English today is a delightful, expressive train wreck of grammar and spelling madness. But Old English really was not. It was a much more earthy, simple, and consistent language. Old English had a total of about 40,000 words. Today's English has almost half a million.
I'll take the opportunity to plug a fantastic podcast on the history of English, creatively named "The History of English Podcast".
I love that too. English was spelled phonetically all the way up until the late 1400s, I believe. One fun by-product of purely phonetic spelling is that you could tell the accent of the author by the way they spelled words.
So, little to no major works of anglo-saxon or old english were found after his lifetime? I'm surprised that there are no palimpsests or binding materials yielding new writing.
It's amusing that his translations might need their own translations to modern english in a century or two, like he uses forms that already aren't really used anymore (like ye).
XVIII century French for instance, while probably being the peak of the language in term of sophistication and elegance, is hard to read without a lot of footnotes. So many words disappeared, changed meaning, or the grammar itself changed.
Modern English is the English that followed the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between the late 14th century and the 17th century. So not necessarily modern in the colloquial sense.
That's assuming that the language will still be called English anything. It might as well split into American, Australian, British, etc. We don't call French or Spanish modern Latin, do we?
There's also an interesting split occurring with continental Euro-English, which is primarily being spoken by non-native speakers as a lingua franca. The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English.
As a linguist, there is no such dialect of English as 'Euro English'. The idea is borderline non-existent outside of Wikipedia.[0]
In order for there to exist a dialect there must exist some kind of stable distinguishing features, and 'Euro English' has none. The errors that a French speaker makes in English are completely unlike the errors a Greek speaker makes in English, which in turn are completely unlike the errors Czech speakers make in English. What are the stable realisations of the usual English lexical set words (e.g. KIT, DRESS, TRAP etc.) in 'Euro English'? What is the internal grammatical system of 'Euro English'? What are its tenses? What is its syntax? No one has any answers for these questions, which should be trivial to answer for a living dialect.
The highest evidence that the Wiki article can point to is a few items of jargon in European bureaucracy, but this for a dialect does not make. Any random larger organisation is going to have its jargon, particularly a legal one. A staffer on the Hill might have good scuttlebutt about Tuesday's pen and pad, but that doesn't mean there's some kind of emerging dialect of English forming in the halls of US Congress.
It's fine to use 'Euro English' to refer to the few lexical items used in the European bureaucracy, but a few items of jargon are neither unusual, nor sufficient to constitute a dialect.
[0] It's worth noting the most frequently cited source on that Wiki page is a click-baity newspaper article from a British tabloid (Brexit could create a new ‘language’), and that, of the three (!) articles in the bibliography, one treats it solely as a legal jargon, and the other two (Mollin 2006 and Forche 2012) actually reject the idea that Euro English is a dialect. Someone's just on a bit of a frolic on Wikipedia.
It's an interesting page, but I think at the moment it only summarizes common errors of english-as-second-language speakers of other European languages. But there might be a pattern there.
Also I doubt that there is a continuity between the mentioned Erasmus students and staff in the European-union for example. I would assume that's a later addition to the wikipedia article when the most likely subject of Euro english is about patterns of the use of english-language in the EU bureaucracy. Maybe a better title would be EU-administrative English or something of the like.
What's not so often talked about is of course that the pronunciation of english by non-native speakers is different and I do think there is tendency for some convergence among some aspects of pronunciation that I observe in meetings and zoom calls at work. Aspiration of consonants, clearer separation of individual words. The result is that native-speakers - while being more eloquent in English which puts them at some advantage - sometimes have a disadvantage because their advanced use of language is not understood well. IIRC MTV Europe realized that british hosts wouldn't be understood across europe, when english-speaking french/german/italian hosts would.
I think that's about right, yeah - in my experience international gatherings in Europe tends to converge on a sort of continental pidgin English where you shave off all the difficult aspects and end up with this very clear and crisp shared language that's more mutually understandable for everyone involved than any of the ordinary 'native' variants of English.
I think what's less clear is how consistent these convergences are. Certainly I have noticed colloquialisms and alterations to better fit romance and germanic languages that pop up again and again, but at what point does it get consistent enough to be its own 'thing' and not just a handy linguistic tool fashioned for the task at hand?
