future of written english

i read or heard this thing once when i was growing up about how "chinese" was supposedly the most evolved language, b/c it had the least grammar rules. that seems highly suspect to me to say the least, but w/o going into all of that issue (unless you want to), where do you see written eng. language going? is it going to be increasingly akin to twitter/sms-speak eg no caps minimal punctuation? i know i already punctuate too much prolly for most style guides circa 2011. like i still tend to use oxford comma, etc.

to me, as an american, current uk standards appear more graceful, just as the dutch written language looks more elegant than the german equivalent, given all of the latter's superfluous capitalization schemes. so yeah. wat denk je

lol chinese is the most static language

i wish i could remember where i got that idea from. it made sense to me att, in the same way that my theory that soccer is the best sport (b/c it basically only requires one technical rule (offsides) whereas basketball, hockey, american football are rife with them, and even baseball has stuff like the infield fly rule, etc.) makes sense to me to this day.

i mean, i'm basically a minimalist, and derive my entire morality system and aesthetic requirements on such a basis. hence why i can never be close friends with anyone who has a middle name, or god forbid, a confirmation name

and goes to explain why the brazilian soccer system thoroughly flummoxes me. why would you have family names ten furlongs per capita, but then reduce it to an average nine syllables or so per player? it's just deliberately fucking with me.

nine letters, rather.

linguists of thee bad old days used to cite the lack of grammar in chinese as evidence it was primitive

feel like this is the kind of question you need actual linguists to weigh in on tho

are there any agreements among contemp. linguists about what would constitute a particularly "evolved" language? other than longevity + changes?

i suspect

i. language use on twitter or in email or on gchat, community standards of same, doesn't really affect ppl's abilities to produce complex sentences in the real world

ii. the public written presence of ppl who can't write properly anymore (viz. this sentence) isn't actually evidence of anything - either they're adapting themselves to the conventions of the medium & are capable of whatever other level outside it, or they wouldn't have been communicating via missive before these technologies were around -- it's not a sudden decline in standards, rather that a huge percentage of the populace that didn't communicate in written words suddenly does

xpost i have no idea. there are a bunch of rules about what you can expect linguistic paradigms to do over time but i don't think the idea of, this language is --more evolved-- exists outside of old-school, prep-school classics teachers

To the degree that society remains organized around universal literacy, english that is written for a purpose that is to any degree formal, such as business correspondence, instruction manuals, legal briefs and the like, will evolve at a slow and stately pace. As per usual, informal english, especially slang, will evolve quite rapidly and just as rapidly informal useages will become dated and be replaced. amirite? kthxbye.

what would constitute a particularly "evolved" language?

Cultures and languages evolve together, as a rule, so that every living language is "evolved" within its cultural context, unless it is a 'dead' language, which is to say one that stopped evolving at some past date and so cannot easily address newly arisen circumstances.

One pointer to where "communication in English" is going:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2006/dec/03/features.review37

Then Nerriere came to his radical, perhaps revolutionary, conclusion: 'The language non-Anglophones spoke together,' he says, 'was not English, but something vaguely like it.' In this language, he noted, 'we were better off than genuine Anglophones'. This language, he decided, 'was the worldwide dialect of the third millennium'. In a moment of pure inspiration he called it 'Globish' (pronounced 'globe-ish').

Globish is not 'pidgin' or 'broken' English but it is highly simplified and unidiomatic. Nerriere observes that in Globish you could never say, 'This erstwhile buddy of yours is a weird duck who will probably put the kibosh on all our good deeds.' That might make sense in Acacia Avenue but it will not play in Buenos Aires or Zurich. In Globish you would express this as: 'Your old friend is too strange. He would ruin all our efforts.' Globish, says Nerriere, is 'decaffeinated English, or English-lite'.

globish rip

sort of curious as to whether the cultural position of english right now is unprecedented (n.b. no one mention latin)

relatedly that nerriere person seems like he sucks a lot

from that description I think most americans speak globish and not very many of us speak english

In the sense that nobody has ever said 'This erstwhile buddy of yours is a weird duck who will probably put the kibosh on all our good deeds.', that is certainly true.

^^^ posts of missing louis jagger

I greatly doubt that 'globish' has much presence outside of well-educated elites. I expect that people still live, work and love in the dominant language of the place where they were born. The apparent 'ascendancy' of english probably doesn't connect much with non-native speakers at an emotional level.

I guess there's an interesting point in that beyond a certain level of competence, fluency in a language involves taking on board a lot of cultural knowledge. An American might not get the finer points of an Englishman's allusions to blood sausage and the poll tax, despite them having a lot in common relative to the rest of the world. For someone from a completely different culture, the amount to learn from scratch will be much greater.

that was an xp, I guess

ENGLISH PEOPLE HAVE NEVER SAID 'BLOOD SAUSAGE'. IT'S AN AMERICANISM. GRAAAARGH.

(sorry for taking ilx in-jokes too seriously)

eee ecky thump

Anecdotal evidence from the sub-editorial floor: I feel like I've been fixing a lot more run-on sentences in submitted copy over the last year or so. More people are just comma splicing, I don't know why that is, it could just be a fluke, maybe it has something to do with breathless internet style (etc etc you get the idea).

One thing that's particularly interesting to me is the role corporations will play in shaping how English is learned and used in other countries. The one i work for has just taken over two of the biggest private language chains in China and works extensively with the sistema schools in Brazil. The question of what kind of English the students will be learning has a lot to do with local conditions and exptectations but publishers and education companies will also have a huge say in the future.

typos have become commonplace even in respectable publications like the NYT and ILX

please switch over to twitterspeak the day after I retire/die

"chinese"

i read or heard this thing once when i was growing up about how <b>"chinese"</b>

Eh?

schoose

lol @ whiney

what are you getting mad about, doggie

i read or heard this thing once when i was growing up about how <b>"chinese"</b>

dude i put it in quotes b/c aside from the written form, there are a bunch of completely diff. languages that get subsumed under "chinese"

Anecdotal evidence from the sub-editorial floor: I feel like I've been fixing a lot more run-on sentences in submitted copy over the last year or so.

interesting. not sure if it's my imagination, or if i've just been paying more attention to this kinda stuff, but it seems like it's much more acceptable these days to use sentences that in the past would have been rejected as "incomplete"

The incomplete 'mini-sentence' wormed its way into broad use via advertising, where we have long been treated to such ad copy as:

Big. Bold. Refreshing.

"Chinese"

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/12/chinese

The uncertainty surrounding the status of Beijing Mandarin at the time is highlighted by a meeting of linguists in 1913 to decide upon the new official language, at which the standard of choice was not the speech of the capital, but an artificial language incorporating the maximum number of distinctions found in the major dialects (including voiced stops, the entering tone, and the apical/laminal distinction before the palatal glide), envisaged as a compromise between north and south. But it soon became clear that no one, not even the linguists themselves, were capable of speaking this linguistic Frankenstein, and the movement failed miserably.