of our popular dictionaries in which words that are commonly misspelled (alright) or misused (disinterested) have been given the lexicographer's stamp of approval.
Yet despite all this talk of transformation the mother tongue has gone remarkably unchanged since the King James Version of the Bible began to stabilize the language in the mid-seventeenth century. Words come and go, yes, but a letter written 367 years ago by John Milton to Benedetto Bonomatthai reads much like one composed by a good writer today:
I am inclined to believe that when the language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin or their degradation.
Now note the dissimilarity between the writing of Chaucer and Shakespeare after a mere 225 years.
Chaucer: Whanne that April with his shoures sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote.
Shakespeare: Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
Often there is good reason to be skeptical of change, particularly when it comes about out of laziness and the dumbing-down of grammar rules. Again, compare Fowler's inflexible 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage to current grammars like Woe is I, in which rules that are troublesome or too difficult to remember are pronounced outdated or dead. (Rats, if I had known this was possible in my college days I would have pronounced Algebra outdated and dead and gotten on with my binge drinking.)
What the conservative sees as threats to the mother tongue are dismissed by the linguist as the natural progression of language, and nature trumps civilization (here represented by long-established rules) every time. These threats include the politicization of language, as in politically correct speech; threats from bureaucrats, businessmen, and politicians who use language to obfuscate, confuse and deceive, or in the case of academics to disguise a dearth of ideas; and, finally, threats from linguists who promote a laissez-faire approach to language.
Ever since the ancient Egyptians began scratching hieroglyphics into sandstone, civilization's most brilliant writers and thinkers have maintained a deep appreciation for -- in Swift's phrase -- the "proper words in their proper places," and felt it their duty to defend their language against its natural tendency to slide back into barbarism. In the preface to his 1755 dictionary Samuel Johnson noted how "…tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggle for our language." Johnson's statement would get only derision from today's anything-goes linguists.
The difference between the Age of Johnson and now is that proper and elegant language today is seen as elitist and anti-democratic, whereas once it was considered every educated man's duty to uphold. Here is linguistic pioneer Friedrich von Schlegel writing in 1815:
The care of the national language is at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it the object of his unceasing concern to preserve his language pure and entire, to speak it, so far as in his power, in all its beauty and perfection.
Language, being an important part of our national heritage, as well as our cultural identity, necessary says a great deal about what kind of people we are. A slovenly, anarchic language reflects poorly on us. The language liberals may have abandoned their duty to preserve the language, but the recent popularity of "why oh why" books such as Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Robert Hartwell Fiske's Dictionary Of Disagreeable English prove that the public is serious about its upkeep. Once again academics and other language liberals have shown themselves to be out of touch with the mainstream and their opinions hopelessly irrelevant.
Why?
Twice? You have to read the Trask edition...3,500 pages and only takes you up to ole Giacomo's 50s.
Ultimately, the sort of propriety you are talking about is related to class usage of particular dialects. My point is simply that dialects, and their associations, change. There is linguistic pressure to say "aks" instead of "ask" because it's easier to say. That may push it into the primary dialect at some point.
My own personal theory is that the reason it hasn't changed (but may change in the future) is that the most irregular and difficult parts of English are often the parts that people learn when they are the youngest (e.g., the various forms of "to be", a lot of the irregular verbs, etc.) and traditionally children have been told to "ask" at a very young age. The problem is that children are no longer being told to "ask". They demand, instead.
Once when I was a late teen and then,again,when I was 30.There are some books worth rereading and I've read the Trask edition.
Actually I don't do those things, but I do have fantasies of them, particularly when dinner conversation turns to:
A)$700 9,000,000,000 count sheets.
B) The psychology of inhabitants of "fly over states"
C) The "death of the novel."
Johnson's dictionary is what solidified the spelling of English.
And I'm sure that he put the "k" and "gh" in "knight" and all those "silent 'e's" on the ends of words because he liked the way they looked, too, right? Out of curiosity, why do you think Johnson chose not to spell words phonetically? I'd like to hear your theory.
And yes,dear,we all know that Shakespeare spelled not only his name,but many words differently,through the years. Why don't you assume that all of us on this thread are at least as educated as you;if not more so. :-)
I'm simply following the lead of the self-appointed grammar police and being as patronizing as possible. I thought that was the norm for silly discussions about grammar. When the grammar cops stop give up the patronizing tone, I'll be more than happy to.
Poor you...you do seem to know an awful lot of very boring or strange people.You make me want to invite you to dinner or up for a weekend. :-)
Yes, boring and strange. Luckily I've managed to arrange my life so that I never get invited to the same place twice.
"Hey kid, c'mere. Do you know where mommy and daddy hide the candy? In their night stands."
You're the only crepe hanger on this entire thread.
And FYI...I'm NOT a mind reader and shan't dig out the Ouija board to try to channel Samuel on.
Oh oh........you're such a naughty boy. LOL
I actually know someone who got drunk and did that. It was a career ender.
I have to get to work, as always it's been fun.
In the big scheme of things, English had already lost much of itself by the time Shakespeare started writing in it. In the merging with Danish, it lost almost all of the noun forms (with the exception of plurals and a handful of other words, mostly pronouns). With the Great Vowel Shift, the sounds of the words changed and a lot of homonyms were created when the sounds shifted ("two" -> "to", "knight" -> "night" -- all of those letters used to be spoken). Before that, English lost the dual form. And so on. In fact, I think one of the great paradoxes of language is that they seem to get more simple as time goes on rather than more complex.
What I think many people here really lament is the loss of the dialect they are used to and prefer.
OTOH,mispronunciations are also a problem for some;though not evident,at all,in the written word.
