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Do all languages have a "turning point"? | ||
Tags: Linguistics | History | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4495 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 17 of 38 22 April 2015 at 9:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
We discussed them, but I don't think I have read a single Dutch book from before 1900. As for English classes, I do not know what is routinely discussed in them (I took bilingual education and certainly conformed with the standards, but we analysed literature at a much higher level). I read 19th century English literature without much ado "The Mayor of Casterbridge" for example, and Shakespeare is read by the Dutch, but in annotated English with modern translations. Note that all English works that we read were in the original English; this holds true across all levels of English, as far as I know. (the university preparatory division of higher education complies with B2-C1 on the CEFR scale with regards to English). German and French I cannot speak for, as I didn't sit the central examinations; I took sciences, but to my knowledge at least the literature is to be read in the original. It used to be in any case, and I think my brother had to do it in German; but how he coped I don't know because he hated German. I have never read the Dutch constitution so I don't know the language contained therein. @eydimork: Actually Swedish language development has strongly paralleled that of Dutch; it would be interesting to see a comparison. Both lost the masculine/feminine distinction, for example, radically simplified their verb forms, and are quite open nowadays to loaning words from English and French. I am not sure if it holds irrespective of language, but the trends in Swedish and Dutch have always felt very similar in their mentality to me. Edited by tarvos on 22 April 2015 at 9:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3820 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 18 of 38 22 April 2015 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Almost every non-european languages has not had strange turning points, if you observe
proto Algonkin, the descendants are all more or less similar. Sometimes a language diverges and evolves different qualities over time, sometimes things get more complex but a lot of languages families hover at a very plain level. Sometimes big changes can occur due to contact and recomplexification having been a creole in the past (Japanese) or becoming similar to surrounding languages due to contact (agglutinating mixed language/ dialects of Mandarin), but nothing as haphazard and uncontrolled seems to every occur out there. Edited by Stolan on 22 April 2015 at 5:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6385 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 19 of 38 22 April 2015 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Non-IE languages vary even more than the IE ones.
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| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3820 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 20 of 38 23 April 2015 at 3:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
And they all seem content with whatever they have, if they change then they change. If one prefers to eat chocolate ice cream, they eat it, but if they switch to strawberry, then they switch. They do not drag arounds dozens of half filled cups only adding more to the collection when they don't finish their new servings since they can't decide on the new flavor. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4677 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 21 of 38 23 April 2015 at 4:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've read that the rate of change for non-written languages is generally high, and
that writing and literacy tend to slow down the rate of change. And so a tribal language from 200 years ago might be incomprehensible to modern speakers, while most major 'world' languages are still relatively easy to understand. (I can't back this up; just passing along what I've heard). To me, English feels modern from about 1800 on. Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, etc. are all pretty easy, and don't require me to shift gears to understand them.
The 1700's are trickier and require more effort:
English in the 1600s is downright archaic. It's not just style; the grammar itself is different.
My guess is that modern English might be going through another period of rapid change, both due to globalization and to technological changes. Edited by kanewai on 23 April 2015 at 4:32am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4078 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 22 of 38 23 April 2015 at 4:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The only "archaic" features in Cromwell's speech is the presence of pronomial adverbs, a
combined adverb "withal", and and the older third-person present indicative conjugation of "to have", which is "hath". But still to this day "thereunto" and "hither" is found in books. I received an e-mail that had "hitherto" just a month ago. In terms of style, it does sound a bit old-fashioned, but "We have that here to tender you" can easily be used in Modern speech. It is a financial term in banking like to "tender" money to someone. In the UK, I am not sure about North America, but I think that in the Commonwealth as well as the UK, the pronomial adverb "outwith", which I just read in an e-mail a few days ago, is common and used in all registers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6944 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 23 of 38 23 April 2015 at 5:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've never encountered "outwith" on this side of the pond (i.e. Canada and USA) and you might even be a little hasty to think that it's used throughout the Commonwealth. I just looked it up and it seems to be practically limited to Scottish English.
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| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3324 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 24 of 38 23 April 2015 at 5:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I am from Australia (a commonwealth country) and I don't think I've met anyone who has ever used hitherto or outwith - such language would make the person look pretentious and if I heard someone speaking like that, I'd assume they were mockingly imitating a brit.
Even with Frankenstein, whilst I can understand it the structure is very different to what I would be used to in a novel and I don't particularly appreciate the style that texts were written in in that period more than anything. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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