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It's amusing that his translations might need their own translations to modern english in a century or two, like he uses forms that already aren't really used a
by cm2187 2y ago
It's amusing that his translations might need their own translations to modern english in a century or two, like he uses forms that already aren't really used anymore (like ye).
XVIII century French for instance, while probably being the peak of the language in term of sophistication and elegance, is hard to read without a lot of footnotes. So many words disappeared, changed meaning, or the grammar itself changed.
- netdevnet 2y agoMakes you wonder what future generations will call our English. "Old" is taken and "modern" is always the English of the living
- kwhitefoot 2y agoModern English is the English that followed the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between the late 14th century and the 17th century. So not necessarily modern in the colloquial sense. That is, Modern is also taken :-)
- usrnm 2y agoThat's assuming that the language will still be called English anything. It might as well split into American, Australian, British, etc. We don't call French or Spanish modern Latin, do we?
- kombookcha 2y agoThere's also an interesting split occurring with continental Euro-English, which is primarily being spoken by non-native speakers as a lingua franca. The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
- wirrbel 2y agoIt's an interesting page, but I think at the moment it only summarizes common errors of english-as-second-language speakers of other European languages. But there might be a pattern there. Also I doubt that there is a continuity between the mentioned Erasmus students and staff in the European-union for example. I would assume that's a later addition to the wikipedia article when the most likely subject of Euro english is about patterns of the use of english-language in the EU bureaucracy. Maybe a better title would be EU-administrative English or something of the like. What's not so often talked about is of course that the pronunciation of english by non-native speakers is different and I do think there is tendency for some convergence among some aspects of pronunciation that I observe in meetings and zoom calls at work. Aspiration of consonants, clearer separation of individual words. The result is that native-speakers - while being more eloquent in English which puts them at some advantage - sometimes have a disadvantage because their advanced use of language is not understood well. IIRC MTV Europe realized that british hosts wouldn't be understood across europe, when english-speaking french/german/italian hosts would.
- kombookcha 2y agoI think that's about right, yeah - in my experience international gatherings in Europe tends to converge on a sort of continental pidgin English where you shave off all the difficult aspects and end up with this very clear and crisp shared language that's more mutually understandable for everyone involved than any of the ordinary 'native' variants of English. I think what's less clear is how consistent these convergences are. Certainly I have noticed colloquialisms and alterations to better fit romance and germanic languages that pop up again and again, but at what point does it get consistent enough to be its own 'thing' and not just a handy linguistic tool fashioned for the task at hand?
- 082349872349872 2y ago> at what point does it get consistent enough to be its own 'thing' Traditionally, when it has its own army. (navy optional) [several years ago I was told the peacekeeping operations in Kosovo were all organised in "bad english"]
- downWidOutaFite 2y agoSince the rise of the web, and tv and movies before it, regional language divergence is decreasing instead of increasing as it did in the past. Future English will be more globally unified but with more online text chatting influences.
- usrnm 2y agoRomans probably thought so too
- inglor_cz 2y agoThe difference is that education is now ubiquitous and almost everyone who matters is literate. The reason why Latin diverged into Romance languages is that literacy among the secular class died out, and both the elite and the peasants had no knowledge of formal Latin. (The Church did, but it was relatively weak in Early Middle Ages, certainly not strong enough to push the society to use a certain standard of language.) Sure, if the educational system today collapses and we revert to pre-industrial state like around 500 AD, English will spontaneously develop into a family of mutually unintelligible languages. I sincerely hope that this won't happen, though, because 95 per cent of humanity would die. We cannot feed 8 billion people with pre-modern technology.
- pessimizer 2y agoRomans didn't have TVs, and couldn't still listen to recordings of people talking from a century before. edit: If we're not killed by corruption, the assumption is that people will be enjoying films made in the 1920's and 30's in the 2220's and the 2230's. That's completely unprecedented, and has to pin a language to a certain extent. Imagine if during the Great Vowel Shift, everybody could listen (and did listen, for entertainment) to people speaking at length from before. It would have ended up a fashion where maybe a couple of features stuck. In 2230, there will be 300 years of film to watch. The past will overwhelm the present.
- mrkstu 2y agoThere will be more YouTube and TikTok video generated in a year than the previous 300 - 5 most recent years of film/video. 90%+ of youth video consumption will be contemporaneous to the viewer.
- Macha 2y agoArt and architecture have had this problem already. Linguistics still has post-modern to use.
- anal_reactor 2y agoControversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably. 1. Ever wondered why English spelling is so stupid? It's because it's based on an older version of language, but we never decided to update the spelling, so we just roll with it. How is that supposed to change in the future if it hasn't changed so far? 2. At first, text used to be a representation of spoken language. Nowadays communication is mostly via text, so it's more like "speech is acoustic representation of written language" and written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set, at least not as likely as spoken language, which can strongly vary from generation to generation. 3. Smaller languages, which potentially could be a source of new words and grammar, are quickly dying out due to popularity of English. Icelandic didn't evolve much through last thousand of years because its speakers had little contact with speakers of other languages. English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages. I don't think we're there yet, but at some point in the future English will reach its "final form" and from there on, only minor changes here and there will happen. Just like the entire world has almost collectively decided to use arabic numerals, or the metric system, and we don't expect any revolutionary changes there anymore.
- KineticLensman 2y ago> Controversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably. (Brit here) Multicultural London English [0] and others like it suggest that language continues to evolve rapidly. I can't even do an MLE accent in the way that I could yorkshire, scouse, etc. > written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set Look at the rapid emergence of txt speak, emojis, etc, creating written forms that again rapidly evolve and may be unintelligible to an older generation > English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages. Look at the variety of English used in India. This continues to evolve independently of, say, British English and US English. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
- OJFord 2y agoI find Indian English fascinating as a tangent to my learning Hindi. From grammatical/auxiliary word 'errors' or quirks that you can relate to Hindi (and probably other Indic languages, I'm just not familiar) to vocabulary or usage that's not incorrect at all, it's just extremely quaint sounding or rare in British English, but for whatever reason so much more common in IE. (I can't think of a good example for the latter at the moment, for the former I mean things like 'I myself have noticed this' or 'it's common in Indian English only'.) It also provides one of my favourite words/concepts (which isn't quite an example of the second point as I meant it): timepass. Something you do to pass the time, or a (not exactly positive, nor negative) review of something that served that purpose.
- ted_bunny 2y agoMaybe something like Singlish. There are already more english speakers in China than the US.
- stainablesteel 2y agonothing to wonder about, they already call it boomer english
- pessimizer 2y ago"ye" is just "the." The "y" is being used to represent the letter thorn.