That's only because we've frozen our spelling such that it no longer reflects the spoken language accurately. At some point, if the written language becomes different enough from the spoken language and English will become more like Chinese, where words are not phonetic representations of the spoken language but abstract characters that need to be memorized. That's not a good thing. I spent over a year living in Tokyo and watched Japanese wrangle their own language and I'm convinced that liabilities of that sort of writing far outweigh the benefits.
You crime the language in the year 1386 for not YET being standardised? Fine. Try this: NO language -- any you care to name in the Western world -- was standardised at the time regarding spelling (or even usage, in many cases).
The Middle Kingdom being what it was, I should imagine that what we call today the Mandarin language was/had been fairly well standardised at that date, perhaps the endlessly subtle Yamato Japanese language, too.
Prior to the advent of the printing press, history admits of just 3 Western or near-Western alphabetic (not ideographic, ok?) languages that were standardised in their spelling to ANY considerable degree for any even marginally significant length of time: the Greek of the 4th through 2nd centuries BC (perhaps a bit longer, but Alexander wrought worse than he knew, linguistically), the Hebrew of Judea and environs up until the Diaspora, and the Latin in the days of the Roman Republic and the early Empire.
As regards the retention of these more or less ''consistently'' spelt languages, let's examine the cases, along the road to 1386. Fair enough?
1) In 1290, Edward I expelled all the Jews from England (the idiot), so let's fairly dismiss the notion of Hebrew being an influence on the spelling of English language here, 2) What few Greek clerics were in England at the time of the Conquest had been banned long since by William's son, with the result that Greek language was at the time studied only by antiquarian monks, and 3) at that date, 880 years after the sack of Rome, and, not incidentally, 220-odd years after the overthrow of what was left of the Britanno-Roman culture by the Normans, the remnant of Latin language in Britain was no less corruptly spelt than were the several ''Old English'' surviving texts of the Beowulf.
Given all this, you surely can not reasonably expect that the English language of the day would become standardised as to spelling in LESS than a century's time, can you?
After all, Gutenberg only reached the language scene in the mid-15th century, and, as has been well proven for several centuries thereafter (public teachers' unions notwithstanding), if proper spelling as taught isn't reinforced by seeing words properly spelt in print or elsewhere, then ...
Ah gess ah gots ta axe yu a kwestyun.
Spelling, sir, is subject to the law of excluded middle: you've either spelt a word correctly, or you have not. Don't like this view? OK, fine -- but don't expect any literate person to show even the tiniest interest in paying for your illiteracy-producing ''ideas'' such as ''creative spelling'' et sim..
Yes,for the exception of one thread,we ALWAYS have fun on threads.It's been delightful. :-)
Safire's marvelous use of the language is right there with Edwin Newman's, and Terrence Bevers' (most FReepers won't know him, sorry; by a single sentence, he could -- and did -- once cause the senior editorialist of the London Times to be dismissed. A man who KNEW the language...RIP!)
Nooooooooooooooooooo...I miss the use,by most,of lovely words,masses of lovely,but now mostly shunned words.The English language is a rich repository of glorious words,now mostly fallen into disuse.And these words have not been replaced by others.Instead,the rich heritage of a broad English vocabulary has been recently been subjugated to the gross dumbing down of most its speakers.
Think of PBS+NPR with an annual and forcibly collected tax, complete with enforcement conducted by cretins tooling about in taxpayer-purchased autos, at public expense (not dissimilar from Radio Moscow in the Soviet days, now I think of it), and you have today's BBC.
No. I point out that the "mistake" that some many people ridicule has been around for perhaps 1200 years. When the same "mistake" has a lifespan of a millennia or so, it might be useful to consider why that is. And when people are talking about "aks", their complaint is generally how the word is spoken, not how it is spelled. Of course I could also point out that you are using the English spelling of "standardised" which illustrates just how "unstandardized" English spelling still is.
Spelling, sir, is subject to the law of excluded middle: you've either spelt a word correctly, or you have not.
I think I can safely say that's wrong. And I'll point to none other than Daniel Webster as my evidence. The reason why American spelling is different (and generally simpler and more phonetic) than the English spelling of the same word (e.g., "flavor" vs. "flavour", "gaol" vs "jail", "check" vs. "cheque", "standardized" vs. "standardised", etc.) is that Daniel Webster decided to reform the spelling to make it better reflect the language as it is spoken. It is possible, en masse, to change what the "correct" spelling of a word is because, in fact, we've done just that in this country. And since Webster, we've seen a lot of other revised spelling come into common use, in trademarks if nothing else (e.g., "nite", "lite", "r", etc.).
Don't like this view? OK, fine -- but don't expect any literate person to show even the tiniest interest in paying for your illiteracy-producing ''ideas'' such as ''creative spelling'' et sim..
So, how did Danliel Webster manage to convince so many "literate" people to go along with his spelling revisions? And also note that spelling is simply one of the points being discussed here (the other two being grammar and pronunciation).
I'm not advocating "creative spelling". I'm pointing out that English isn't static, has never been static, and that I think it's pretty silly to expect it to stay the same forever. I also think that a lot of people simply don't realize how much English has changed in the past 1000 years, 500 years, or even 100 years because book editors frequently update and regularize the spelling and language in literature that hides just how different those original works sometimes are.
While I've got plenty of sympathy for this sentiment, despite what I've written so far, I'm not sure what you can do about it. The change in English is a symptom of broader social changes in how people communicate with each other. My argument is primarily that it's inevitable, not that it's necessarily good. Trying to stop a language from changing never seems to work unless the language is essentially dead. Just ask the French about their attempts to keep their language pure.
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