IRC wrote:<WhiteShark> so you would say that a language which takes a million words to convey a simple concept is as good as one that takes one word
<Humbaba> I would make no judgement on the matter, because I don't think languages get "better" or worse because I'm not a Darwinist
Thread for discussing how languages have gotten worse. Let us agree that the primary purpose of language is communication of information and that any change which works against this purpose is a degeneration. We'll start with some English ones, but examples from other languages are welcome. Grammar and vocabulary are both on topic.
- The disappearance of thou
English once had the second-person singular pronoun
thou and the second-person plural pronoun
you. This made distinguishing the singular and the plural very simple. With the disappearance of
thou, the number of
you became uncertain and the second-person plural was reinvented in the forms
you guys/you all/y'all. Of course, those doesn't make
you by itself any less uncertain, so its number can only be judged by context.
Yon is a demonstrative pronoun indicating an entity distant from both speaker and listener, as opposed to
this, which indicates one near to the speaker, and
that, which indicates one near to the listener. This third distinction is present in many other languages but no longer in English.
Whither, whence, hither, hence, thither, thence, yond, yonder. What a great loss this was. They sound so nice, and in the case of the 'from' column, they save a syllable to boot. For some reason there never appears to have been a
yonce, leaving the 'from yond' spot in the chart sadly blank.
- The near disappearance of the subjunctive mood
Modern speakers cannot understand the grammar behind phrases like 'come what may' and 'God save the king' because they are wholly unaware of the subjunctive mood. To our ears they sound like imperatives, but they are actually expressions of hypotheticals. The latter is a subclass of the subjunctive mood called the
optative, which expresses a hope or desire. Of course, even at the everyday level, the change can be observed in the replacement of
were I/if I were with
if I was. The former ought be used when the topic is unreal, the latter if it may have actually been so. In my experience this distinction is unobserved by many, perhaps most, English speakers.
And one for Japanese.
- The disappearance of the past-tense suffixes
In classical Japanese there were verb endings
ki and
keri, indicating personally witnessed past tense and secondhand information past tense respectively. These have been replaced by the ending
ta, an abbreviation of
taru, which originally meant the present perfect. Though the meaning is generally clear in context, there is technically no way in modern Japanese to express a pure past tense; this is evidenced by the fact that verbs ending in
ta, when used to modify a noun, indicate that the noun is presently affected by the result of the modifying verb. As a side effect, modern Japanese frequently fail to grasp the proper usage of
ki/keri and thus use them in places where
taru were more appropriate.
