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Language standardization is not something that exists. You could hope for merging of communities that create an unified language, but whenever two communities
by pyrale 7y ago
Language standardization is not something that exists.
You could hope for merging of communities that create an unified language, but whenever two communities are not completely merged, each will coin new words, the pronunciation will drift, etc.
That is because locutors create languages, not ruling bodies.
Examples of that include canadian french, and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers.
- acchow 7y ago> and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers. Have some examples of these english words that native english speakers wouldn't know?
- pyrale 7y agoYou can find some at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pseudo-anglicism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pseudo-anglicism. Even more of them can be found in business language, which did not become loan words.
- dfawcus 7y agoCorporate speak: 'leverage' when 'use' is perfectly functional, and less of a mouthful. Only occasionally is it used in a sense when a magnifying effect is implied.
- Narishma 7y agoSame thing for 'performant' instead of 'fast'.
- magic_beans 7y agoWhat a fascinating rabbit hole.
- pgcj_poster 7y agoInterestingly this also exists in the reverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudo-French_words_adapted_to_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudo-French_words_ad...
- pgcj_poster 7y agoI once had someone ask me what the "preterite" of a certain verb was. I was able to guess what she meant, but I definitely did not know that word from my experience speaking English.
- taejo 7y agoThis is kind of a borderline case, since the term "preterite" is recognized by English grammarians as a synonym of "simple past tense", but to use it probably is an influence by e.g. German Präteritum or French prétérit (which seems to be used in teaching English even though the syntactically corresponding French verb form is called the "simple past").
- yorwba 7y agoOf course language standardization is something that exists. You get a ruling body to declare a particular manner of speaking as the preferred one, mandate that it be taught to children in school and prevent anyone who speaks differently from appearing in mass media. After a generation, you have children who grew up speaking non-standard with their parents but standard with their peers in school. Many of them will speak standard with their children, so non-standard becomes something you use to speak to your grandparents. Then the grandparents die and almost everyone who speaks non-standard fluently doesn't use it regularly, so they forget. The next generation grows up barely aware that the standard way to speak is not the only way. All of that doesn't completely stop natural language change from occurring, but it strongly constrains the range of possible variation. Locutors may create languages, but ruling bodies can tell them which language to create.
- pyrale 7y agoMind you, did your country/language try this? Because, being french, we actively do it, and it is an utter failure. People do not know the ruleset they were supposedly taught, new words largely come from the society as opposed to the institution, and thus the institution mostly acknowledges things after the fact. From that pov, the thing you describe looks like a pipe dream.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoWhat's interesting about France is the people who think they don't speak much less understand the local dialect - who think it's dead or dying - but then you actually record them talking to their children, and lo and behold, they're passing dialect on to their children. Still, the descendants of emigrants who learnt the dialect of their parents can only understand the older generation, not their peers.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago> You get a ruling body to declare a particular manner of speaking as the preferred one, mandate that it be taught to children in school and prevent anyone who speaks differently from appearing in mass media. In a liberal democracy?
- gpderetta 7y agoItalian is mostly an invention. The language itself has changed very little in 700 years because it was born as an hybrid of a few Italian "dialects" (as we call them, but they really are proper languages). For a very long time the language was only used by a very small minority of elites and litterates. It only became a widely spoken language after the second word war through a explicit governmental effort and through the television. And the language is explicitly standardized by the Accademia della Crusca. Still you are not wrong, now that it is widely spoken, it is likely that the language will mutate quickly (and signs are already visible).