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The future of English

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kitano

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Re: The future of English
« Reply #45 on: March 30, 2010, 04:33:50 PM »
data/datum :D
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Day Dreamer

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Re: The future of English
« Reply #46 on: April 01, 2010, 02:46:34 AM »
Many know the mouse/mice, now try to ask them the SINGULAR of dice. At any age, if they didn't know before, they laugh (laff) hysterically when told  ahahahahah


All those words that fall into the or/our debate, personally, I like U. (but not too much)
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For you to insult me, first I must value your opinion
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Calach Pfeffer

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Re: The future of English
« Reply #47 on: April 28, 2010, 04:14:04 PM »
Casualties of international English
Brenda Townsend Hall, PhD.
February 28, 2009

Hello again,

English is increasingly taking over as the language of international scholarship. I edit my fair share of doctoral theses and academic articles. I could of course deplore the general decline in writing standards rather than focus on the effect of non-native speakers publishing in English, but I think the two issues ...

...have separate effects.

With non-native speakers likely eventually to outnumber those publishing with English as their mother tongue, I predict that some niceties of the language will be irretrievably lost. There will losses in grammatical forms and these will occur where the native usage is over-complex. I have seen a creeping disintegration of the standard use of articles, for example. The definite article is often deictic and its use or not depends on whether there has been an antecedent. Take abstract nouns. Normally we use them without an article. “Happiness is a state of mind.” But if we continue, we might need to use an article deictically: “happiness is a state of mind: the happiness of one person might be another’s misery”. Increasingly I find non-native writers unable to cope with this anaphoric use of the article.

Nuance in the choice of words is also being lost. Some words may not be exactly pejorative but have negative overtones. Take the sentence: “he drew up a tentative list of for the agenda.” We know what is meant, but tentative smacks of indecision and timidity. A better choice would be “provisional”. These nuances of meaning are often lost in the writing of non-native speakers.

Increasing redundancy is another feature of international English. Non-native speakers often lack the confidence to write succinctly and believe that verbosity lends them credibility. It doesn’t, but the tendency is often overlooked by editors and this creeping prolixity seems to be part of the international style.

I realise I probably sound judgemental over these matters. I do, I must confess, miss the elegant prose of earlier times, and sometimes I worry that English may go the same way as Latin. But largely I am interested in observing language change. Researchers at the University of Reading have produced software that analyses the age of words and predicts what will die out. The supercomputer, called ThamesBlue, can model the evolution of words in English and the wider family of Indo-European languages over the last 30 000 years. It predicts that words such as “squeeze” and “dirty” will die out. Logically, the researchers, show that infrequent use contributes to a word’s demise. Conversely, I suggest, the constant drip-feed of different usage in international English will produce meaning change and grammar change.
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when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0
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