3 ms·

I'm not sure the "(2013)" in the title is right; this page was last updated in 2013 but it is a decade older than that. Still, this is a fun experiment and a g

I'm not sure the "(2013)" in the title is right; this page was last updated in 2013 but it is a decade older than that. Still, this is a fun experiment and a great read if you haven't encountered it before. If I were to bet money on it, however, I would say that voice recordings and a world-wide broadcast system will turn out to have slowed down very considerably the rate at which sounds in a major language like English change. Barring catastrophes and conquests 2014 AD English is likely to be a lot easier to understand to 2700 AD English speakers than Middle English is to modern speakers.

gliese1337 12y ago
I would not take that bet. The article even lampshades this exact view; quote, "accents such as Cockney never did arise because working class Londoners were unaware of how the aristos talked. They knew perfectly well". Language change has more to do with social group identification than it does with ignorance of how other people (whether separated in time or space) speak. The availability of high-fidelity recordings does nothing to change that.
tfgg 12y ago
To make the opposite point for fun, what if higher interconnectedness means that language actually evolves quicker? Couldn't the fact that everyone can 'sync' their language with other people faster mean that things like pronunciation can change more rapidly while maintaining mutual understanding? There's an advantage in maintaining communication efficiency to being able to change language faster. This is in addition to the social reasons for changing language, e.g. teens wanting to be different from adults.
- visakanv 12y ago
  Yup, I think we can detect some very real differences in the way people use English on different parts of the internet, for example. HN english is different from Reddit english. I read an interesting article once titled "we who spoke LOLcat now speak doge". Communication changes, evolves, gets remixed, etc: http://io9.com/we-who-spoke-lolcat-now-speak-doge-1481243678 http://io9.com/we-who-spoke-lolcat-now-speak-doge-1481243678
kylebgorman 12y ago
Your intuition that modern technology is slowing down language change, while entirely reasonable, is generally thought to be wrong by experts in language change. LETRA MAGNA - How do radio, television, films and popular entertainment affect language? LABOV - Our studies of sound changes in progress indicate that the mass media have almost no effect on the development of every-day language, which is influenced far more by the interaction of peers in every-day life. Passive listening to radio, television, or teachers in school, does not appear to affect the basic machinery of language production. In North America, regional dialects are becoming more diverse even though the mass media are quite uniform. Actprs on television programs will often reflect changes that have taken place in the community a generation before. The same principle applies to grammatical innovations, like the new English verb of quotation, "be like." Rosa Saladino showed that watching television had no effect on the replacement of dialect words with Italian. (from an interview with Bill Labov, "founder of modern sociolinguistics": http://www.letramagna.com/entrelabov.htm http://www.letramagna.com/entrelabov.htm) [edit for whitespace]
- mistercow 12y ago
  And you can kind of see this already in existing dialect shifts. The "Transatlantic" dialect is largely gone, but for a long time it was extremely popular in any form of media involving voice.
kylebgorman 12y ago
Seconding the request for a date change. I remember reading this in 2003 when it was linked on /.

gliese1337 12y ago

I would not take that bet. The article even lampshades this exact view; quote, "accents such as Cockney never did arise because working class Londoners were unaware of how the aristos talked. They knew perfectly well". Language change has more to do with social group identification than it does with ignorance of how other people (whether separated in time or space) speak. The availability of high-fidelity recordings does nothing to change that.

tfgg 12y ago

To make the opposite point for fun, what if higher interconnectedness means that language actually evolves quicker? Couldn't the fact that everyone can 'sync' their language with other people faster mean that things like pronunciation can change more rapidly while maintaining mutual understanding? There's an advantage in maintaining communication efficiency to being able to change language faster. This is in addition to the social reasons for changing language, e.g. teens wanting to be different from adults.

visakanv 12y ago
Yup, I think we can detect some very real differences in the way people use English on different parts of the internet, for example. HN english is different from Reddit english. I read an interesting article once titled "we who spoke LOLcat now speak doge". Communication changes, evolves, gets remixed, etc: http://io9.com/we-who-spoke-lolcat-now-speak-doge-1481243678 http://io9.com/we-who-spoke-lolcat-now-speak-doge-1481243678

kylebgorman 12y ago

Your intuition that modern technology is slowing down language change, while entirely reasonable, is generally thought to be wrong by experts in language change. LETRA MAGNA - How do radio, television, films and popular entertainment affect language? LABOV - Our studies of sound changes in progress indicate that the mass media have almost no effect on the development of every-day language, which is influenced far more by the interaction of peers in every-day life. Passive listening to radio, television, or teachers in school, does not appear to affect the basic machinery of language production. In North America, regional dialects are becoming more diverse even though the mass media are quite uniform. Actprs on television programs will often reflect changes that have taken place in the community a generation before. The same principle applies to grammatical innovations, like the new English verb of quotation, "be like." Rosa Saladino showed that watching television had no effect on the replacement of dialect words with Italian. (from an interview with Bill Labov, "founder of modern sociolinguistics": http://www.letramagna.com/entrelabov.htm http://www.letramagna.com/entrelabov.htm) [edit for whitespace]

mistercow 12y ago
And you can kind of see this already in existing dialect shifts. The "Transatlantic" dialect is largely gone, but for a long time it was extremely popular in any form of media involving voice.

kylebgorman 12y ago

Seconding the request for a date change. I remember reading this in 2003 when it was linked on /.