I would say if German english (Denglish) would pick up French english Idiosyncracies and vice versa, so if the speech patterns aren't just a result of making mistakes in a foreign language, but if they are acquired by other speakers. The Euro-English article gives as an example of Euro-English "Planification" for "Planning" which seems to stem from french / spanish https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/planification . So if the Germans start using planification they would have learned it from the french/spanish Euro-english speakers (I never heard "Planifikation" in German although its actually a word in the dictionary, I looked it up). And that would mean that certain Euro-English features propagate throughout Europe and are more than just Denglish/Frenglish/Swenglish and more than just English-learners messing up vocab/grammar.
While we are talking about language, there definitely are also those folks who move abroad and after a few years when they return they have picked up peculiarities of the language of their host country. The daughter of a neighbor moved to Paris for example and after a few years she started to sound more french. Still spoke perfect german but with an accent. Similarly a coworker who is a US expat in Germany told me he caught himself using some Denglish constructions.
> , based on common mistranslations and the technical jargon of the European Union (EU) and the native languages of its non-native, English-speaking population. It is mostly used among EU staff, expatriates and migrants from EU countries, young international travellers (such as exchange students in the EU's Erasmus programme) and European diplomats with a lower proficiency in the language.
This sounds niche, scattered and irrelevant as far as language making goes. Erasmus students and expatriates? EU staff?
It seems that you need some sort of concentration (virtual or geographical) to make a supposedly second-rate variation of some language. I don’t see how people from all across “continental” Europe which are also so scattered domestically (Erasmus students?) could make something cohesive enough to call it Euro English.
- A Spaniard might say “how you say” but would a Polish person do that?
- A Polish person might drop a lot of articles but would a Spaniard do that?
I’m from Scandinavia and a supposed mistake that people from the Nordic countries commit is to use “blue-eyed” to mean “naive”. And sure that’s a direct translation of the “naive” expression but I have never heard anyone from Scandinavia say that in English.
I see the footnotes for the opening paragraphs are The Independent, the Financial Times and a British linguist. I don’t know what the deal is with the British (similar to Americans but their distance from Europe excuses them IMO) and their insistence that Europe (really “Continental Europe” i.e. Europe which isn’t a bus drive under the English Channel away from the mainland) consists of this uniform blob of non-Anglos who drive scooters, eat baguettes and go to raves. And speak the same pidgin apparently.
> The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English.
That’s a laugh. Language isn’t spread by way of EU diplomats. Regular people are more likely to be “anchored” to American English.
One Czech guy I was talking to recently sounds like he moved to California at the age of nine.
> That’s a laugh. Language isn’t spread by way of EU diplomats. Regular people are more likely to be “anchored” to American English.
American English is the best variant of English because we stole it. Nobody cares if somebody messes with it because, eh, it isn’t ours anyway. Let’s drive this language like a stolen car.
> this uniform blob of non-Anglos who drive scooters, eat baguettes and go to raves. And speak the same pidgin apparently.
Since the rise of the web, and tv and movies before it, regional language divergence is decreasing instead of increasing as it did in the past. Future English will be more globally unified but with more online text chatting influences.
The difference is that education is now ubiquitous and almost everyone who matters is literate. The reason why Latin diverged into Romance languages is that literacy among the secular class died out, and both the elite and the peasants had no knowledge of formal Latin. (The Church did, but it was relatively weak in Early Middle Ages, certainly not strong enough to push the society to use a certain standard of language.)
Sure, if the educational system today collapses and we revert to pre-industrial state like around 500 AD, English will spontaneously develop into a family of mutually unintelligible languages.
I sincerely hope that this won't happen, though, because 95 per cent of humanity would die. We cannot feed 8 billion people with pre-modern technology.
Romans didn't have TVs, and couldn't still listen to recordings of people talking from a century before.
edit: If we're not killed by corruption, the assumption is that people will be enjoying films made in the 1920's and 30's in the 2220's and the 2230's. That's completely unprecedented, and has to pin a language to a certain extent.
Imagine if during the Great Vowel Shift, everybody could listen (and did listen, for entertainment) to people speaking at length from before. It would have ended up a fashion where maybe a couple of features stuck.
In 2230, there will be 300 years of film to watch. The past will overwhelm the present.
There will be more YouTube and TikTok video generated in a year than the previous 300 - 5 most recent years of film/video. 90%+ of youth video consumption will be contemporaneous to the viewer.
Controversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably.
1. Ever wondered why English spelling is so stupid? It's because it's based on an older version of language, but we never decided to update the spelling, so we just roll with it. How is that supposed to change in the future if it hasn't changed so far?
2. At first, text used to be a representation of spoken language. Nowadays communication is mostly via text, so it's more like "speech is acoustic representation of written language" and written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set, at least not as likely as spoken language, which can strongly vary from generation to generation.
