Could of would of

Brendan Bendar

dxhound2005 wrote: »

You should read the article in the link in the post before yours.

Whooooy?

dxhound2005

Brendan Bendar wrote: »

Whooooy?

'Cos

So what is it that drives the language conservationists? Younger people tend to be the ones who innovate in all aspects of life: fashion, music, art. Language is no different. Children are often the agents of reanalysis, reinterpreting ambiguous structures as they learn the language. Young people move about more, taking innovations with them into new communities. Their social networks are larger and more dynamic. They are more likely to be early adopters of new technology, becoming familiar with the terms used to describe them. At school, on campus or in clubs and pubs, groups develop habits, individuals move between them, and language change is the result.

What this means, crucially, is that older people experience greater linguistic disorientation. Though we are all capable of adaptation, many aspects of the way we use language, including stylistic preferences, have solidified by our 20s. If you are in your 50s, you may identify with many aspects of the way people spoke 30-45 years ago.

This is what the author Douglas Adams had to say about technology. Adapted slightly, it could apply to language, too:

– Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
– Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary.
– Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.

Based on that timescale, formal, standard language is about 25 years behind the cutting edge. But if change is constant, why do we end up with a standard language at all? Well, think about the institutions that define standard language: universities, newspapers, broadcasters, the literary establishment. They are mostly controlled by middle-aged people. Their dialect is the dialect of power – and it means that everything else gets assigned a lower status. Deviations might be labelled cool, or creative, but because people generally fear or feel threatened by changes they do not understand, they are more likely to be called bad, lazy or even dangerous. This is where the “standards are slipping” narrative moves into more unpleasant territory. It’s probably OK to deviate from the norm if you are young – as long as you are also white and middle-class. If you are from a group with fewer social advantages, even the forms that your parents use are likely to be stigmatised. Your innovations will be doubly condemned.

The irony is, of course, that the pedants are the ones making the mistakes. To people who know how language works, pundits such as Douglas Rushkoff only end up sounding ignorant, having failed to really interrogate their views. What they are expressing are stylistic preferences – and that’s fine. I have my own, and can easily say “I hate the way this is written”, or even “this is badly written”. But that is shorthand: what is left off is “in my view” or “according to my stylistic preferences and prejudices, based on what I have been exposed to up to now, and particularly between the ages of five and 25”.

Mostly, pedants do not admit this. I know, because I have had plenty of arguments with them. They like to maintain that their prejudices are somehow objective – that there are clear instances of language getting “less good” in a way that can be independently verified. But, as we have seen, that is what pedants have said throughout history. George Orwell, a towering figure in politics, journalism and literature, was clearly wrong when he imagined that language would become decadent and “share in the general collapse” of civilisation unless hard work was done to repair it. Maybe it was only conscious and deliberate effort to arrest language change that was responsible for all the great poetry and rhetoric in the generation that followed him – the speeches “I have a dream” and “We choose to go to the moon”, the poetry of Seamus Heaney or Sylvia Plath, the novels of William Golding, Iris Murdoch, John Updike and Toni Morrison. More likely, Orwell was just mistaken.

The same is true of James Beattie, Jonathan Swift, George Puttenham, John Cheke and Ranulf Higden. The difference is that they didn’t have the benefit of evidence about the way language changes over time, unearthed by linguists from the 19th century onwards. Modern pedants don’t have that excuse. If they are so concerned about language, you have to wonder, why haven’t they bothered to get to know it a little better?

Gaoth Laidir

dxhound2005 wrote: »

You should read the article in the link in the post before yours.

I did. Why?

dxhound2005

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

I did. Why?

You should know then that your fears about "a general dumbing down" is just nonsense which has been spouted in every generation.

Gaoth Laidir

Comparing the evolution of language since the middle ages is one thing, but that's very different to the sudden autocorrect-induced shorthand texting language that has made its way from the phone to the paper. Txtng is 1 ting, but when this becomes the norm in general written or spoken language through pure laziness and apathy then where will it all end?

dxhound2005

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

Comparing the evolution of language since the middle ages is one thing, but that's very different to the sudden autocorrect-induced shorthand texting language that has made its way from the phone to the paper. Txtng is 1 ting, but when this becomes the norm in general written or spoken language through pure laziness and apathy then where will it all end?

It hasn't become the norm. If it becomes the norm it will be the norm. The norm is not something which can fixed and remain unchanged.

