Sigh

[avevale_intelligencer]

Machines come in many forms, of many levels of complexity. The primitive lever you use to hold the door open can be any old stick; as long as it doesn't actually break in half you can do what you like with it. Your stainless steel screwdriver, milled to just the right size for its intended purpose, will become less useful if misused. Your computer will object to even the most casual spillage of tea into its interior. And your fancy Italian sports car, capable of 0-60 before you've even started it up, will go into a sulk and refuse to start at all if you look at it the wrong way. (I once had a boss who owned a Ferrari.)

It's common sense, it's evident, we know it to be true. The more complex and precisely tuned the machine, the more susceptible it is to mistreatment. Complex, precise, powerful machines need looking after, they need loving, and they need to be treated with respect and the rules set down for their maintenance must be followed, or they will become useless. Complex, precise, powerful machines demand effort.

And as with machines, so with language.

Amen.

EDIT: someone is bound to point out that English (which is the language of which I speak) is not (to resort once more to the hateful Wivving Fing metaphors) a thoroughbred stallion, but a mongrel nag whose ancestry spans the world and whose legs are all different lengths. To which I reply: Yes! Exactly! But we were training it! We had it on this special diet, and we were putting rules in place for its care and exercise that would bring out all the strengths of its hybrid heritage and minimise the weaknesses, and it was becoming a champion! And then people came along saying "shame on you, mistreating that poor animal, let it do what it likes and eat what it likes and be Fweeee!"

If all we want is a pidgin fit only for chaffering in the market, picking fights in the pub and shouting mindless political slogans, then that is what we will end up with. I don't doubt that. That takes no effort at all, and no effort is what we're good at. To be happy about it, to call it a good thing, to urge it as a noble cause...that revolts me.

Comments

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.

[alun dudek (from livejournal.com)]

The quotation that I most like about the English language is (as I remember it):

"English is the result of a Norman foot soldier trying to get a Saxon barmaid to climb into the hay behind the inn with him. And no more legitimate than any other product of that process. Any word that gets caught up in that deserves everything it gets." - H. Beam Piper - Little Fuzzy (or possibly Fuzzy Sapiens). The word being discussed is fuzzioligist, by the way.

Largely true, I'm afraid.

In fact, for most of our history, people (the ones who tended to write about such things, at any rate) have not been trying to make English into a more refined form of itself, or even to preserve its current form. They have been trying to make English into Classical Latin, which is like trying to turn a appaloosa into a arabian horse.

There is a time and a place for an appaloosa, and a time and a place for a arabian horse, and they are different times and places. (Hmm, not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea.)

And whilst a Ferrari is useful for certain things (for example, proving how over-endowed one is with money, and under-endowed in other areas), I sincerely doubt that my solicitors would have considered replacing their people carrier at any point during the childhood of their four children.

Of course, English, like any language, is required to do both the job of allowing people to rant at one another in the pub, and to hold rational debates in university halls. It must be - to use my car metaphor - a Ferrari and a people carrier. Also a mini, a bus, a lorry, a ... all at the same time.

English is relatively adaptable and robust, which is one of the reasons why it is so widely spoken even outside the old British Empire (though the Empire helped, of course). Other languages are not always so robust.

The Latin of the Caesars was already a long way from what we are taught as Latin. Cicero (107 - 44 BC) who was an almost exact contemporary of Julius Caesar, and is much admired for his writings in Classical Latin, once wrote that the language he wrote was not anything like the language he spoke to his family. In that sense Classical Latin was already dying, becoming Dog Latin - the ancestor to French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc.- a result linguistic change, the Roman Empire and poor communications.

(Having said that, English is showing signs of fracturing the way Latin did, but the problem is less acute than it became for Latin, and modern communications may reverse the trend.)

English does - as you point out - have a lot of fine-tuning that is little used, or sometimes misused, but nobody needs to use them all the time. Indeed some people have little, if any, opportunity, or need, to use those features in their lives. But that doesn't mean they will disappear. Or that, given the need to do so, those who don't use them couldn't understand speech using those features - though lack of practice may limit their ability to use them. And there will always be a minority who do use them regularly, though not all the time.

[alun dudek (from livejournal.com)]

Hit the damned character limit again.

There is a strong tendency in linguistics to equate change with deterioration, (another legacy from the whole 'Latin is perfect' idea that is why people tried latinising the - singularly unlatin English language) a perfect reflection of the human tendency in other fields to equate change with progress. Both habits are wrong. It's true some change IS progress, and that some change IS deterioration. But most change is ... change. Nothing more, nothing less.

I think English will change - though how fast that change will happen I don't know. Probably a lot slower than it has in the past. You and I are of the first generation which grew up with access to recordings of our grandparents' generation speaking, and that will have changed our way of perceiving language. The children growing up now are hearing voices of people who were dead of old age before they were even born, and that is certainly something nobody, not even their parents, did. With who knows what implications for language change.

Most of the current trends of change in the language, including many you complain about, are in vocabulary; new technical words, and new slang. The changes you are worried about are relatively minor, albeit (sometimes?) annoying. I doubt English will be seriously damaged by them. And I don't honestly think you should, either.

PS According to the spell checker, sapiens, latinising and unlatin are not real words. My apologies if my appalling lack of competence in English causes you or your readers difficulties in understanding whay I am saying.

Mind you, the same spelling checker also thinks blog isn't a word too. AD

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, I shall follow your advice and continue not to doubt that English will be seriously damaged by these changes. (That was what you meant, wasn't it?)

The actual everyday unintended misusages of language don't in fact bother me that much. I tut at the appalling state of education and move on. What revolts and enrages me are the counsels of quietism, the pervasive belief that anything anyone may try to do to effect deliberate control over the language is not only futile--which I dispute in any case--but wrong and blasphemous, a word I choose quite deliberately. People, many of whom have repudiated all other deities with vigour, seem determined to invest the imaginary living being I call Wangwidge with numinous attributes, just for the joy of having something to feel smaller than again.

If a company that makes cars were to sack all the people whose job it is to improve on their designs, and instead send people out to examine everyone's old banger and incorporate every dent and rust patch and deterioration they could find into the new models rolling off the lines, they would be thought mad, and so they would be. Yet that is the approach that is positively endorsed in relation to the tongue that we speak. Never try to make it better, but nod and smile when a bit falls off.

Languages change, they certainly do. But to deny and revile the notion of exerting any kind of control over that change--to set Wangwidge up as, to all intents and purposes, a god beyond our petty mortal power to affect--is nonsensical and pernicious, a retreat to the womb of primitive superstition while pretending to scientific rationality.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

There is a strong tendency in linguistics to equate change with deterioration

As a linguist¹, I must disagree. This tendency is strong among laypeople commenting on language², but the discipline of linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Some of us¹ call the prescriptivists among them² "language peevers".

Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Whom: Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in which specific changes you think are making matters worse.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

See my comment to Allan.