OJ: "beckoning grave"! mornings are your blogging peak time

Isn't there a saying, "To the Victor Belongs the Spoils." We get to pick which language we want to use and the rest of the world can sign on or miss out.

Our son is a physicist. Traditionally, scientific papers were published in German and French. Now they're in English. English is the lingua franca of science, business, air traffic controllers, probably lots of other areas too.

Smart people all over the world make sure their kids learn how to speak English.

computer programs.

As long as we're coining ugly words, let's make up one as ugly as possible: Deutsche-glish. Sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball with shreds of a Nietzsche essay mixed in.

Languages change all the time unless you have an Academie Francaise telling you what can and cannot be in your language. This is nothing new, and English has been the beneficiary of such organic change probably more than any other, with large numbers of words from Latin, French and German and German dialects among countless others.

The use of the word 'moment' by a German is of no more moment or 'Blick' for that matter than the use of the word 'Glockenspiel' by an Anglophone.

I don't know why this is such a big deal; we've been doing this for centuries. I don't know who said it originally, but "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

Putting it another way, if you speak English, you're actually speaking an amalgamation of several languages.

Just think of English as open source software that anyone is free to add their words and phrases to, and then if it catches on with the general population it becomes part of the main language code. So if French or German dies off, a few key words will survive on within English, taking their place next to other exhalted terms like "bling-bling".

How many people say "Gesundheit" when someone sneezes? At least, everyone in the Midwest does. I didn't even know what it actually meant until I started taking German classes.

If it happens, it will probably take several hundred years for German to pass.

Keep in mind that if an English speaker from three hundred years ago were to suddenly appear and strike up a conversation, you would scarcely be able to understand.

Jeff:

Really?

I was able to understand 18th century stuff like Wealth of Nations and Locke's work quite easily.

Left unfettered, language is one of the purest iterations of an efficient market.

Printing and literacy standardized the language so that change is actually far slower than it used to be. The change from Chaucer to Shakespeare(250 years) is far greater than from Shakespeare(400 years) to the present day.

We read Chaucer in Middle English in High School.

Whan that Abrill with his shoure souchte, the drocht of Marche hath perced to the roote and bathed every veyne in swich liquore, of which vertu engendered is the fleur.

It's as clear as any academic paper explaining it.

So in what language was "Finnegan's Wake" written?

Raoul:

The point of it is that it be incomprehensible:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/991/

A lot of good points already made above, one of the best by Roy J. English was always an absorbtive language. It joined threads from various sources, and conitues to pick up words from everywhere with shall we say, merry abandon.

This adaptabilty is almost the definition of evolutionary superiority from a Spencerian viewpoint. English what works and throws it into its linguistic arsenal. We like a slavic word for artificial worker? It's ours. A Tagalog word for the hinterland? Ditto.

What we are seeing throughout the world is an accereration of the process of linguistic adaption through technology. Will there be some additions to English as a result of this? Of course, just as there were as a result of the Roman and Norman conquests. Do we mind? Not at all.

English will continue to adapt and prosper, and the languages stuck in the past, French, German, Arabic, "Ebonics," and all the rest, will just sort of sputter along, every now and then winking out of existence.

Ali:

Perhaps my several hundred year notion was a bit short, but try reading any Shakespeare. Then imagine having to understand it spoken, probably in an accent you have never heard.

Lou:

Well said. But English will do the same, only its speakers will never realize it.

Jeff,

If you try speaking Shakespeare in a Cockney accent, not unlike Michael Caine's, you will get the flavor of what Shakespeare's English was supposed to sound like. If you can visualize what that sounds like, Shakespeare is actually quite easy.

Germans, unlike the French, are not afraid of neo-logisms.

Beowulf is a great read in Old English.