Why/What is destroying Language

[CasperTFG]

I think the ease of creating, modifying and transfering data is what is destroying language.

In the days before correction fluid, If you made a mistake typing a letter, you started over. Therefore would also make sure you were writting the proper thing in the first place. Thought was actually put into what was typed or written down.

If anyone has ever used a telex machine you know exactly what I mean. If you made one incorrect key stroke, you would have to go back to the begining.

Our own impatients is also destroying language. Many of us would agree that we would rather read a simple to the point paragraph than a long winded essay on it.

The ease of transfering data also makes us sloppy. Today we can send out a message, then make a correction and send it again. Change our mind and adjust it again. All of this can be done and sent in a matter of minutes. If this was all going through letter carrier it could drag on for a month.

Today I got a perfect example of this. I sent a purchase order out. The company replied back to me that I priced an item in USD rather than CDN. I made the adjustment and sent it again. They replied with an invoice, on the invoice I noticed they wrote down an incorrect hardware extension.

All of this back and forth resending via fax, lasted a total of about an hour. If there was no email or fax, then this process would have gone on for months and I probably would have made sure everyone had the right information to begin with to avoid all of this.

The attitiude today is get it done and out the door. If something needs to be changed or fixed it can be changed then.

Just my thoughts.



Casper

There is room for all of gods creatures, "Right Beside the Mashed Potatoes".

 

[CasperTFG]

By the way above I have 7 spelling mistakes, and at least 4 Grammatical errors.

By the way above I have 7 spelling mistakes, and at least 4 grammatical errors. I guess I am no better.

Casper

There is room for all of gods creatures, "Right Beside the Mashed Potatoes".

 

[sleipnir214]

I disagree that English is being destroyed. It may be evolving in a direction you don't like, but it's not being destroyed. Navaho is being destroyed -- fewer speakers of the language are born in each successive generation and the richness of the language is being lost.

In the days before correction fluid,...

You are, as Truman Capote decried, confusing typing with writing. The medium does not necessarily affect the quality of the written work.

Many of us would agree that we would rather read a simple to the point paragraph...

You seem to be equating quantity with quality.

On November 19, 1863, two men gave a speech at the dedication of a Solders' Cemetery on a former battleground. One man, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours. The other man delivered a speech that is only 272 words long.

Few remember Edward Everett or his words.

But Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is a world-famous speech.

The ease of transfering data also makes us sloppy

Don't blame the medium here. It is not the ease of dissemination of information that is the problem. It is, as your own comments about grammer and spelling errors points out, a problem of lack of attention to detail.


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[ESquared]

grammar

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A sacrifice is harder when no one knows you've made it.

 

[entaroadun]

Impatience and a lack of attention to detail are not necessarily bad. They are a natural consequence of technology which allows mistakes to be easily corrected at a low cost. As CasperTFG pointed out, it took an hour to get a P.O. and an invoice right. But prior to the advent of fax and telephone communications, it would have taken at least two days to compose and deliver the P.O. and invoice.

Maintaining attention to detail requires constant presence of mind. This uses precious mental bandwidth. Freeing this bandwidth up allows it to be used for more creative pursuits. A mathematician proving a theorem will often skip ahead several steps based on hunch alone in order to work out the more complicated parts of the proof. He/she will go back later to fill in all of the blanks. Maintaining attention to detail through the entire process would interrupt the creativity necessary for accomplishing the bulk of the problem.

Some of the most creative people are the most imprecise, and vice versa.

One might argue that a society must value and cultivate both qualities. I believe that there is a tradeoff; a society which promotes creativity will suffer in precision and operational efficiency, just as a society which promotes individualism will have trouble mustering solidarity.

The intellectual network formed by American private and public schools and research organizations is, I believe, the most innovative in the world. The force which drives this free-form creativity is the same force behind the overall level of sloppiness in American manufacturing. This sloppiness was fixed by adopting and innovating on Japanese quality control techniques. However, very few organizations in Japan are truly innovative.

 

[Grenage]

I would have to agree with sleipnir214, don't blame the medium.

SMS messaging, email & internet fora make it much easier to communicate the written word quickly as you say, but I do not believe it is "destroying" language.

I myself abbreviate every word I can in a text message, emails to friends are not proof read. Official emails and documents are another matter and I always check what I have typed twice.

 

[BJCooperIT]

Part of the "evolution" of our languages is regional dialects. Even here in the United States, you can travel to a different state, town or even across the railroad tracks and be puzzled by what folks say there. Sometimes it is the accent that is confusing. But often it is the local acceptance of words or phrases that mean something different in that area.

A classic example is a northerner coming into the deep south. Where else, outside of the media, would you hear the phrase:

Y'all come on in and sit a spell!

but in the south? While "Y'all" is listed in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as a variant of "you all", "spell" has no definition that implies a length of time. Yet this sentence is readily understood by people from that region.


Language evolution also happens when the meaning of a word or phrase morphs into something else. My parents' generation would never understand the meaning of

He nailed it!

to mean anything other than a man or boy drove a nail through something. Yet you and I might readily understand that it means that he did something perfectly.


We, in the IT industry, like to define things as black and white. Right or wrong. Works or doesn't work. That is the nature of what we do everyday. There is no gray area to a job running correctly. Either it did or it didn't. Language, with it diverse complexities, does not cater to our On/Off mentality. It can be frustrating, but the evolution is necessary. How can our communication improve if our language is stagnant?

