# Is the English Language undergoing a massive process of simplification? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 23, 2018, 8:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416 "2018-07-23T08:13:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2018, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/41 "2018-07-24T16:45:29Z")
> [@Ashtura](#): > > Why wouldn’t you say, “Could you hand me her book?” This does not require further clarification. This doesn’t seem like a good example. Of course you could say it like that. The example was just a demonstration of the forms in question _ **only** _. But anyone who’s ever done a formal study in discourse analysis (or conversation analysis), where we record people talking in real life, and transcribe everything they say–every pause, every overlap, every “um” and “ah,” every discourse marker particle, and direction of gaze and gesturing–EVERYTHING–and analyze how people employ all of that as part of the totality of human communication–will tell you that when people talk, they often DON’T just automatically employ the least ambiguous and efficient ways to express themselves, and human communication often involves quite a bit of backtracking, negotiation of meaning, and re-clarification, etc. Real language, as people use it in real life, _ **is messy** _–much in contrast to how it’s perceived in threads like this. People don’t stop before they speak and think, “Hmmm, how can I say this in a way that will not require further clarification.” Moreover, interlocutors approach a conversation with different perspectives, different motivations, and–most importantly for the example here–different pools of shared knowledge, so things like respective deictic reference, etc., are not always congruent. The antiseptic examples people make up out of thin air for this message board usually don’t reflect that. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2018, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/42 "2018-07-24T17:10:44Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > I’m not a prescriptivist. I’m a linguistic agnostic. Language is both mutable and flexible. But attempting to claim that rules _don’t exist_ is frankly stupid, as evidenced by the fact that you can read this post. I don’t know what a linguistic agnostic might be, but you’re not painting yourself in a good light here. The misguided notion that descriptivism (i.e. all of linguistics, and empirical science) means “rules don’t exist” is a trope repeated _ad nauseam_ by willfully ignorant prescriptivists. It’s at about the same level of discourse as the creationist trope “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys”. All languages have sophisticated rules of grammar that native speakers (of any level of literacy) follow instinctively. We acquire the rules as children, but not through being taught them explicitly - our parents and peers cannot themselves _articulate_ the rules in abstract form. We unconsciously infer the abstract general rules based on the examples of usage that we hear around us. It’s a remarkable process, and the underlying cognitive mechanisms are controversial. > **[Language acquisition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition)** > > Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. > Language acquisition involves structures, rules, and representation. The capacity to successfully use language requires human beings to acquire a range of tools, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive v... To take a simple example, Subject-Verb-Object word order (as opposed to the less common Subject-Object-Verb). The extensive true rules of language are followed flawlessly by all native speakers. However, you will never hear a prescriptivist discuss these true rules of language because they are followed unconsciously and universally by everyone. Most people (other than linguists) cannot articulate them and are not even aware of them. But language evolves, and sometimes some of these rules change - perhaps a prior strict rule relaxes, with two grammatical variants becoming prevalent in common usage. At this point, a linguist will observe the language empirically, note that the rules have changed, and perhaps study the process through which the change came about. But a prescriptivist will typically now step in and insist that only one of the variants is “correct”. The prescriptivist will present arguments that one variant is better in some sense: perhaps that accepting both variants will compromise clear communication, or that accepting both variants constitutes degeneration of the purity of the language. But whatever the merits of these arguments, the sole variant that the prescriptivist accepts is invariably the one that conforms to the stricter rule that the prescriptivist is _familiar_ with, the now obsolete rule that he learned when he acquired the language himself. A good rule of thumb for the tracking the evolution of the rules of language: any rule that is discussed by a prescriptivist is not a rule. ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2018, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/43 "2018-07-24T18:45:59Z")
I don’t speak Spanish - but I’m 99.9% certain that the issue is the same as it is in Italian, where “suo libro” means both “his book” _and_ “her book” . Asking “His book or her book?” in Italian makes as much sense as asking " His book or his book?" does in English. " Could you hand me _her_ book?" uses exactly the same words as " Could you hand me _his_ book?" , so that wouldn’t be any more clear. ``` I believe **Nava's** mistake is using *his *and* hers *incorrectly. ``` ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2018, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/44 "2018-07-24T19:02:05Z")
> [@doreen](#): > > I don’t speak Spanish - but I’m 99.9% certain that the issue is the same as it is in Italian, where “suo libro” means both “his book” _and_ “her book” . Asking “His book or her book?” in Italian makes as much sense as asking " His book or his book?" does in English. " Could you hand me _her_ book?" uses exactly the same words as " Could you hand me _his_ book?" , so that wouldn’t be any more clear. > > ``` > I believe **Nava's** mistake is using *his *and* hers *incorrectly. > > ``` Right. So, for example, someone (a Spanish speaker) is telling you a narrative about something involving another person you don’t know, who at first is identified as female. Then the Spanish speaker will say, for example, “Then I saw his book,” and you get confused and have to interrupt and say, “_ **His** _ book or _ **her** _ book?” The Spanish speaker stops, gets frustrated, and says, “Oh, yeah, I meant _ **her** _ book.” Happens all the time. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2018, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/45 "2018-07-24T19:51:05Z")
> [@doreen](#): > > I don’t speak Spanish - but I’m 99.9% certain that the issue is the same as it is in Italian, where “suo libro” means both “his book” _and_ “her book” . Asking “His book or her book?” in Italian makes as much sense as asking " His book or his book?" does in English. " Could you hand me _her_ book?" uses exactly the same words as " Could you hand me _his_ book?" , so that wouldn’t be any more clear. > > ``` > I believe **Nava's** mistake is using *his *and* hers *incorrectly. > > ``` So singular they solves this one, in terms of neatly mapping what Spanish does into English? I can understand **Nava** ’s confusion now, thank you. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2018, 12:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/46 "2018-07-25T00:55:43Z")
