Is English bound for extinction?

[G-Lexington]

Hopefully, it'll go the way of all outmoded dinosaurs, and we'll be left with the far superior version...

...textspeak.

BCUZ OMG TXTSPK TTLY RULZ LOL K BYEZ!

Lex

 

[G-Lexington]

Ironically, Noah Webster did much to advance changes (all of them wrong-headed) in the United States.

I watched the First World War movie Passchendaele/Paschendaele/Passendale/Passendaele et al (ironic to this topic) and cringed when a soldier (if I recall correctly), speaking over a phone, said something or other was "ongoing." Oh god, what a clanger.

"Ongoing" isn't 40 years old. It may not be 35 years old. IT SHOULD BE BANNED! On pain of death.

It not only stole the perfectly serviceable and much more elegant "continuing," it reversed "going on" and jammed it together. He might as well have spoken of the internet and astronauts. Positively barbaric.

But nobody cares. *sniff* English is "ongoing" to hell in a handbasket, and if the ground wasn't frozen with three feet of snow on it, I'd go out back and eat worms.

Or am I just . . . wait for it . . . loosing it?

B.

I know any movie set before a certain date should have yellow stop signs. They almost never do. Do I care? Hell no. I notice it, sure, but if I'm caring more about the stop sign color than the plot, I'd say the main problem isn't the prop guy. It's either me being overly sensitive, or the writers who can't write a plot engaging enough to keep me from thinking about the stop signs.

Lex

 

[bander66]

I read somewhere that France and Spain periodically hold conferences to purify and standardize their respective languages.
To the best of my knowledge no English speaking countries do that.

It's true... we talked about it in class. What they are attempting to do however is different than what we are talking about. They are attempting to minimize the amount of English borrowings in their language versus trying to prevent change all together. Considering that about 60% of our language has French origin I think it'd be a little late for us to do the same.

 

[belamy]

English isn't the only language that is constantly changing. I learned that back in high school when I tried to get a fluent Spanish speaking friend to help me with my Spanish class work. She didn't even understand half the crap because it was so...proper. I think that's the right word.

Was she American Spanish or a Spaniard? It can happen with a [STRIKE]young[/STRIKE] Spaniard, but it seems to make better sense that, while learning any language, even if you are perfectly understood, people don't like to be talked to like from a book.
It happened to me with French: French taught me the proper way to express my thoughts in coherent phrases, and people would find it "weird", to say the least, that I could articulate my dicourse in full and well-developed phrases (and I mean simply syntax, not really formal speech and usage) without training my words with "euuuuhhh, euuuuhhh...".

 

[belamy]

It's true... we talked about it in class. What they are attempting to do however is different than what we are talking about. They are attempting to minimize the amount of English borrowings in their language versus trying to prevent change all together. Considering that about 60% of our language has French origin I think it'd be a little late for us to do the same.

It's a very continental thing to be as despotic with language as with anything else: it MAY help producing some of the finest literary works EVER, but it actually is the mark more of snobbish preciosity than of actual rigorous and systematic intellectual proceedings.

 

[star-warrior]

Printing, writing, and dictionaries, as well as education has done quite a bit to halt the change in languages. But being words on a page doesn't mean it's static. Languages are firstly and foremostly, spoken. If writing is to record speech, then so long as spoken languages change, then the style of the written word will change.

One of the interesting things about modern day life is, that we do most of our writing and communication over the electronic keyboard. When we begin to use less paper, and technology changes to more temporary media for recording our words, then eventually, that technology becomes obselete and the recorded discs and whatever will fall into disuse. The machines needed to read them won't be around any longer, and there will be a time when there will be a fundamental gap in the printed record in our human civilisation. It maybe in a thousand years from now, the twenty first century blogs and whatnot are all inaccessible piles of useless inanimate unreadable objects.

 

[geloge]

Yes, english will die, and I'm helping to kill it.

 

[Miz1983]

I read somewhere that France and Spain periodically hold conferences to purify and standardize their respective languages.

True, it's what we call "L' Académie Française" [i.e., cranky 95 year-old men who try to understand new words used by young lads ]

 

[belamy]

True, it's what we call "L' Académie Française" [i.e., cranky 95 year-old men who try to understand new words used by young lads ]

The French version of the cranky 105 year-old revered Spaniards without a real job, no productive talent and no remarkable intellectual gift, who have been working for decades on a complete makeover of the current mess that they call the official dictionary of the Spanish language (last edition in 2001) and they are still in the letter A.

 

[scains]

I never use text speak, I hate it.
And because I write, not professionally, but because I like to, I fear that it would interfere with my ability to write proficiently. And hopefully the English language doesn't die because then I would be left with no medium. I would fall apart if, suddenly, one day my language didn't exist. Now that seems quite absurd just like the fear that the English language is going to become extinct. Rather irrational don't you think?
Yes, I suppose it has changed, but only in the way it is written; the way people speak is exactly the same.

 

[levenshulme31]

English isn't dying, just evolving very quickly.
What passed for standard BBC English 50 years ago now sounds rediculously prim (although that's as much to do with the RP accent than the language used), by the same token I find a lot of what the young people speak, particularly urban youths, to be complete gibberish.

English is a sponge of a language, it just soaks up anything it comes into contact with. Gadzooks!

 

[rareboy]

I remember when Latin stopped being the lingua franca.

And then the demise of middle english.

It is the reductivism of txtspeak that worries me most.

 

[cmizer]

we teens wil force d xtinkshun of eng n replace it wit IM

Translation into English:-

We teens will force the extinction of english and replace it with IM.

Support the raping of english by speaking IM pplz!

lol

 

[belamy]

........................

 

[Harke the Boeotarch]

La langue est un salaud pour commencer.

Oui, ma blonde sexmachine.

 

[belamy]

All the digital writings will meet the same fat that writings have ever had, and th same that twenty and twenty-first century will have: total destructuion and oblivion.
The creations of civilizations always end up crumbling under their own weight, and then there's always military holocausts to finish the job of the impossibility of preserving everything that didn't need to be created and preserved in the first place.

 

[relaxin13]

English, is like most living things, is bound solely for evolution.

 

[belamy]

^ Finally the voice of plain reason.

 

[bankside]

English has been debased by just a little too much flexibility. I'm glad to see the language expand to incorporate new concepts, or to express ideas with greater precision, but we're undoing the language and burdening ourselves with neologisms that add nothing to what the language can already do well.

Thankfully, we now have better records of our language than at any time in history, and this will likely have the effect of making English stable and more consistent from one generation to the next. That is a good thing!

 

[belamy]

Has anybody anything else to say?