Re: Representing futuristic English

On Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:20:32 +0000 (UTC), Kevin
<ktn3654@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:dejrg0$stc$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

[...]

> This is a question that I've wondered about for years, and
> I almost raised it in my original post.

> It seems that you can distinguish drift in the spoken and
> written languages. It also seems fairly clear that
> written languages can indeed stay quite stable over long
> periods of time.

Of course, they become *foreign* languages.

> You can have a written language that originally was just
> the written form of a spoken language, but that
> subsequently remained stable while the spoken language
> changed, until the two diverge dramatically---even when
> both continue in use.

In general it requires a deliberate effort. Latin was
maintained, for instance, because it was taught as a dead
language. Classical written Arabic is maintained for
religious reasons.

> But maybe that is only likely to happen when the written
> language is the domain of a small elite? Maybe
> widespread literacy would cause the written language to
> change along with the spoken language?

Look at it this way: written French is a descendant of
written Latin. The relationship is actually very obvious in
the oldest Old French texts. Of course the written language
is almost always behind the spoken one -- our spelling, for
instance, is basically that of the late 15th century, with a
bit of 17th c. etymological restoration (or in some cases
'restoration').

> A separate question is whether the widespread use of
> writing can actually slow the change of the spoken
> language. If I understand Brian correctly, he is saying
> that it evidently cannot have that effect.

It does not appear to have had that effect.

> I've read that modern Greeks find the writing of Plato
> about as easy to understand as present-day English
> speakers find the writing of Chaucer. Since Plato lived
> about three times as long ago as Chaucer, that would
> indicate that Greek has changed much more slowly than
> English, probably because of the effects of literacy.

I don't know whether it's true or not. I do know that it
can't have much to do with literacy, which until recently
was not widespread. (Indeed, I'd bet that the proportion of
literate Englishmen in Shakespeare's day was significantly
higher than the proportion of literate Greeks.) I'm too
sick at the moment to dig out the information, but I do know
that modern standard Greek, like modern standard Italian, is
to some extent an artificial construct, and I believe that
one of the strains that went into it was significantly
archaizing.

You should also remember that some kinds of change are
easier to compensate for than others. There's been very
considerable change in English grammar in the last 400
years, for instance, but you mostly don't notice it, because
a lot of it involves the addition of new constructions:
apart from a few archaic ones that until recently have been
kept in people's minds by the King James Bible, the
constructions of 400 years ago are a subset of those
available today. (One example off the top of my head:
Shakespeare couldn't have said 'The house is being built',
because the passive progressive didn't exist in his day).

The loss of almost the entire inflectional apparatus of Old
English, on the other hand, makes it a foreign language.

[...]

> Recording devices are yet another issue. They haven't
> been around for very long yet, so I don't really see how
> you can say what their long-term effects might be. If I
> posit that they do indeed slow linguistic change of the
> spoken language, would linguists find that implausible?

Yes. There are major sound changes going on right now in
parts of North America, for instance. The most famous is
the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, on which William Labov has
done a great deal of work, but there are others; you can
find out more starting at his home page,
<http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/home.html>. The NCVS is
about as massive a restructuring of English vowels as the
Great Vowel Shift of the 15th c.

[...]

Brian
.

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