3. Smaller languages, which potentially could be a source of new words and grammar, are quickly dying out due to popularity of English. Icelandic didn't evolve much through last thousand of years because its speakers had little contact with speakers of other languages. English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
I don't think we're there yet, but at some point in the future English will reach its "final form" and from there on, only minor changes here and there will happen. Just like the entire world has almost collectively decided to use arabic numerals, or the metric system, and we don't expect any revolutionary changes there anymore.
> Controversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably.
Borg hivemind convergence is a bog-standard HN opinion. Although still controversial enough to elicit replies. ;)
> Smaller languages, which potentially could be a source of new words and grammar, are quickly dying out due to popularity of English. Icelandic didn't evolve much through last thousand of years because its speakers had little contact with speakers of other languages. English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
Mainland Scandinavian languages have plenty of foreign borrowed words from decades ago, long before most people had a reason to know English (or Latin or French or). Today though English in particular should have penetrated Iceland as much as mainland Scandinavia, but Icelandic (according to Icelanders) has plenty of neologisms instead of loanwoards (apparently eschewing lame polysyllabic words like “helicopter”).
Other Scandinavian languages (language communities) could have chosen the same route as they become more influenced by English than even somewhat mutually intelligible neighboring language communities. But they don’t. Proving that language communities can choose to take different routes even in an American Western World Order.
> Controversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably.
(Brit here) Multicultural London English [0] and others like it suggest that language continues to evolve rapidly. I can't even do an MLE accent in the way that I could yorkshire, scouse, etc.
> written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set
Look at the rapid emergence of txt speak, emojis, etc, creating written forms that again rapidly evolve and may be unintelligible to an older generation
> English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
Look at the variety of English used in India. This continues to evolve independently of, say, British English and US English.
I find Indian English fascinating as a tangent to my learning Hindi. From grammatical/auxiliary word 'errors' or quirks that you can relate to Hindi (and probably other Indic languages, I'm just not familiar) to vocabulary or usage that's not incorrect at all, it's just extremely quaint sounding or rare in British English, but for whatever reason so much more common in IE.
(I can't think of a good example for the latter at the moment, for the former I mean things like 'I myself have noticed this' or 'it's common in Indian English only'.)
It also provides one of my favourite words/concepts (which isn't quite an example of the second point as I meant it): timepass. Something you do to pass the time, or a (not exactly positive, nor negative) review of something that served that purpose.
I always wondered if the, common in IT, phrases like 'do the needful' and 'do the necessary' that you hear from Indian English speakers evolved from Hindi phrases.
Interestingly India got "do the needful" from Britain, but then it dropped out of use there, while India kept it.
There are things like that idea though. I hear "different different" from Indian coworkers pretty regularly, which is apparently a direct translation of a common Hindi expression.
I'm not familiar with that one but I believe it - there's a lot of repetition for emphasis like that, and for example 'same same' or 'slowly slowly' (धीरे-धीरे) leaks into Indian English for sure.
(And to be honest, my own if I'm talking to people I attempt to speak Hindi (or Hinglish) with - once you're aware of it it seems pretty natural and effective, all of these things do, which is what I find so fascinating really. I've grown up speaking BrE completely without it, but then you hear it and it makes sense. Even head movements other than nodding-yes and shaking-no: couldn't reproduce them, but somehow they immediately make sense, and are so much more expressive than I know how to be with words, certainly to be so succinct anyway.)
There may not be a big enough corpus for adequate training. The problem with both is that the main people writing would either prefer Latin (or later, French). The number of people who could write and used the vernacular to do so, were small.
Most LLMs do well at Middle English (it is not that difficult of a task). Old English is significantly harder but I have found Claude Opus to give good results.
I guess if money wasn't such a limiting factor, more of us would be productive in different ways later in life. Instead of implementing already invented ideas, we could invent now that we are at the peak of our knowledge and mental capabilities.
It's really hard to justify the financial loss required to (full time) pursue novel ideas when you're middle aged. It's much easier to just put in the 8 hours per day and collect the paycheck.
Live in the US (not a native) and my health insurance is tied to my employment. Coupled with my mortgage, kids' education costs, etc. sustaining what we have is far more pressing than the desire for more money.
Money may not be a limiting factor in that you might actually need a very small amount of money to live on to do something similar to what Benjamin Thorpe did, but Money in the form of existing obligations and the inability to get out of those obligations is very much a limiting factor for just about everyone who reaches that age.