Every language has rules. Every dialect has rules. Every person’s individual dialect (the usual term for that is “idiolect”) has rules. Actually, I would rather say that each of those has a structure, rather than rules. Using the term “rules” makes it sound like this is just about grammar, while it’s really about grammar, meaning, pronunciation, and vocabulary (and anything else you can think of that’s part of language). The structure of languages, dialects, and even idiolects differs from person to person. Usually we say that if two persons can’t understand each other, they speak two different languages and if they can, they speak two different dialects, but that’s an arbitrary boundary. The boundaries between dialects isn’t just geographic. It also depends on income, occupation, social class, education, sex, ethnic group, race, and many other things. Even two persons who would seem to match up on all those things still often have tiny differences between the structure of their languages, which is why we need the term “idiolect”. Yes, there are “standard” dialects of languages. These are the ones used in printed material, for instance. They are used in language courses. They are how people speaking that language are expected to speak. That doesn’t mean that anyone’s idiolect is not a language. It doesn’t mean that they are too stupid to use or understand the standard grammar of that language. It just means their idiolect, which is the complete structure of their language, might be quite far from the standard language. Now, there may be important reasons that in many situations it’s necessary to have a standard language, but that doesn’t mean that nonstandard languages aren’t languages, nor does it mean that people who don’t speak that standard language are stupid or rebellious or evil. They just have a different structure to their idiolect. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2018, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/47 "2018-07-25T01:08:07Z")
> [@guizot](#): > > Right. So, for example, someone (a Spanish speaker) is telling you a narrative about something involving another person you don’t know, who at first is identified as female. Then the Spanish speaker will say, for example, “Then I saw his book,” and you get confused and have to interrupt and say, “_ **His** _ book or _ **her** _ book?” The Spanish speaker stops, gets frustrated, and says, “Oh, yeah, I meant _ **her** _ book.” Happens all the time. Interesting. The book has a gender that the pronoun has to match, so the owner of the book doesn’t get a gender. English has definite and indefinite articles - and some other languages have only one of those, or neither (Russian has neither - so is Russian more simple than English?) ---
**Author:** ![MarvinKitFox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ba0ec/32.png) [@MarvinKitFox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MarvinKitFox)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/48 "2018-07-27T07:09:55Z")
> [@PlaceboTarget](#): > > When I last asked a question about an English structure here, some of the people advanced the idea that the subjonctive seems to be fading in a process that can be regarded as simplification. Having studying the topic on the Internet for a while I understand how simplified forms can be adopted as a result of standardization, but dropping noun cases and verb moods appears to be more massive than just turning ‘lit’ into ‘lighted’. Only among that segment of the population that cannot spell, nor utilize functional grammar. “sunjonctive”? “Having studying”? really? ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 8:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/49 "2018-07-27T08:27:03Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > This doesn’t match your explanation. Possessive articles in Spanish are neuter. So what mistake does this tend to cause when speaking English? Not all possesive articles are neuter in Spanish. Imagine you are on a holiday where you get a house to live in and a car to drive: _la casa_ (feminine) and _el coche_ (masc.). The houses are ll in a row by the road and the cars are parked in front. If you ask: _¿Cual es el mío?_ you are asking which one (of the male things, thus the cars) is for you. If you ask _¿Cual es la mía?_ You are asking which house is yours. \*Mío \*and \*mía \*are possevive pronouns and gendered in Spanish, mine is not gendered, therefore you have to add supplementary information (more words) to express what you want to ask. But if instead of seeing the place to live as a \*casa \*you regard it as an _apartamento_, both the car and the appartment become masculine and you have to add more words in Spanish too. But the articles do indeed become neuter if you just say: _esta es mi casa, este es mi coche_. But there are more possesive articles in Spanish than just mi and su: _mío, mía, suyo, suya, nuestro, nuestra, tuyo, tuya, vuestro, vuestra_ plus the plural forms (and I guess I am forgetting some). ---
**Author:** ![PlaceboTarget](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/placebotarget/32/1073_2.png) [@PlaceboTarget](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlaceboTarget)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/50 "2018-07-27T18:05:53Z")
> [@MarvinKitFox](#): > > “sunjonctive”? I don’t know what this is but it looks like a spelling mistake. :dubious: Why are we talking about it? > [@MarvinKitFox](#): > > “Having studying”? > really? Really. Or was it rhetorical? ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416/51 "2018-07-27T19:25:08Z")
> [@Pardel-Lux](#): > > Not all possesive articles are neuter in Spanish. Imagine you are on a holiday where you get a house to live in and a car to drive: _la casa_ (feminine) and _el coche_ (masc.). The houses are ll in a row by the road and the cars are parked in front. If you ask: _¿Cual es el mío?_ you are asking which one (of the male things, thus the cars) is for you. If you ask _¿Cual es la mía?_ You are asking which house is yours. \*Mío \*and \*mía \*are possevive pronouns and gendered in Spanish, mine is not gendered, therefore you have to add supplementary information (more words) to express what you want to ask. > But if instead of seeing the place to live as a \*casa \*you regard it as an _apartamento_, both the car and the appartment become masculine and you have to add more words in Spanish too. > But the articles do indeed become neuter if you just say: _esta es mi casa, este es mi coche_. But there are more possesive articles in Spanish than just mi and su: _mío, mía, suyo, suya, nuestro, nuestra, tuyo, tuya, vuestro, vuestra_ plus the plural forms (and I guess I am forgetting some). These are all examples of Spanish usage. They aren’t illustrations of errors that Spanish speakers make when they’re speaking English. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-english-language-undergoing-a-massive-process-of-simplification/818416.md?page=2)