Did people in the past talk more eloquently?

In My Humble Opinion
21

OK… let me mention (again - it was pointed out before) that The Man in the Iron Mask is a French novel, so it’s relevance to English is slight at best. French translated into English has a tendency to come off flowery or formal. For a short example:

Is literally “One speaks English here”, which really IS the way folks say “English spoken here” in casual French.

Also, French even has a verb tense that is used only (or nearly so) for written passages, which English does not do.

The point being, do not compare apples and oranges, or even des pommes and des oranges.

As for M. Villon… his French is about as close to the daily French of France as Shakespeare is to our English. It may have been common speech in his time, but it’s not something you’ll be able to read if all you’ve had is high school French in America.

As far as English goes… through the first half of the 20th Century English English was considered a “higher” form of the language than American. Thus, in cimena as well as the stage, actors would frequently adjust their English toward the English style of speaking, particularly in words like “can’t” and “again”. The Three Stooges did not - but then, they were portraying the “uncouth”.

We are in a unique circumstance in history, where we can actually hear, through recordings, how people sounded 100 or more years ago. ALL languages change over time, and more rapidly than people suppose. It’s not that English is somehow “devolving”, it’s that it’s changing. New words enter, some old words leave or change their meanings, new sentence style evolves. At one time, being able to construct elaborate, complex sentences was highly valued. Now, we value clear, direct speech. Those are two different ends And the language adapts. A hundred years from now there will be folks nostaligic for the speech of today.

22

In the olden days, too, most male aristos and bourgeois were taught rhetoric at school, which was the art of using certain devices in speech to put your point across or win an argument. I think they were also taught certain stock phrases, borrowed from the ancients to use on certain occasions. Certainly they wouldn’t have used these devices in everyday speech but it certainly would have made its way into letter writing, public speeches, etc.

23

Should’ve been more specific about my Three Stooges cite…lol…I meant to clarify that it was mainly the side actors(butler, housewive, dean, etc.) that exibited the more advanced speech that is the topic.

And I certainly hope that the American version of the English language will stop this “changing” and go back, as Reader’s Digest puts it, “Towards more Picturesque speech”. Such a “directness”, IMHO as well as others I’m sure, is rather simple and shows lack of breeding.

24

Wow, either I’ve just been whooshed or have fallen into some kind of timewarp:confused:
The problem with using Literature to analyse past rhetorical patterns is that most of the authors would’ve received an education something above the norm, or at least have had access to higher modes of learning e.g libraries/travel. It’s possible to infer from many of the classics that times past were more polite and mannered, resulting in over-elaborate rhetorical flourishes: However, it could just be the author showing off his knowledge of fancypants language or broader-than-thou vocabulary. Also, the words may strike you as eloquent merely because they are unfamiliar to you within a conversational context - modern language may have moved on from using flowery and over-descriptive terms in everyday usage but that does not mean the vocabulary employed today is in anyway less intricate and expressive.

If anything, as access to higher education expands, an over-complicated vocabulary ceases to have as much ‘snob’ value as it once did. Education does not signify a higher class as much as it once did, now that it is more usual for people to complete high school or to go to college; plus people are simply less class-conscious in today’s society. I can use straight-forward, simple, even crude language if I choose to, without worrying as much as I might once have that people may think I’m undereducated or uncouth, and therefore of a lower class. Or at least, so I thought…

25

Read some Kipling. His rendering of common speech patterns will disabuse you of the notion that English is devolving.

26

I’d like to nominate this for the most ignorant comment of the week.

I wish I could agree with you on this. However, based on my experiences it seems as though if you use “$50” words in common conversation (and depending on who you’re speaking with, the illustration of a $50 word would change) it is often perceived as the speaker attempting to be high-falutin’ or showing off.

Which is a shame in my opinion. I’m a person who says exactly what i mean and quite often the vocabulary that allows me to be so exact is mistaken for being snobbish.

Could it be that since there is more widespread literacy and easier access to books, a larger proportion of people are only reading what is written to the lowest common denominator and aren’t stretching their vocabulary as much as persons who lived 70+ years ago?

