Randall R Schulz wrote:
Anders,
On Wednesday 24 August 2005 09:48, Anders Johansson wrote:
... If children learn it, they'll have to unlearn it. ...
It sounds like you're playing the role of language dictator, to me.
The most hopeless cause in the world is to try to control the evolution of language. There's a great deal of everyday English usage that offends me, too, but it's whistling in the wind to inveigh against it.
Randall, while I disagree strongly with Anders's statement, I disagree even more strongly with yours. What's happening is not evolution, but corruption. Our language came from William the Conqueror's conquest of the Anglo-Saxons, and subsequent suppression of their culture, including a (reportedly) beautiful, expressive language. Since the Anglo-Saxons were not allowed to have an education except in Old French (and then only a few of them), their language declined to a messy jumble of local dialects, similar to the early 20th century Italian mess of mutually incomprehensible dialects. Chaucer and a few of his comtemporaries wrote in one of the less disorderly of those dialects, and their genius made it become the English language. But it was not until the printing press and the Puritans (who invented universal education) that we got a stable, expressive, powerful language that people could depend upon for communication. Much the same thing happened in Italy when Dante Aligheri and his contemporaries formalized the Florentine dialect and made it the Italian language. When I was in central Italy in the '60's, there were still old rural people who couldn't speak Italian, and I couldn't understand anything they said (I'm fluent in Italian). That's where we're headed. Evolution is what Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Noah Webster took 700 years to do (Webster succeeded to some extent in America). Chaos is what the UCB professors of the '60's promoted, and that way lies not evolution, but corruption. Based on historical evidence, it'll only take a couple of centuries. By the way, my disagreement with Anders is that children must learn that English is a slurred language with a powerful, expressive underlying grammar that needs to be learned. The slurring (schwa) is in our speech, and has nothing to do with what we're thinking. If we lose the underlying grammar, we lose our communication, our thought processes, and ultimately our society. As did the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons. John Perry