|
 |
Do all languages have a "turning point"? | ||
Tags: Linguistics | History | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5070 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 25 of 38 23 April 2015 at 5:22am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
I'm from the US and I've never heard "outwith" before.
I've also never heard "gives you well to..." We do not use the word "farther" in the way Cromwell does. All the individual pieces still exist in "an Instrument drawn up by the consent and advice of the principal Officers of the Army" but the sentence as a whole is archaic in style to the point that its meaning is not obvious. Where I'm from people don't really use "scant" or "shall" that way either, but I think some people still do. Although I'll agree with the general sentiment, that Cromwell's English is not any further from contemporary speech as you might expect after 350 years. I'm still able to read it. Edited by robarb on 23 April 2015 at 5:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4718 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 26 of 38 23 April 2015 at 8:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
All these excerpts are completely legible and understandable to me. Cromwell's is a bit
more laborious to get through because of some of the grammatical differences, but given that they are often present in Dutch they do not represent a problem for me in particular. I always categorized "outwith" as exclusively Scottish in nature. I would consider using "hitherto" quite posh, if not archaic; I would expect it to be written in very old formal texts, but I would only use it if I were being facetious on purpose. Edited by tarvos on 23 April 2015 at 8:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4594 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 27 of 38 23 April 2015 at 9:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
I've also never heard anyone say "outwith" and wouldn't have known what they meant if they did.
I would consider "hitherto" to be quite a common word; I might not use it very frequently in everyday conversation but wouldn't hesitate to use it in writing. I certainly encounter it in business correspondence quite often. I was quite surprised to receive an email a few weeks ago that included the word "herewith", however, as that is a word which I have only ever seen in legal documents before. The person who used it is someone on secondment from one of our offices in Pakistan, so I'm not sure whether it's more common in the English spoken there or whether he learned it from a slightly outdated textbook. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4110 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 28 of 38 23 April 2015 at 10:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Third alternative: He just likes using an older or more formal register, and is aware of this tendency in himself. I can't possibly be the only person who can't write a semi-formal text without digital red pen left and right because my language is supposedly "antiquated". ;) I'll also add a quick general warning to everyone, since this is a pet-peeve of mine and the "outdated textbook" comment touches a bit on that: beware of assuming that the "I wouldn't personally say/write this" you find in a non-native speaker is an unconscious fault on their part, because you probably don't like it when helpful natives make the same assumptions about you when you're not actually doing anything wrong (e.g. last week someone corrected me for saying that I was painting something 'dolphin grey' and told me it was better to say 'mouse grey' since that's what a French person would say... not only could I simply have meant to describe the paint in more vivid and descriptive terms since mice and dolphins aren't actually the same hue, but the fact of the matter was that I was simply giving the name of the actual colour I had bought, a name given by a French paint company. In Swedish, I could've said drizzle-cloud-grey and I would just have been creative, because my native accent doesn't make it register as an error). We're all learners, so let's give other learners the benefit of the doubt. :) 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 29 of 38 23 April 2015 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Why is the Benjamin Franklin excerpt written in "German-style" orthography? (all nouns are capitalized)
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4532 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 30 of 38 23 April 2015 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
He was obviously a member of the so called "Tea-Party". read me edit: I'm giving up on this forum -.- now even re-formatting doesn't help Edited by daegga on 23 April 2015 at 9:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4043 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 31 of 38 29 June 2015 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
No, they do not, they simply do not and most never will because it is not the norm.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5543 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 32 of 38 29 June 2015 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
In French, I find that Tocqueville was quite accessible, as of 1848:
But if we go back to 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan is more annoying to read in English than Tocqueville was in French:
But if we jump back to France, we have Montaigne's Essais in the mid-1500s, which can still be mostly deciphered by anybody who reads modern French fluently, although some of the vocabulary is used in surprising ways:
I can only read this in small quantities, or it will mess up my French spelling! But if you go back another 200 years in either language, I start to get into trouble. I actually find the Canterbury Tales to be slightly harder than Montaigne (although it varies depending on the passage). But if you're interested in how languages change over time, the Egyptian language makes a wonderful case study, because we have texts from 3,400BC up through the 17th century when spoken Coptic finally died out, for a total run of over 5,000 years. And in many cases, we know how long texts remained intelligible: Ancient Egyptian texts could generally be read by speakers of Middle Egyptian, for example, but Late Egyptian readers appeared to use translations of earlier texts. One big driver is language evolution is clear: Written languages will often outlive the fall of an empire, but when a new empire arises, the regional vernacular of its ruling class will often become the new prestige dialect. The spoken language is no longer held back by an older written language, and hundreds of years of poorly-recorded changes to spoken language become visible at once. Edited by emk on 29 June 2015 at 9:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