27

This is unfair to “street talk” and rap culture. While I am about as far from being a rap fan as it is humanly possible for one person to be, I think it is undeniable that most rappers are highly eloquent. This eloquence is as important as a tough-guy image in becoming a respected rapper. In this environment there is prestige associated with the ability to make a clever rhyme or deftly turn of phrase that is not found in mainstream middle-class America.

Admittedly, this form of eloquence would be unsuitable for, say, business or politics, but so would the eloquence of Mercutio.

28

Come one, come all – see irony in action!!

The section quoted above, decrying modern American English and its ties to “lack of breeding,” (NB: :rolleyes: ) includes several errors:

–The dropped (implicit) subject, “I,” in the first sentence, very informal.

–Two misused ellipses on either side of the “lol.” Ellipses are three dots with spaces between each, and before and after the first and last dots, respectively.

–I’m pretty sure that the acronym “lol” should be all caps.

–“I meant to clarify” is incorrect usage. You meant to state; now you are clarifying.

–“Housewive?” “Exibited?”

–Correct usage would be " . . . the more advanced speech which is the topic."

–Beginning a sentence with “and.”

–The language is not “changing,” it is changing. The use of quotes is only properly ironic if the subject of the sentence doesn’t actually have the property in question.

–“Others” should have an apostrophe, and there should be a comma before “I’m sure.”

See how easy it is to do, to pick apart someone else’s usage? What you wrote above would look like gibberish to Chaucer, and you would have been unable to understand him speak.

Language changes. It always has and it always will, and using one variant over another has nothing to do with breeding. Until you can master the language yourself, or unless you are exclusively speaking Proto-Indo-European or something, I really don’t think you have a lot of room to call others’ use of language “simple.” It’s simply snobbery otherwise, and if your writing here is indicative, it’s affected, rather than earned, snobbery.

29

This is unfair to “street talk” and rap culture. While I am about as far from being a rap fan as it is humanly possible for one person to be, I think it is undeniable that most rappers are highly eloquent. This eloquence is as important as a tough-guy image in becoming a respected rapper. In this environment there is prestige associated with the ability to make a clever rhyme or deftly turn of phrase that is not found in mainstream middle-class America.

Admittedly, this form of eloquence would be unsuitable for, say, business or politics, but so would the eloquence of Mercutio.

30

I would like to thank the hamsters for allowing me to accomplish something few can dream of – a double post with an HOUR LONG GAP in between!

31

Thank you for your responses everyone!
Popup and Broomstick: I am sorry, I should have been more clear by leaving out my second question which was just an aside. My first question is simply to ask if people (from any country) really conversed this way, and if so who? Another (less extreme) example would be Jane Austen.

32

That sounds like Narrative of My Captivity Among
the Sioux Indians (©1871, Mutual Publishing Co.) by Fanny Kelly.

33

The basic problem with the request (having just gone back to some of my more arcane Elizabethan studies) is that 400 years ago common speech tended not to be recorded. Certainly nothing like the records today, where we can watch typical people speak every day on TV.

Printing until 1900 was expensive, and what tended to be preserved were things said that people felt had lasting value. Even people writing letters, I would argue, had some sense that they were “writing for posterity”, and used different language than normal speech. I have letters going back 150 years that exhibit fairly elevated language, and others from adults that have horrific misspellings, and sound approximately like a typical seven year-old, today. It’s hard to tell whether either, or both, represented common speech.

Whether people “actually” talked this way, as a whole, seems a subject for very difficult and scholarly debate. The sort that never come to final conclusions, I have a feeling.

Lamia, apart from your admirably stealthy double posting, I’ll take issue that rap is eloquent. You may not have the experience of people in your circle who can’t stop talking, but to my mind rap is a defect, rather than an accomplishment. That rappers are able to concatenate a mass of one and two-syllable words into highly simplified rhyming meters demonstrates mostly that the speaker’s thought process revolves around monosyllabic chunks falteringly expressed in the vocabulary of a pre-teen.

34

Here’s something that may provide a clue and a time to when and why the change happened.

From George H. Douglas, The Golden Age of the Newspaper.

35

Well, I guess I can only say that I do not feel this is a fair or accurate description of rap or the verbal skill that goes into it.

36

Well, they spoke more “properly”, because that was their role. That was the Three Stooges’ schtick. Set up an upper class, sophisticated setting, and then enter the Three Stooges, whose lack of sophistication, common speech, and tendency toward physical violence, causes conflict. The Marx brothers did it also. Witness Groucho’s exchanges with Margaret Dumont. It’s a standard vaudevillian routine…high class meets no class.

