Questão 331983

Slowly does it

Feb 19th 2015, 17:34 BY R.L.G. | BERLIN

LAST week’s column looked at the long history oflanguage declinism: for more than 600 years peoplehave complained that youngsters cannot write properEnglish anymore, and even ancient Sumerianschoolmasters worried about the state of the “scribal art”in the world’s first written language. Two universal truthsemerge: languages are always changing, and olderpeople always worry that the young are not takingproper care of the language.

But what if the sticklers have a point? Of courselanguage always changes, but could technology (or asimple increase in youthful insouciance and lack ofrespect for tradition) mean that in some ages it changesfaster than in others? Is change accelerating? In thiscase, a real problem could arise. Even if languagechange is not harmful, the faster language changes, theless new generations will be able to understand whattheir forebears wrote.

The Middle English quotation in last week’s column________ the point for some readers: it is all butimpenetrable to modern understanding without specialtraining. It is, in effect, a foreign language. Is this aproblem? Perhaps it is too much to expect writing to stayfresh on the shelf for 600 years. More recent writingholds up quite well. Pupils read Shakespeare with onlymodernised spelling and a bit of help from teachers. AndThomas Jefferson and Jane Austen are perfectlyreadable.

But maybe a greater conservatism would let modernreaders peer further back in their own literary history. Ifchange had been slower, perhaps Chaucer would beonly as difficult as Shakespeare is to us; “Beowulf” onlyas distant as Chaucer is now. What’s not to like?

The problem is that conservatism works differently onwriting than it does on speech. Writing is morepermanent, so people choose their words carefully andconservatively. It is slow and considered, so people canavoid new usages widely seen as mistakes. It is taughtcarefully by adults to children, which naturally exertssome conservative drag on the written language. And itis often edited, so (say) a young journalist with a breezycontemporary style may well be edited to a moretraditional one by an older editor.

Speech is different: instead of permanent, slow,considered and taught, it is impermanent, fast,spontaneous and learned naturally by children from theirsurroundings. Speech will—at almost any level of linguistic conservatism—change faster than writtenlanguage.

The problem with overly successful conservatism thenbecomes clear. Speech moves on, writing does not, andthe two diverge over time. Take just one example:English spelling. As with all languages, thepronunciation of English has changed a lot over thecenturies. Spelling has changed much more slowly.Thanks to the Great Vowel Shift of the middle of the lastmillennium, English uses vowels differently from almostall other European languages. Silent letters likethe gh in night are a remnant of an earlier pronunciation(a bit like the German nicht). Other odd spellings wereintended to keep etymologies clear: a b was insertedinto debt to show the link with Latin debitum. Somelinguistic innovations do not make it into writing at all:nearly everyone says gonna and writes going to.________ a language pays homage to the past,_________modern schoolchildren will find learning towrite a bit like learning to speak a foreign tongue.