I don’t know how many of you studied the Canterbury Tales in Middle English(1400), but it might as well be Latin for all the ability of the average person to understand it. Sure, some words are familiar, but not enough to have a conversation.
Fast forward to 1600 and Shakespeare is reasonably understandable. Much like listening to someone with a thick accent.
From there on it’s more of a challenge to know what words and phrases actually mean than understanding the words.
Now, in the past 100 years, we’ve been recording everything with near perfect fidelity. Okay, not quite so perfect in the beginning, but close enough for my purpose.
Sure, words will continue to be added and meanings will drift, but I expect the basic bones to remain static for centuries.
How long is it going to be for Star Wars to be dubbed into Post Modern English? Or just digitally CGI remastered.
For the record though, if you read it out loud, it’s noticeably closer to comprehensible than the written words would indicate, to the degree that I suspect you could communicate, although as you said, probably not a nuanced discussion.
But the evolution of language, as opposed to the evolution of English is a very different thing. For example, French is a very regulated language, and has been for a considerable length of time, AND AND was preserved as a literate language for a much greater length of time than the gutteral pidgen that English was considered during the early eras. Back in college when my French from high school was much more fresh, I found reading Cretien de Troyes (hundreds of years older than Chaucer) was MUCH clearer than Canterbury tales.
But I doubt people say that the French language doesn’t evolve, just more slowly, and in a more directed manner.
Now that most modern languages have reached a certain plateau of sophistication, number of speakers, and preservation, they are all likely to remain more or less stable. Niche, low population pidgens, jargons, and the like are much faster to mutate as it were, due to the smaller population base.
Heck, I went back to read an old comic from 10-15 years ago that was making fun of l337$5p3@k and it was nearly impossible to read because many of the conventions of that lingo had fallen away, although some of it had become more mainstream if anything (LOL, ROFL, etc).
[ l337$p3@k / leetspeak for any who didn’t participate in said subculture or too tired to try to decipher it ]
Back to your final note, I doubt that anytime in the next few hundred years (if humanity or our culture survives) will see a re-dubbed Star Wars for anything other than (another) cash grab. And Shakespeare will likely be read in the original still without appreciably more contextual notes than it is now.
Indeed. Listening to the reading the OP posted, I comprehended it a lot better than I ever have just by reading the text. The archaic spelling is a lot harder to wrap one’s head around than the spoken word, because we intuitively try to read it with the modern pronunciation and lose the meaning in the process.
Actually, linguists have observed that language evolves much more slowly in small populations. The number of innovations seems to increase with the number of possible innovators. A friend of mine from northern Minnesota told me about some Danish linguists who came to small town there to study the 19th century Danish spoken by the inhabitants.
I think English has changed (mostly in new words) noticeably in my lifetime. Just to mention one example, my children’s generation has pretty unanimously replaced the word “problem” by “issue”, a change I find annoying.
See, I agree and disagree with that Hari. The studies (and your point) are absolutely correct when it comes to preserving a language that is no longer heavily in use. I’ve seen similar studies when it comes to Minnesotans of Scandinavian heritage who similarly ‘fossilized’ the original settlers dialects.
Which is why I was (perhaps clumsily, granted) talking more about pidgins, jargon, and other similar rapidly expanding sub-dialects where the need to add to the communicative density pushes the evolution of that dialect. Yiddish growing (in part, hugely simplified) out of Germanic and Hebrew roots in order for a community to communicate.
But yes, I was clumsy, and overly simplistic, so I did want to apologize.
Yes, I’m not sure where the idea that evolution proceeds more slowly in large populations came from. (That’s not true for biological evolution either.) Nor the idea that audio recordings might inhibit evolution - we don’t learn our first language by listening to recordings.
A big driver of language evolution is the desire of the younger generation to assert their identity, and in particular to differentiate themselves from older people. That’s equally strong today - and I’m pretty sure that young people don’t verify that their usage is correct by comparing it to recordings of old people. They want to conform to their peers, ideally in a manner that does not conform to old people. And “trendy” mutations that arise can spread throughout the population much more quickly today.
I’ve thought that big pronunciation shifts are less likely due to the recorded word. But other changes like new words or changed meanings would seem to still be in play.