37

On a family trip when I was 9, I decided that I could talk continuously for as long as anyone wanted. It took about 5 minutes for them to admit I was right.

Doing rap would have been slightly easier, since what they’re saying often doesn’t form continuous thoughts for more than a couple lines.

In comparison, I’d consider giving an unprepared speech on any topic in a British debating club, as I described, quite challenging.

To get back to the OP, to do what the Elizabethans did, which was compose coherent poetry, in complex meter, on the fly, is beyond any skill I ever had.

So my answer to the OP is, yes, they were more eloquent. FAR more eloquent.

38

Have you ever listened to MC Solaar? French rappist…he has one song (and many of his songs are like this) that goes “la concubine de l’hemoglobine…” that’s all I can remember.
If you don’t know French, that means “the concubine (or mistress, whichever you prefer) of the hemoglobin.” Now, I happen to think that that’s a very eloquent way of saying that someone is dear to your heart, don’t you think? Since I don’t listen to rap music much, I don’t have any english examples though.

I’ll have to agree with past posters that the writing reflects high society and the desire to only preserve what they deemed truly worthy. When Celine, a turn of the 19/20th century French author, wrote in the common usage of the day (for example, saying c’est pas instead of ce n’est pas), he created a storm of protest from critics and academics. It was seen as a measure of your intellect to write in eloquent, complicated prose (or poetry), and since you were writing to the intellectuals, then you wouldn’t need to write as the common person wrote.

Now, we have very much deconstructed the intellectual/common barrior…we still have intellectuals, but they aren’t the untouchable, superior caste of past centuries. They don’t need to prove themselves with eloquent prose, rather, they do so with ideas and concepts.

And I’ll have to strongly disagree with people who say english is degenerating…I frequently use large words in speech and writing, simply because they are more precise than the simpler words. Every once in a while, there’ll be someone who doesn’t know what it means (I mean, how often do people use juxtaposition in a phrase? That’s what I use sometimes because it’s a much more succinct way of putting it), but I won’t necessarily hold it against them. Grammar mistakes are what really bug me.

But the thing is, you don’t have time to proofread your words when you say them. Churchill’s speeches (I believe) were written and proofread beforehand. So were Mitterand and Chirac’s. All the works of literature certainly were. So English may not sound as good as what we read…but you don’t talk really slowly while your brain considers every word you say, what it conveys and all its various meanings (well sometimes, but if you did this often nobody would want to talk to you…), you just talk. Maybe someone should invent the Microsoft grammar check for speech errors and eloquent prose?

39

Partly_Warmer, I challenge you, then – if rap is something so easy a 9-year-old can do it, try it now. Without forethought, give us a decent rap. You can type it, but no revising, and no thinking ahead of time: make it improv.

The rap I’ve listened to has highly complex rhyming structures behind it. Internal rhymes, near-rhymes, puns, and other forms of wordplay are at the heart of the best stuff I’ve heard. I’m no aficionado, but I know enough to know that it’s not easily and accurately dismissed.

A couple years ago, my SO was reading a journal kept by a whoring slavemaster from the American South. I looked at some of the entries, and stand before you today to tell you that not all journals from the 19th century reflect eloquence or erudition. One of them, at least, would be improved by translation into 133t speak.

My guess is that nonacademics rarely see such journals: the poorly-written ones don’t get published for popular consumption. At best, they gather dust in archives; at worst, they moulder away in attics, or get thrown out when descendants move to a new home.

It would be interesting to study conversations from the last couple centuries (perhaps recorded by ethnologists) and compare sentence complexity, word variety, and so forth. I don’t know if it’d be feasible, given the paucity of recorded conversations from the late 19th century, but it would be interesting.

Degrance said,

I’m sure you think you’re right – but in the end, when I converse, pentameter’s my friend.

Daniel

40

IANASS (Shakespeare scholar), but it’s my opinion that his non-noble characters do accurately reflect the vernacular. One must remember that Shakespeare’s plays are written in meter as a memory aid for the actors, which gives us the impression that his writing is distanced from the speech of the everyday people. My server’s acting up, but I’ll be back later with cites.