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Linguistic purity movements continue to strike me as largely pointless. It seems better that language evolve naturally -- as long as it remains effective as a c

• jhpriestley 12y ago
  I'm not sure what "natural" evolution you're referring to. We can think of language as a natural behavior of man - a social creature that uses technology. In this case we must admit that this creature also sometimes forms language purity movements.
• jacquesm 12y ago
  It stems from fear of identity loss. The weird thing is that in the longer turn it results in a much larger problem: irrelevance.
• rw37 12y ago
  Right. I can almost see the case when a language is in real danger of extinction, although even then maintaining its purity might be harmful, but French is not in danger of extinction anytime soon.
• panglott 12y ago
  There is an ancient perception that one's own language is degraded, that the language of older literature is more vital, more robust, richer. You can find this strain of thought in English literature for hundreds of years, in French, and in classical Latin and Greek, and many other literary traditions, I'm sure. There must be some basic cognitive bias here, like valorizing too highly the literature you loved in your youth, while discounting the creative innovations of your own age.
  • kissickas 12y ago
    Or by cherry-picking the greatest works of century-long periods and comparing them to the endless onslaught of terrible works today. That said, even if there is a selective bias, that doesn't make it any less useful to preserve backwards compatibility so we can understand those great works.
  • PepeGomez 12y ago
    Or maybe old language looks "richer", because you can easily notice grammar used in old literature that is no longer used in modern speech, but it's very hard to spot grammar that didn't exist yet.
• borgia 12y ago
  >Linguistic purity movements continue to strike me as largely pointless. It seems better that language evolve naturally -- as long as it remains effective as a communication medium, what is the issue? On the one hand I agree with you. The English we use now, even when written or spoken in a grammatically perfect way, is very different to the English used a couple of hundred years ago. On the other hand, seeing "your/you're" or "they're/their/there" used incorrectly or interchangeably rustles my jimmies immeasurably.
  • 0xffff2 12y ago
    Do the French really not have that problem though? It seems to me that most people know the difference between "your" and "you're", they just don't care enough to use the right variant.
    • borgia 12y ago
      Regarding your question about French, I'm not too sure. There/their/they're would be la/leur/ils sont, so perhaps there's scope for the first two to become conflated, not so much the last. As far as I know the biggest issue French is facing is the injection of English words where there isn't a French equivalent. Then again, French people seem to absolutely loathe the version of French spoken in Quebec so there could be a plethora of other issues involved that we don't have in English. Regarding your second point, personally I'm not sure but ignorance certainly plays its part one way or another.
• realusername 12y ago
  It depends, sometimes the words they invent fit quite naturally into the language and people tend to use them and sometimes they just invent something unpronounceable and obviously nobody is using those words and use the English word as a replacement instead.
• dorfsmay 12y ago
  No. Everybody knows that languages naturally evolve on their own. The advantages of the "Académie" are: - it slows down the evolution allowing better choices. - although the language is still driven by everybody using it, it is stirred in the right direction by linguists and authors, usually making choices consistent with the rest of the languages, its history and roots. The best example of what happens when such a mechanism isn't in place is the "biweekly" and "irregardless" mess in english! I am really fond of the "Real Academia Española" as they go even further than their french counterpart, and regularly change the spelling of words to reflect their modern pronounciation.
  • seszett 12y ago
    > I am really fond of the "Real Academia Española" as they go even further than their french counterpart, and regularly change the spelling of words to reflect their modern pronounciation. The Académie does that too, but people are so used to having irregular or (apparently) illogical spelling that the new spellings catch on very slowly. It works though, and today you rarely see someone write "clef" instead of "clé" or "cuiller" instead of "cuillère". A few verbs got their accents changed from "é" to "è" too, following modern pronunciation. All that was in 1990.
    • alricb 12y ago
      I think it's partly because when spelling was standardized in the 17th-18th century, it was done with a "learned" view that spelling should reflect a word's origin. So you get "doigt" for finger because of the latin digitus, the circumflex to denote an S that has become silent (hôpital vs. hospital), and even overcorrections (that have been recorrected since), like nénuphar -> nénufar (ph is used to denote places where there used to be a greek phi, but nénufar comes from Arabic)
    • dorfsmay 12y ago
      When it comes to spelling though, they are too slow. Why do we have 'k', 'c' and 'qu' when one would suffice? What about all the spelling we never pronouce ("ils mangent")? If the Académie doesn't do anything about it, eventually people will create their own simplifications, and that is guaranteed to be a mess.
• agumonkey 12y ago
  Especially regarding the cyclic relationship between English and French, it's not as if both of us didn't borrow words in the past.
• Svip 12y ago
  You can argue if that if languages are merely tools, then sure, why not? But it leaves out things to wonder about and be intrigued by. I am not a fan of the idea that we cannot make interesting linguistic additions to our languages any more. And certainly not isolated to English. I find internet lingo in non-English languages far more interesting than those in English (at least when we are talking about something else than simply using the English loanword), since the Internet is largely an English-written concept, other languages are finding its incompatibilities with English difficult and the solutions can be quite interesting. I find the anglifications of languages to be uninteresting at best, from a completely linguistic standpoint. Take a modern item like a 'vacuum cleaner', called »støvsuger« in Danish, which literally translates as 'dust sucker'. This reveals a difference in how each language's speakers think about items, words and their meanings. If all words are English, then the languages themselves reveal nothing about our differences and how we think. Moreover, it will cause us all to think in the same way. It's documented that speaking more languages helps one think different about approaching problems, even ones not related to language. It broadens the mind. Everything being English won't broaden the mind.
• mc32 12y ago
  From France's pov, it all started as a way to centralize and wrest power away from the provinces, later as a way put France and French at the center of Europe. Having been the center of science and education for much of the middle ages, renaissance, colonial power, etc. It's hard for France to give in symbolically and allow that there are stronger influences than its own. It's been a quixotic quest, at best, it's not as if in regular speech (French) people didn't inject whatever was the argot dujour into the speech be it domestic or foreign.
• auganov 12y ago
  Well I can feel how it's neat to have a pure version of the language. Maintaining some knowledge about languages that are/will probably die is also nice. The most striking thing to me is how people tend to get so conservative about natural languages.