The Lost Art Of Writing

[HDoug]

Since we're talking about words and meanings, here's a Ted video (stream or download) of Erin McKean redefining the dictionary. Kind of an oldy (2007, I think) but I just ran into it and it seems like some following this thread might enjoy (or hate!).

 

Doug

[DAYoung]

I agree absolutely. My point was that the term (and therefore the motive behind it concerning language) may seem dated, not that it is. I'm going to suggest that to many younger people, the simple fact of when he wrote will be enough to discredit his ideas. In this I will be wrong in many instances, I know, but in many more instances, I believe, there is something in it.

 

Yes. And it's not only young people (by which, I'm guessing, you mean folks under forty or fifty). Plenty of mature scholars also believe that old ideas are inherently dubious.

 

Now, it's certainly true that facts and theories grow stale, and require constant testing and elaboration. But recognising this does not commit us to intellectual amnesia, which sometimes afflicts even the brightest minds.

[Chevalier]

@Kate

Thanks for pointing out the "You had better" problem.

 

Well, this is the crux with living languages, they change a lot. It's interesting that a certain degree of ignorance seems to be an important factor. "Transpire", as it is used in contemporary English, is already a case of changed meaning. Most other languages only understand the meaning similar to evaporating (Transpiration -> Evaporation). You say transpire .. and the French or German guy will think you are talking about sweating.

 

I am unable to judge many cases you are talking about, because I am living in the German speaking world for too long, but I know similar problems frequently seen in Germany. I learned German in school first, from a very good German teacher. I am still confused, because I found many people using something that appears to me like a pidgin German. I asked myself "How could they let that happen to their language", and it took me a long time to understand that this development is perfectly normal.

I know German better than English now, even better than most native speakers, simply because I invested a lot of time learning it. Many people won't bother that much, they use it every day on the streets, why bother learning the subtleties? I don't think this way, but I kinda understand why they think this way. Language is an instrument of communication, and many people are fine as long as they understand the everyday speech.

 

Grammar and standardized high languages are pretty new inventions, inventions of the scholars, not the common people. Launguage is a complex collection of willful decisions to speak something *this* way. There's always the language of books and scholars, and then there are the languages of all those other people around. This is nothing new, in fact nobody in ancient Rome would have speaken literary Latin on the streets. German is rather small, compared to the States, but they have many different kinds of German. It's not only the way how something is pronunced that is different, even the grammar and use of certain words is.

[Chevalier]

.. would have spoken ..

 

You see, there's my pidgin English :roflmho:.

 

There's one thing I am concerned about, it came to my mind while reading my former post again. My thinking was still "switched" to German while writing the former post, hence the strange mistakes. Our language, and especially the subtelties (or better the lack of knowing them), are limiting our inner world and the ability to tell people what we are thinking.

 

Sure, not everybody can be a highly educated person, but we need to make sure that a language doesn't lose it's subtelties. This is the real problem, because nobody would be able to think about the subtle destinctions anymore. Latin, like ancient Greek before, served as a buffer, for a pretty long time, but this buffer is vanishing quickly now.