Gaoth Laidir

dxhound2005 wrote: »

It hasn't become the norm. If it becomes the norm it will be the norm. The norm is not something which can fixed and remain unchanged.

so do you think its ok and acceptable to get rid of all punctuation full stops etc i notice that you dont write this way i also notice that the author of that article and indeed Stephen Fry below both use impeccable English in there condemnation of dose who find fault with it kinda hypocritical wudden you say

Brendan Bendar

dxhound2005 wrote: »

It hasn't become the norm. If it becomes the norm it will be the norm. The norm is not something which can fixed and remain unchanged.

If it hasn’t become the norm then its not the norm, dude.

Until you produce evidence that it is the “norm” over the English speaking world, then you are off the mark.

dxhound2005

Perhaps the norm should have been preserved when the language was like this:

“By commyxstion and mellyng furst wiþ danes and afterward wiþ Normans in menye þe contray longage ys apeyred, and som vseþ strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harrying and garryng, grisbittyng.”

Or maybe the point of preservation should have been when A Numpire became An Umpire. What does it matter if "txtspeak" is the norm in 200 years time? Something different than the current norm is going to be the norm anyway, so why the great need to preserve it as it is now?

Aongus Von Bismarck

Brendan Bendar wrote: »

If it hasn’t become the norm then its not the norm, dude.

Until you produce evidence that it is the “norm” over the English speaking world, then you are off the mark.

It’s.

Brendan Bendar

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

It’s.

Always one.

Either contribute or get............

Gaoth Laidir

This is a good video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lXv3Tt4x20

New Home

Language changes, granted, but at any given time it follows a set of grammar rules (and other rules, e.g. syntax, etc). If a sentence does not follow those rules, then it's not grammatically correct. It may become grammatically correct/ if the grammar rules changes, but not until then.

If you have a stretch of road where the set speed limit is 50kmph, even having most cars driving at 100kmph doesn't make the speed limit less valid and it doesn't make all those cars NOT in breach of the speed limit in force at that time. If and when the speed limit changes, then they might be ok, unless the speed limit is brought to 80 and they're still doing 100.

joe40

I don't think written language is changing drastically, by written language I mean where people take time to express themselves clearly in a written format.
However I think interaction on social media, where you can have fast moving conversations is a almost a hybrid of written language and oral language.
As a 51 year old I more or less missed that scene. In school or work anything I wrote was considered and thought about. I was never a fluent writer.
That is impossible in a WhatsApp chat with several people "talking" for want of a better word.

It is a totally new form of written communication. It is almost inevitable rules will change. I'm not necessarily happy about that and would rather grammatical rules be preserved but I'm also a realist.

I still cringe when I see "youse" written down.

dxhound2005

New Home wrote: »

Language changes, granted, but at any given time it follows a set of grammar rules (and other rules, e.g. syntax, etc). If a sentence does not follow those rules, then it's not grammatically correct. It may become grammatically correct/ if the grammar rules changes, but not until then.

And when those changes are happening, they are not the result of a general dumbing down, laziness, bad teaching, or the breakdown of civilisation as we know it.

joe40

New Home wrote: »

Language changes, granted, but at any given time it follows a set of grammar rules (and other rules, e.g. syntax, etc). If a sentence does not follow those rules, then it's not grammatically correct. It may become grammatically correct/ if the grammar rules changes, but not until then.

If you have a stretch of road where the set speed limit is 50kmph, even having most cars driving at 100kmph doesn't make the speed limit less valid and it doesn't make all those cars NOT in breach of the speed limit in force at that time. If and when the speed limit changes, then they might be ok, unless the speed limit is brought to 80 and they're still doing 100.

If you apply that analogy to language the speed limit would change when most people drive at 100 mph.

New Home

It really depends on how or why the changes come about. If nobody teaches you in the first place that doing 100 in a 50 zone isn't right it is bad teaching and I can't figure out how you got your driving licence. If you can't figure it out for yourself despite the 50kmph signs or despite someone telling you, then yes, it is laziness and dumbing down.

It's probably not the breakdown of civilisation as we know it, but it could be one of its symptoms. :pac:

EDITED TO ADD: "I seen", "I done", "could/would of" (incl. things like "could of went"...) might be common usage, but they're most definitely NOT grammatically correct.

dxhound2005

As it said in the article the likes of Swift did have the excuse of not having the internet to research how the language had evolved before his time. So he fell into the usual trap of insisting that changes in his time were a result of dumbing down.

Nobody has that excuse nowadays, when the evolution of the language can be seen going back for centuries. But as in each generation there is a group who seem to want to freeze the language in their own time, and blame current changes on all sorts of imagined failings in society.

