4 ms·

What do you mean by "degenerating"? Is for instance today's English degenerated in comparison to the English of 100 years ago?

• lmm 6y ago
  > What do you mean by "degenerating"? IIRC: Losing its distinctive grammatical features; becoming much closer to Swedish, and also adopting large numbers of loanwords from English. > Is for instance today's English degenerated in comparison to the English of 100 years ago? I've read that grammatical irregularities are being (slowly) flattened out, so in a limited sense yes.
  • bobthepanda 6y ago
    English will flatten somewhat, but so long as English is a big enough tent to comfortably hold massive subgroups in its own right it will continue to fork and branch in unpredictable ways. I would probably watch Indian English as the biggest variety of English, it will probably develop some unique grammar of its own. Though to some extent each major variety of English has something different about it (e.g. AAVE and "ain't no" negative double negation.)
    • lmm 6y ago
      Maybe. The thing is, none of these subgroups is isolated the way geographic regions historically were; it used to take weeks to send a letter from one place to another, whereas now people in India and the UK have realtime conversations all the time. Of course the geographic separation has some effect, but maybe the mesh of connections is dense enough that there's just no space for dialects to diverge from each other.
  • mcswell 6y ago
    "Degenerated" carries a connotation of "becoming inferior." It's not at all clear that a relative lack of irregularities makes a language inferior. One might even say that it makes the language superior, at least in the sense that it's easier to acquire as a second language. (First language learners don't seem to have that much of a problem with irregularities, although the gradual loss of irregular forms probably means that the problem for first language learners is not null.)
• bloak 6y ago
  That's a difficult question, but if a language changes rapidly then not everyone will keep up with the changes to the same extent and communication between those people will be compromised. This also affects written communication. Most modern English speakers can't understand Shakespeare properly. They could, if they put in hundreds of hours of study, but in practice they don't. English hasn't changed very much over the last 100 years, I'd claim, compared with many other languages, but it's hard to measure that objectively. To start off with, what do I really mean by "English"? I suppose I mean the standard written language rather than colloquial forms... One could perhaps also argue that a language that has changed a lot recently can't have built up the vocabulary, connotations, and all the rest of the stuff that is required for high-quality, nuanced communication and is therefore likely to be a less precise means of communication even between people who are tracking the changes. But that's speculative and I don't know how you could measure it. So, to conclude this waffle, I suspect it does make sense to talk about a language "degenerating", but it's very hard to be scientific about it.
  • mcswell 6y ago
    "Most modern English speakers can't understand Shakespeare properly." Wherefore thinkest thou that? Canst not understand the King's language?