The age of mental peak is also generally the age of most obligations accrued.
Modern life does not make it easy or very safe to live modestly. Obligations are often long term and costs are unpredictable. I don't think most people are kept from pursuing their dreams due to greed...more so by fear.
But looking at this another way: some societies effectively transfer needs into wants by making them contingent on other factors. In the United States, healthcare coverage remains difficult to obtain even if you have significantly above-average wealth or income, unless you have access to an employer's coverage. This has improved somewhat under the ACA, but there's a significant variance on a state-by-state basis.
More generally, though "if money wasn't such a limiting factor" and "Money is rarely a limiting factor as much as the desire for more money" both suggest that it's the pursuit of wealth itself that ZaoLahma and dr_dshiv meant. And there are certainly people, particularly amongst the ultra-wealthy, who seem motivated in this way, with wealth at which access to healthcare simply isn't an issue: they could hire their own doctors, pay out of pocket, or travel to where healthcare access isn't an insane torture device of its own.
Given that there are parts of the world where health insurance is not tied to employment, there may be more relevant axes that the one you're considering.
Wouldn’t that vary from person to person? I have several medications that I objectively need in order to remain healthy. The cost of those would be prohibitively expensive without a good job and/or health insurance.
I think they're trying to suggest that since they survived a period in their life without health insurance and did not experience calamity, that everyone else who needs to live must also be able to do so.
And thus, by extension: Those who cannot live without health insurance needn't remain alive.
I think you'll find that those who pursue anything in mid life are not lacking in what you might deem wants. In no one's value judgement would they jeopardize reliable income, when there's a mortgage and kids that need providing, unless it made no difference. Plus, pursuits themselves often cost money.
Your meaning isn't entirely clear, but I suspect you're agreeing with me.
It's wants that drive the dynamic originally commented on. It's the confusion of wants with needs that's being distinguished. E.g., many people do in fact have their needs met to a degree that would afford freedom, it's their wants which inhibit them.
English today is a delightful, expressive train wreck of grammar and spelling madness. But Old English really was not. It was a much more earthy, simple, and consistent language. Old English had a total of about 40,000 words. Today's English has almost half a million.
I'll take the opportunity to plug a fantastic podcast on the history of English, creatively named "The History of English Podcast".
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
The language was largely phonetic, meaning words were spelled the way they sounded. This fact is my fav
I love that too. English was spelled phonetically all the way up until the late 1400s, I believe. One fun by-product of purely phonetic spelling is that you could tell the accent of the author by the way they spelled words.
So, little to no major works of anglo-saxon or old english were found after his lifetime? I'm surprised that there are no palimpsests or binding materials yielding new writing.
It's amusing that his translations might need their own translations to modern english in a century or two, like he uses forms that already aren't really used anymore (like ye).
XVIII century French for instance, while probably being the peak of the language in term of sophistication and elegance, is hard to read without a lot of footnotes. So many words disappeared, changed meaning, or the grammar itself changed.
Makes you wonder what future generations will call our English. "Old" is taken and "modern" is always the English of the living
Modern English is the English that followed the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between the late 14th century and the 17th century. So not necessarily modern in the colloquial sense.
That is, Modern is also taken :-)
That's assuming that the language will still be called English anything. It might as well split into American, Australian, British, etc. We don't call French or Spanish modern Latin, do we?
There's also an interesting split occurring with continental Euro-English, which is primarily being spoken by non-native speakers as a lingua franca. The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
As a linguist, there is no such dialect of English as 'Euro English'. The idea is borderline non-existent outside of Wikipedia.[0]
In order for there to exist a dialect there must exist some kind of stable distinguishing features, and 'Euro English' has none. The errors that a French speaker makes in English are completely unlike the errors a Greek speaker makes in English, which in turn are completely unlike the errors Czech speakers make in English. What are the stable realisations of the usual English lexical set words (e.g. KIT, DRESS, TRAP etc.) in 'Euro English'? What is the internal grammatical system of 'Euro English'? What are its tenses? What is its syntax? No one has any answers for these questions, which should be trivial to answer for a living dialect.
The highest evidence that the Wiki article can point to is a few items of jargon in European bureaucracy, but this for a dialect does not make. Any random larger organisation is going to have its jargon, particularly a legal one. A staffer on the Hill might have good scuttlebutt about Tuesday's pen and pad, but that doesn't mean there's some kind of emerging dialect of English forming in the halls of US Congress.
