Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[arkabee]

Explain to me about the evolving language, and I will tell you of the devolving discourse.

i doubt i could _explain_ to you about evolving language, but i certainly shall try in an attempt to get you to tell me of the devolving discourse.

Language, as utilized by the people and for the people, is evolving by several percentage points daily.  This is happening for several reasons.

One possible reason, is the influx of semi to non literate children posting to the internet in a second or further removed language.  Given the number (or volume if you will) of posts by these people, and the general reaction to such posts, the evolution is thusly spawned.

or something.


now, quick like a bunny, don't think about the gibberish i spouted, but enlighten me to your theories, please!!

[Nabubrush]

People are dolts. They just can't be bothered to take any amount of care with anything they do, except their own personal thing, whatever it might be. For instance, I might dress like a slob and shower infrequentlky and spend most of my time down at the bus station leering at people, and only make a big deal about the way people use language. Someone else might be all uptight about how a person plays a collectible card game. Everything is devolving into chaos. It's the end of the world.

[AugustWest]

It's the end of the world.

I feel fine.

It's always been this way.  People have always been dolts.  We're just painfully aware of the particular fashion of doltishness occuring in our lifetime.

So cheer up, dammit!

[wombat]

It is natural for language to change.  Many words that you don't think twice about caused all kinds of uproar at previous points in history.  But eventually, the people who thought, for example,  that you shouldn't use the verb 'donate' (derived as a back-formation from 'donation') all died, and now no one cares.  It seems ignorant now when people write 'ice tea' instead of 'iced tea,' but it doesn't bother anyone that we say 'ice cream' when it used to be 'iced cream.'  Etc.

I could give you dozens more examples, but I've packed all those books and put them in the attic and in five minutes I have to have a phone interview for a zookeeping job and I don't DO this stuff anymore, dammit.

If language didn't change, we'd still be speaking Old English. Modern English isn't worse than Old English, it's just different.

This isn't to say that people aren't stupid and ignorant.  Just that this is maybe not the right thing to focus on if you want to eliminate stupidity and ignorance from the world.

[Nabubrush]

Modern English = "I Melt With You" < Olde English = "Malt Liquor"
Bad English = Neal Schon + John Waite < both of the above.

These are provable with math!

[AugustWest]

My dearest and most esteemed Wombles:

For the record, I agree almost entirely with your immediately preceeding post.  However, as is my wont, I have a few gratuitous comments.

1.  OK, OK, grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive.  Language is dynamic, not static.  Language is whatever bits of sound and scribbles we use to communicate with each other.  But...

At any single point in time, don't we have some collective idea of what is and isn't correct, accepted language?  When I say that something is not grammatically correct, you know what I mean.  We always have some loose concensus of what correct grammar is.  This may be a fluid concensus, but we do collectively set parameters on what is and what is not an acceptible, "correct" way to use our shared language.

Given that, isn't it acceptible to say that a given statement isn't grammatical?  "Pwned" may become a perfectly cromulent English word in a few more years, but as yet it has not reached full acceptance.  Therefore it is incorrect in some sense to use it.  Also relevant is the nature and degree of the incogruity with the accepted rules.  Blatant violations of subject-verb agreement or tense formation seem less likely to become acceptible through evolutionary change than do neologisms, back-formations and mispronunciations.

2.  Yes, language is always changing and evolving.  But can't we take a snapshot and have at least a decent idea of what is acceptable right now?  And if so, can't we learn something about the speaker from his usage?  I think what we collectively disdain in our "Grammar Cop" posts is willful ignorance.  Empirically, I've found that people who are willfully ignorant about our language are usually willfully ignorant about everything else.  The structure of language is how we arrange our thoughts, emotions and desires for presentation to the rest of the world.  An inability or unwillingness to do so in a coherent (if not artful) manner speaks for itself.

3.  I have only a couple gratuitous comments rather than a few.  Please forgive me.

[Nabubrush]

Grammar almost always depends on setting. It's very easy to say that something is acceptable or unacceptable, but there are no doubt hordes of people using this very same internet who would not agree on specific points. There are also usages that I might feel are acceptable here that I would never use when speaking with or writing to my Aunt (we are both tech writers). I'm with Wombat on this, I think.

By the way (or for instance), what does _this_ mean? I kind of get some feeling for it, by reading it, but I don't know. Also, it just looks wrong to me.