[sup]Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.[/sup][sup] ~George Bernard Shaw[/sup]
Systems Project Analyst/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle/Windows

 

[strongm]

Just to be difficult, 'spell' is in the on-line Merriam's as (amongst other variations) 'an indeterminate period of time'

 

[sleipnir214]

YourDictionary.com, too, has a possible usage for spell as a short, indefinite period of time. YourDictionary also lists the word as I have heard it used as a verb:

Spell me, will you?

In this case spell is a verb meaning to take one's turn at some piece of work.



A lot of linguists, too, have seen the utility of two non-standard words, y'all and ain't.

Y'all is a perfectly good disambigation between the second-person singular and second-person plural pronouns. Unfortunately, there are some regional usages in the U.S. where y'all is used for the singular, too.

Ain't also has its utility. There are contractive forms for the negation of the verb "to be" in every person but first person: "you aren't", "she isn't".

This article at YourDictionary.com, titled '"Ain't" Isn't a Four-Letter Word', says that ain't is of good use, provided its use is limited to the first person.



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[BJCooperIT]

I stand corrected. I failed to click on the "noun" entry. Interestingly enough it says:

spell... Etymology: probably alteration of Middle English spale substitute, from Old English spala

So rather than "spell" being an old word with a new definition, it may very well be a very old word with a new spelling.

[sup]Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.[/sup][sup] ~George Bernard Shaw[/sup]
Systems Project Analyst/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle/Windows

 

[sleipnir214]

Yeah, I think we're running afoul of the fact that English is such a promiscuously-borrowing language.

According to the etymology entries at YourDictionary, it looks like spell in the sense of "to spell a word" comes from the Middle English spellen. And spell in the sense of "come sit for a spell" comes from the Middle English spelen.

I wonder if there wasn't a vowel-sound shift somewhere. German as the word splielen ("to play"), which might be a cognate of the single-"l" spelen. Unfortunately, I don't have a pronunciation of spelen.


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[rosieb]

English is such a promiscuously-borrowing language.

Where does any language come from, at what point does it become a separate language. Any language borrows from its local cousins. Latin borrowed from Greek, borrowed from.....

In the UK, geordie (UK Northumberland) dialect takes many words from the Dutch language, because of historical trading relationships.

I don't know for sure, but I've heard it said that "real" Geordie is understandable to Dutch speakers. For certain, it's almost totally incomprehensibile to speakers of "pure" English. (But the accent is totally gorgeous.)

Languages absorb words from all sorts of arenas, trading, colonies (bungalow - India), or from soldiers being stationed in certain areas (bint - Egypt).

South east asian languages (and others) borrow technological terms from "english".

No language is static, not even French (despite the best effforts of the Academie Francais). Nor should it be.

However this does not mean that we all have to accept changes we don't like. If enough of us ignore sloppy usage it doesn't become acceptable, and dies.

CasperTFG
I used to be pretty hot with a telex machine, it wasn't That long ago.

Rosie
"Never express yourself more clearly than you think" (Niels Bohr)

 

[sleipnir214]

rosieb:
You've asked one hell of a question. I neither know nor can find out a definitive method for determining that two languages are different.

I do know that for two people's languages to be different, their speech must be mutually unintelligible. This, however, is not proof that they are speaking different languages, simply a necessary condition. If, for example, a person from the California surfer culture where to try to communicate with a Gullah-speaking resident of the South Carolina barrier islans, they probably cound not understand each other beyond the fact that they will have part of the lyrics of the song "Kumbaya, my Lord" in common.


I have found multiple sources explicitly stating the obvious fact that for a single language to evolve into different languages, there must be separation of two groups who speak that original language. I think as the world becomes more interconnected, we will find that languages will amalgamate rather than evolve apart.


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[ESquared]

For what it's worth, my post with the single word grammar was referring to sleipnir214's post, and was just a lighthearted observation about how attention to detail and spelling are ironically elusive sometimes, even in the midts of pointing out someone else's trouble with same. It happens to everyone!!!

-------------------------------------
A sacrifice is harder when no one knows you've made it.

 

[strongm]

>like spell in the sense of "to spell a word" comes from the Middle English spellen. And spell in the sense of "come sit for a spell" comes from the Middle English spelen.

Ah! Homonyms. Lots of those in the English language. Perhaps worth a seperate thread

 

[sleipnir214]

strongm:
It may not be that the Middle English spellen and spelen were pronounced the same, but rather there was a consonant or vowel change. A lot of spelling and even pronunciation changed after the Normal Conquest -- one source I found cites sceamu, which became shame because at the time Norman French did not support the "sc" consonant combination.


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[strongm]

Sure. I'm well aware of that. That's why the English language today has homonyms , and why I thought it might be an interesting area to discuss. Some of my favoutites (and potential causes of confusion for non-native speakers) are homonyms that are also their own antonyms (eg cleave)

 

[KenCunningham]

...and sleipnir214, thanks for the laugh of a grey Monday with your 'Normal Conquest'. ;-)

 

[strongm]

oops - I wonder what a 'favoutite' might be when it is at home?

 

[sleipnir214]

You know, if I could type, I'd be dangerous.


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