At what point do you think language should stop, or should have stopped, evolving?

To clarify my question: do you think we should speak Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, Old English, Middle English, a slightly older version of Modern English...? (Careful, all of those but the last would be incomprehensible to everyone reading this website.)

And should we ever allow new nouns and verbs to be used, or should we just represent new objects and concepts with increasingly baroque recursive structures? That could become pretty inefficient pretty fast...

Interested to hear your answer,

Jeff

Thanks dude. You're, like, awesome; although thanks to language change, like, I like can't understand like half of what you said. Like, language like evolves, and we should never, ever, ever, ever try to like slow or change its course in any way. Like, we shouldn't even correct like babies' babbling. Change is always like an improvement; like, I can't imagine we're getting any, like, dumber when we like, toss out like the majority of the English vocabulary in favour of, like, our stupid substitutes. It feels so, like, awesome to me, like to pick up like Shakespeare and even like Emerson and, like, not be able to read it, or even have trouble like talking to like my own grandparent, because I'm like drowning in so much, like, language evolution pushed on me from, like, a profligate academia that maybe wants to like ensconce itself as, like, the sole proprietor of like the knowledge of like historical English by like yanking out like the floodgates of change for the rest of us. Like, let us unschooled rats float stupidly down the sewers of language evolution till we, like, someday reach the point where like even linguists like don't even know that, like, English is Germanic anymore, and we can like call it, like, an isolate. That's really like such a sweet and awesome idea. That's like progress. Like, who cares about history? Am I like making any sense, or does this like annoy you? Like... perish the thought of ever steering our vessel through a current, instead of letting it carry us off.

So who decides how the vessel should be steered? You mention Shakespeare, but did you know that he made up words? Are you against that? Or is it okay for Shakespeare and not for anyone else.

Nobody said change is ALWAYS an improvement, but it is a way of life. If you can't handle change then you're going to have a hard time getting by. Time passes, seasons change from one to the next, you get older, you change roles. Change is neither good nor bad...it simply is.

Language is an incredibly complicated emergent system. If many people are using a word there is very little you can do to stop them. Arguing a word is 'wrong' because you say so seems pretty weak. Words simply are. There isn't some moral division between good and bad words. The only thing that matters at the end of the day is if people want to use a word to communicate. If the answer is yes, and everyone uses that word and understands it, there is nothing inherently wrong with the word.

Read a book on the history of the English language some time. It's incredibly interesting and will make you realize how language morphs and changes over time--not becoming better or worse mind you. Simply responding to changes in society (the ruling country, trade partners, jobs, art, etc.). A language that can not adjust to meet these changes will not last.

If anything steers it, it should be logic. Do you disagree? Have you ever been in an ESL classroom in your life? If anything is "right" or "wrong" about languages, it's regularity and irregularity. The more irregular a language is, the more unwieldy and difficult it becomes -- and the easier its speakers will stratify into educational classes.

The point about Shakespeare is that -- brace yourself -- people CAN'T UNDERSTAND him because their forerunners, like them, and like you, have been shameless about butchering the language, as if historical language is of no value to you at all. You seem happy that old English has to be translated, and is thus a different language. I think it's a terrible waste of the literary wealth of the any language, to consign all of its writings to obligatory future translation. I think the "form" of a language has a very similar importance to the objects archaeologists dig up, and to throw it away is to go on a rampage through a museum, and thrust ourselves into a brutish ignorance about the past.

You seem infected with the same defeatism as every other establishment linguist. You fail to notice the effectiveness of linguistic policy. Teach anything in schools, and it will be understood as a "rule" in society (hopefully a logical rule, and not arbitrary).

You also misapprehend the factors deciding the fortunes of languages by saying that the ability to adjust decides whether languages "last" or not. Above all else, economics bestow prestige on a language, or doom it. So we're left with aberrations like this "Standard American English", taught all around the world, but extremely backwards phonetically, barely explicable semantically, and unimaginably difficult to master because of its many syntactic inconsistencies.

Again, a logical language is a good language.

Is "unfriend" illogical? That depends on how we feel about the rule that changes all nouns into verbs at will. This certainly is a less-threatening (that is, less stupefying) aspect of language change; my comments have been more directed against the intellectually spineless clique that is afraid to ever call anything "wrong", and that insists that all change is inevitable and thus should be embraced.

"I can't imagine we're getting any, like, dumber when we like, toss out like the majority of the English vocabulary in favour of, like, our stupid substitutes."

How can a word that means the same thing be stupider? And again, unless you believe that sometimes the newer word is not stupider, why not speak Proto-Indo-European?

"If anything steers it, it should be logic. Do you disagree? Have you ever been in an ESL classroom in your life? If anything is 'right' or 'wrong' about languages, it's regularity and irregularity. The more irregular a language is, the more unwieldy and difficult it becomes -- and the easier its speakers will stratify into educational classes."

Name one way in which an older form of English is more logical. And name one natural language that's regular.

"The point about Shakespeare is that -- brace yourself -- people CAN'T UNDERSTAND him because their forerunners, like them, and like you,"--let's add "and like Shakespeare" here, since as Ax23000 pointed out, he made up words too. Unless of course you feel like defending his invented words as less stupid than those of others.--"have been shameless about butchering the language, as if historical language is of no value to you [or Shakespeare] at all."

It's not that historical language is of no value to me (I won't speak for anyone else), just like it's not that a manual transmission or an unfrosted donut is of no value to me. I drive an automatic and eat frosted donuts because I find the former easier and the latter more enjoyable than their older counterparts. (Ok, that's not strictly true, I'm learning to drive a stick and I like plain donuts. But still.)

"Teach anything in schools, and it will be understood as a 'rule' in society (hopefully a logical rule, and not arbitrary)." Wrong. If that were true, chatspeak and text speak wouldn't exist. Luckily for people trying to communicate efficiently, they do. It's also lucky from your perspective, since the spelling is usually more logical--or, at least, rarely less logical--than that of standard English.

"[M]y comments have been...directed against the intellectually spineless clique that is afraid to ever call anything 'wrong', and that insists that all change is inevitable and thus should be embraced."

Linguists aren't afraid to call things wrong. They're smart enough to recognize that some things aren't wrong. And if you're worried about 'stratification into educational classes,' you should recognize that the type of prescriptivism you advocate exacerbates that stratification by making the "educated" feel that the way they use language is superior to the way those who haven't been through school use it, as many English speakers feel about AAVE, when in fact both ways are governed by consistent grammatical principles and both serve equally for communication.

Those are real words. Unfriend is not a real word.

I guess it is now.

Amen to that....

"Ditto," good sir. "Ditto" (Is a pokemon)

Good grief, it's just a way for me to keep in contact with family that lives far away. The whole idea that this is a 'bad' thing pisses me off. What do you have against me keeping in contact with my brother who lives hundreds of miles away?

And by the way, before you say it, phone/email/letters are not the same as facebook. They're all just useful tools, each good in its own right when used properly.

Okay, so the word "believe" belongs between "really" and "Facebook" in that last paragraph. Good thing I'm handsome.

Everyone should have to read 1984.