[andalucia]

This is something about which my father and I debate all the time--  He's of the "descriptive" camp, and I'm on team "Ridiculously Pedantic Future Editors"... as you can see from the first sentence in this post, wherein I avoided ending a clause with a preposition.  
In theory, I know that language is inexorably evolving, but at this point in time some constructions sound gratingly wrong to me and I'd just rather not use them... or hear them.  
I think that articulacy and general mastery of language tend to raise the level of discourse and that laziness of vocabulary and syntax tend to lead to intellectual decadence.  I do see this as a cultural decline: political speeches even from the early twentieth century are written to a much higher grammatical and rhetorical standard, and reading them in history classes tends to make me envy the ages from which they came.
Of course, there is the argument that the contemporary tendency to appeal to the lowest common denominator is valuable, since it allows people outside of the upper echelons of education, and by extension, wealth, to understand and to participate in political discourse.

I could go back and forth on this debate forever, so I'll shut up now.

[arkabee]

By the way (or for instance), what does _this_ mean? I kind of get some feeling for it, by reading it, but I don't know. Also, it just looks wrong to me.

i underline words, to stress them.

see, some people, when they type, they are WRITING.

other people, they are SPEAKING.

me, i am sucking, but that's a whole different ball of monkeygames.

--

on another topic:  take a long time IRC user, and put them into an I.M. environment.  or, take a mobile texter, and put them on usenet.  or etc, et al.

it's very interesting to me, that beyond educational issues, meat-world cultural differences, etc, that the differences in computer based communication histories often-times cause the most difficulties.

i'm, at my basic level, a usenetter who types as if he is speaking.  i do not type as though i am writing a letter, nor a disertation, nor a mbl txt msg 4 u.


regardless, where's pedro?  i was askin' _pedro_.

[slink]

other people, they are SPEAKING.

I find that somewhat curious, as I tend to alter how I type depending on the medium. For instance here, I will tend to write. Most places in fact, I will tend to write. When I speak, I am often a stickler for speaking correctly, although I seem to also drift off into different vernaculars.
On IRC I always tended to write correctly as well, although there was one channel where I just typed in lower caps. IM I will drift between writing and all lower caps, but I still refuse to abbreviate in the lazy SMS fashion. It is something I truly hate, as with rising intonation outwith a question mark.

So I guess I'm finding it more interesting that it really is; that I drift between different 'dialects'. After all, it is something I do verbally depending on company.

[jay-ell]

Pedro's been busy with our out-of-town guests.  He'll get back to you on Monday.  

This is his answering service.

[wombat]

Blatant violations of subject-verb agreement or tense formation seem less likely to become acceptible through evolutionary change than do neologisms, back-formations and mispronunciations.

Well, actually things like agreement and tense do change.  If we were still speaking Old English we'd need to do a lot more case-marking, like in Modern German.

2.  Yes, language is always changing and evolving.  But can't we take a snapshot and have at least a decent idea of what is acceptable right now?  And if so, can't we learn something about the speaker from his usage?  

Yes, and everyone does it. People use language for communication in many ways.  One of the ways we use it is to find out who's a member of our club - from their accent, for example, or from their knowledge of the Grammar Cop rules of acceptability.  But we should be conscious of the fact that that's what we're doing.  The people whose usage we dislike don't speak a language without rules - that's humanly impossible - they just speak one with different rules. But yeah, that's one of the things we humans use to categorize one another.

Andalucia's comment is interesting in that if you go back to all the golden ages that people will mention, you'll find people at that time making the same complaints about how the current generation doesn't write or speak as well as some past golden age.  I would give you the quotes, but like I said, I packed all the boxes and put them in the attic.  Can't we talk about animal poop instead?

[/professor soapbox mode]

[wombat]

see, some people, when they type, they are WRITING.

other people, they are SPEAKING.

This is an observation that has often been made before but perhaps never so perfectly, and note that you couldn't make it any clearer by writing it in Dissertation Style.  

Like Slink puts it, there are different dialects. One of the things about this messageboard is that most or at least many of us probably are writing like you'd write a dissertation.  It's one of our most endearing qualities.  I like people who use the Grammar Cop rules.  It's just that it spoils it for me when they get on their high hoss about them.  

PS Love the new tooth.

[AugustWest]

Yes, and everyone does it. People use language for communication in many ways.  One of the ways we use it is to find out who's a member of our club - from their accent, for example, or from their knowledge of the Grammar Cop rules of acceptability.  But we should be conscious of the fact that that's what we're doing.  The people whose usage we dislike don't speak a language without rules - that's humanly impossible - they just speak one with different rules. But yeah, that's one of the things we humans use to categorize one another.

Yes, exactly.  Going farther, I think it's OK to make value judgments about certain categories of people.  Sometimes, one can make relatively valid value judgements about grammatically derived categories of people.

[Choop]

Y'alls is so lucky this ain't in no forum I moderate, cuz this thread would be SO locked it ain't een funny.