It's fine to use 'Euro English' to refer to the few lexical items used in the European bureaucracy, but a few items of jargon are neither unusual, nor sufficient to constitute a dialect.
[0] It's worth noting the most frequently cited source on that Wiki page is a click-baity newspaper article from a British tabloid (Brexit could create a new ‘language’), and that, of the three (!) articles in the bibliography, one treats it solely as a legal jargon, and the other two (Mollin 2006 and Forche 2012) actually reject the idea that Euro English is a dialect. Someone's just on a bit of a frolic on Wikipedia.
It's an interesting page, but I think at the moment it only summarizes common errors of english-as-second-language speakers of other European languages. But there might be a pattern there.
Also I doubt that there is a continuity between the mentioned Erasmus students and staff in the European-union for example. I would assume that's a later addition to the wikipedia article when the most likely subject of Euro english is about patterns of the use of english-language in the EU bureaucracy. Maybe a better title would be EU-administrative English or something of the like.
What's not so often talked about is of course that the pronunciation of english by non-native speakers is different and I do think there is tendency for some convergence among some aspects of pronunciation that I observe in meetings and zoom calls at work. Aspiration of consonants, clearer separation of individual words. The result is that native-speakers - while being more eloquent in English which puts them at some advantage - sometimes have a disadvantage because their advanced use of language is not understood well. IIRC MTV Europe realized that british hosts wouldn't be understood across europe, when english-speaking french/german/italian hosts would.
I think that's about right, yeah - in my experience international gatherings in Europe tends to converge on a sort of continental pidgin English where you shave off all the difficult aspects and end up with this very clear and crisp shared language that's more mutually understandable for everyone involved than any of the ordinary 'native' variants of English.
I think what's less clear is how consistent these convergences are. Certainly I have noticed colloquialisms and alterations to better fit romance and germanic languages that pop up again and again, but at what point does it get consistent enough to be its own 'thing' and not just a handy linguistic tool fashioned for the task at hand?
I would say if German english (Denglish) would pick up French english Idiosyncracies and vice versa, so if the speech patterns aren't just a result of making mistakes in a foreign language, but if they are acquired by other speakers. The Euro-English article gives as an example of Euro-English "Planification" for "Planning" which seems to stem from french / spanish https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/planification . So if the Germans start using planification they would have learned it from the french/spanish Euro-english speakers (I never heard "Planifikation" in German although its actually a word in the dictionary, I looked it up). And that would mean that certain Euro-English features propagate throughout Europe and are more than just Denglish/Frenglish/Swenglish and more than just English-learners messing up vocab/grammar.
While we are talking about language, there definitely are also those folks who move abroad and after a few years when they return they have picked up peculiarities of the language of their host country. The daughter of a neighbor moved to Paris for example and after a few years she started to sound more french. Still spoke perfect german but with an accent. Similarly a coworker who is a US expat in Germany told me he caught himself using some Denglish constructions.
> at what point does it get consistent enough to be its own 'thing'
Traditionally, when it has its own army. (navy optional)
[several years ago I was told the peacekeeping operations in Kosovo were all organised in "bad english"]
> , based on common mistranslations and the technical jargon of the European Union (EU) and the native languages of its non-native, English-speaking population. It is mostly used among EU staff, expatriates and migrants from EU countries, young international travellers (such as exchange students in the EU's Erasmus programme) and European diplomats with a lower proficiency in the language.
This sounds niche, scattered and irrelevant as far as language making goes. Erasmus students and expatriates? EU staff?
It seems that you need some sort of concentration (virtual or geographical) to make a supposedly second-rate variation of some language. I don’t see how people from all across “continental” Europe which are also so scattered domestically (Erasmus students?) could make something cohesive enough to call it Euro English.
- A Spaniard might say “how you say” but would a Polish person do that?
- A Polish person might drop a lot of articles but would a Spaniard do that?
I’m from Scandinavia and a supposed mistake that people from the Nordic countries commit is to use “blue-eyed” to mean “naive”. And sure that’s a direct translation of the “naive” expression but I have never heard anyone from Scandinavia say that in English.
I see the footnotes for the opening paragraphs are The Independent, the Financial Times and a British linguist. I don’t know what the deal is with the British (similar to Americans but their distance from Europe excuses them IMO) and their insistence that Europe (really “Continental Europe” i.e. Europe which isn’t a bus drive under the English Channel away from the mainland) consists of this uniform blob of non-Anglos who drive scooters, eat baguettes and go to raves. And speak the same pidgin apparently.
> The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English.