In 1785, a few years after the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been published, things were so bad that the poet and philosopher James Beattie declared: “Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast.” Some 70 years before that, Jonathan Swift had issued a similar warning. In a letter to Robert, Earl of Oxford, he complained: “From the Civil War to this present Time, I am apt to doubt whether the Corruptions in our Language have not at least equalled the Refinements of it … most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations. Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg’d, Disturb’d, Rebuk’t, Fledg’d, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse?”

Swift would presumably have thought The History of the Decline and Fall, revered as a masterpiece today, was a bit of a mess. He knew when the golden age of English was: “The Period wherein the English Tongue received most Improvement, I take to commence with the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign, and to conclude with the Great Rebellion in [Sixteen] Forty Two.”

Gaoth Laidir

dxhound2005 wrote: »

As it said in the article the likes of Swift did have the excuse of not having the internet to research how the language had evolved before his time. So he fell into the usual trap of insisting that changes in his time were a result of dumbing down.

Nobody has that excuse nowadays, when the evolution of the language can be seen going back for centuries. But as in each generation there is a group who seem to want to freeze the language in their own time, and blame current changes on all sorts of imagined failings in society.

In 1785, a few years after the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been published, things were so bad that the poet and philosopher James Beattie declared: “Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast.” Some 70 years before that, Jonathan Swift had issued a similar warning. In a letter to Robert, Earl of Oxford, he complained: “From the Civil War to this present Time, I am apt to doubt whether the Corruptions in our Language have not at least equalled the Refinements of it … most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations. Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg’d, Disturb’d, Rebuk’t, Fledg’d, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse?”

Swift would presumably have thought The History of the Decline and Fall, revered as a masterpiece today, was a bit of a mess. He knew when the golden age of English was: “The Period wherein the English Tongue received most Improvement, I take to commence with the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign, and to conclude with the Great Rebellion in [Sixteen] Forty Two.”

So what about my earlier question (below)? Would you accept that as being...acceptable?

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

so do you think its ok and acceptable to get rid of all punctuation full stops etc i notice that you dont write this way i also notice that the author of that article and indeed Stephen Fry below both use impeccable English in there condemnation of dose who find fault with it kinda hypocritical wudden you say

dxhound2005

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

So what about my earlier question (below)? Would you accept that as being...acceptable?

Dose is an interesting word. It does not rhyme with any of the other four letter words ending in -ose. Lose is another outlier. Who made those rules?

Brendan Bendar

New Home wrote: »

It really depends on how or why the changes come about. If nobody teaches you in the first place that doing 100 in a 50 zone isn't right it is bad teaching and I can't figure out how you got your driving licence. If you can't figure it out for yourself despite the 50kmph signs or despite someone telling you, then yes, it is laziness and dumbing down.

It's probably not the breakdown of civilisation as we know it, but it could be one of its symptoms. :pac:

EDITED TO ADD: "I seen", "I done", "could/would of" (incl. things like "could of went"...) might be common usage, but they're most definitely NOT grammatically correct.

Daaaa fuuherrrke. :eek:

Brendan Bendar

dxhound2005 wrote: »

Dose is an interesting word. It does not rhyme with any of the other four letter words ending in -ose. Lose is another outlier. Who made those rules?

Are we into pronunciation now, dude ?

Just sayin’.

dxhound2005

Brendan Bendar wrote: »

Are we into pronunciation now, dude ?

Just sayin’.

I am going to start a campaign to stop people saying "Nooze".

ablelocks

New Home wrote: »

EDITED TO ADD: "I seen", "I done", "could/would of" (incl. things like "could of went"...) might be common usage, but they're most definitely grammatically INcorrect.

you do mean incorrect, don't you?

Brendan Bendar

dxhound2005 wrote: »

I am going to start a campaign to stop people saying "Nooze".

Start with Ballsy, Hannon, Dunphy, Berty, Libreri, all the AA people, Petuna Martin, all ex Newstalk people.


That should keep you going.

New Home

Brendan Bendar wrote: »

Daaaa fuuherrrke. :eek:

ablelocks wrote: »

you do mean incorrect, don't you?

Oops! Yes, definitely INCORRECT - I thought I had written NOT correct!! That's what I get for typing from the phone...

New Home wrote: »

It really depends on how or why the changes come about. If nobody teaches you in the first place that doing 100 in a 50 zone isn't right it is bad teaching and I can't figure out how you got your driving licence. If you can't figure it out for yourself despite the 50kmph signs or despite someone telling you, then yes, it is laziness and dumbing down.

It's probably not the breakdown of civilisation as we know it, but it could be one of its symptoms. :pac:

EDITED TO ADD: "I seen", "I done", "could/would of" (incl. things like "could of went"...) might be common usage, but they're most definitely grammatically INcorrect.

FMOP.