I have conflicting feelings about language standards and change. on the one hand, I can’t help but wince when I hear unconventional or “incorrect” use of a language, particularly my own. that’s not to say that I don’t make mistakes, or that I don’t even always know what’s correct (though I’m trying), but some speakers just do physical violence to your ears. for instance, I am not much of a fan of any dialects that collapse our not-that-complex verbal inflection, whether not distinguishing between singular or plural (I go, he go, we go) or doing away with any auxiliary verbs (what you say? for what did you say?), not to mention swapping verbal forms and creating entirely new auxiliaries (we done went to the store). (though this last one is actually quite charming.)
on the other hand, I don’t pretend for one minute that a language is anything but fluid and constantly changing. (I particularly love that patently Germanic feature of English that allows for the growth of new words through initial hyphenation and eventual integration of words, e.g., inasmuchas). languages are living things, and though they often change in predictable patterns based on the physical limitations of speech and hearing — and they usually head in the direction of being simpler, more regular — you never quite know where a language will go. anyone who pretends that contemporary language changes are corrupting a hitherto unchanging way of speaking or doing grammar cannot have any real clue about the history of that language, not to mention the ways in which languages change in general. all of them. plus, those “ungrammatical” quirks are usually quite regular, which makes them, in linguistic terms at least, grammatical.
so should I be so upset about failures to inflect in English today? after all, Old English inflected for gender, as did the Norman French that so dramatically transformed the mother tongue, but we don’t sit around bemoaning this fact, do we? and as for a failure to differentiate a singular or plural verb, some languages today have already lost this distinction and are doing just fine (by me, anyway). Swedish, for instance, no longer inflects for number, though its predecessor, Old Norse, did. does it really matter that we still distinguish the third person singular, saying I go but he goes? why not officially do away with it, then?
chances are that irregular features of the language will continue to drop off over time. in fact, the relative stability of the spoken language over the past half a millennium is somewhat astounding, and must owe its success to the roles that printing and literacy have held in the last few centuries. whereas literary languages, especially when in the tight control of an elite group, such as scribes or priests, are more than capable of remaining fixed over longer periods of time, spoken languages go through dramatic changes unless the speakers are relatively isolated, or their communities insulated. Icelandic is a great example, which has maintained an impressive stability over the centuries (due also in part to a “purism” movement in the 18th century designed at bolstering the language and removing too many foreign words). in fact, if you want to learn Old Norse, some linguists suggest that you just learn modern Icelandic and then go from there.
in any age you can find a number of stuffy old farts bah, humbug!ing the decline and corruption of the language. but then you realize that were it not for this ongoing flexibility and creativity of the language (and its speakers), we would never have arrived at some of the literary giants of this past century, whose inventiveness and linguistic borrowings are what excite me so much about language! (think here of James Joyce, or more contemporary writers like Salman Rushdie or Junot Diaz).
nevertheless, I can’t help but feel somewhat anxious about the idea of too much change coming too fast. fortunately, with so many people speaking English today — especially those estimated 1.4 billion people learning it as a second language — there isn’t much tolerance for every single regional or cultural dialect and peculiar feature. no one has the patience to learn anything but the most normative, widespread version. the cumulative result is that it takes a significant influence to introduce non-kosher changes throughout the entire web of speakers.
however, this same large body of native speakers and non-native learners will also likely contribute to the “flattening” of the language in terms of making it more regular. when children are learning a language, they have a fantastic innate ability to create the grammar of the language they are learning based on what they hear, and their tendency is to establish regular, predictable patterns. this is why they will always add “-ed” to make a verb past tense unless taught otherwise. and linguists have shown that we have to create entirely new entries in our “mental dictionary” for irregular forms of a verb, such as “went” instead of “goed.” would we really be so much worse off if the latter were adopted as the normative form? though I have to wonder what the chances of this happening naturally are given the fact that even in Old English there were already three different verbs making up the paradigm for expressing the idea of “to be.” so this irregularity has proved rather regular over the past millennium or so.
in the end, I have to stay open minded and flexible about language variants and change — especially when it comes to written grammatical norms (e.g., punctuation standards), which seem to be changing faster than anything else — and enjoy the quirks and convoluted history of this language, at least at a safe distance in literature and poetry. and though I don’t count on seeing any major changes happening in my lifetime, I fully expect our language to continue to interact with other major world languages as we (hopefully) increase our cultural, political, and economic ties with other nations. and I fully expect — and welcome! — the inevitable overlappings and sharings between English and the Spanish of Latin America as we reimagine a shared “American” (North, Central, and South) identity.
I already knew that in any “cultural wars” debate regarding reactions to this book, I sided with Rushdie. in fact, I put down Karen Armstrong’s book on Islam (and then traded it in) because she starts it off by posturing rather negatively towards the literary giant. (and also because there was a gargantuan typo on the very first page: goal was used instead of gaol. how embarrassing.) I’m not saying I believe nothing is sacred — not saying I don’t believe that, though — but I do think an essential criterion for living in the modern world (esp. the modern West, with our unique history of free thought on skepticism with regard to religion, not to mention varying degrees of emphasizing tolerance) is that you cannot expect or even ask others to treat what you hold sacred in the same manner as you. you don’t get to lay that on everyone else.
Recent Comments