That’s a laugh. Language isn’t spread by way of EU diplomats. Regular people are more likely to be “anchored” to American English.
One Czech guy I was talking to recently sounds like he moved to California at the age of nine.
> That’s a laugh. Language isn’t spread by way of EU diplomats. Regular people are more likely to be “anchored” to American English.
American English is the best variant of English because we stole it. Nobody cares if somebody messes with it because, eh, it isn’t ours anyway. Let’s drive this language like a stolen car.
> this uniform blob of non-Anglos who drive scooters, eat baguettes and go to raves. And speak the same pidgin apparently.
Sounds awesome, maybe they are just envious!
Since the rise of the web, and tv and movies before it, regional language divergence is decreasing instead of increasing as it did in the past. Future English will be more globally unified but with more online text chatting influences.
Romans probably thought so too
The difference is that education is now ubiquitous and almost everyone who matters is literate. The reason why Latin diverged into Romance languages is that literacy among the secular class died out, and both the elite and the peasants had no knowledge of formal Latin. (The Church did, but it was relatively weak in Early Middle Ages, certainly not strong enough to push the society to use a certain standard of language.)
Sure, if the educational system today collapses and we revert to pre-industrial state like around 500 AD, English will spontaneously develop into a family of mutually unintelligible languages.
I sincerely hope that this won't happen, though, because 95 per cent of humanity would die. We cannot feed 8 billion people with pre-modern technology.
Romans didn't have TVs, and couldn't still listen to recordings of people talking from a century before.
edit: If we're not killed by corruption, the assumption is that people will be enjoying films made in the 1920's and 30's in the 2220's and the 2230's. That's completely unprecedented, and has to pin a language to a certain extent.
Imagine if during the Great Vowel Shift, everybody could listen (and did listen, for entertainment) to people speaking at length from before. It would have ended up a fashion where maybe a couple of features stuck.
In 2230, there will be 300 years of film to watch. The past will overwhelm the present.
There will be more YouTube and TikTok video generated in a year than the previous 300 - 5 most recent years of film/video. 90%+ of youth video consumption will be contemporaneous to the viewer.
Controversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably.
1. Ever wondered why English spelling is so stupid? It's because it's based on an older version of language, but we never decided to update the spelling, so we just roll with it. How is that supposed to change in the future if it hasn't changed so far?
2. At first, text used to be a representation of spoken language. Nowadays communication is mostly via text, so it's more like "speech is acoustic representation of written language" and written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set, at least not as likely as spoken language, which can strongly vary from generation to generation.
3. Smaller languages, which potentially could be a source of new words and grammar, are quickly dying out due to popularity of English. Icelandic didn't evolve much through last thousand of years because its speakers had little contact with speakers of other languages. English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
I don't think we're there yet, but at some point in the future English will reach its "final form" and from there on, only minor changes here and there will happen. Just like the entire world has almost collectively decided to use arabic numerals, or the metric system, and we don't expect any revolutionary changes there anymore.
> Controversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably.
Borg hivemind convergence is a bog-standard HN opinion. Although still controversial enough to elicit replies. ;)
> Smaller languages, which potentially could be a source of new words and grammar, are quickly dying out due to popularity of English. Icelandic didn't evolve much through last thousand of years because its speakers had little contact with speakers of other languages. English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
Mainland Scandinavian languages have plenty of foreign borrowed words from decades ago, long before most people had a reason to know English (or Latin or French or). Today though English in particular should have penetrated Iceland as much as mainland Scandinavia, but Icelandic (according to Icelanders) has plenty of neologisms instead of loanwoards (apparently eschewing lame polysyllabic words like “helicopter”).
Other Scandinavian languages (language communities) could have chosen the same route as they become more influenced by English than even somewhat mutually intelligible neighboring language communities. But they don’t. Proving that language communities can choose to take different routes even in an American Western World Order.
> Controversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably.
(Brit here) Multicultural London English [0] and others like it suggest that language continues to evolve rapidly. I can't even do an MLE accent in the way that I could yorkshire, scouse, etc.
> written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set
Look at the rapid emergence of txt speak, emojis, etc, creating written forms that again rapidly evolve and may be unintelligible to an older generation
> English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
Look at the variety of English used in India. This continues to evolve independently of, say, British English and US English.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
I find Indian English fascinating as a tangent to my learning Hindi. From grammatical/auxiliary word 'errors' or quirks that you can relate to Hindi (and probably other Indic languages, I'm just not familiar) to vocabulary or usage that's not incorrect at all, it's just extremely quaint sounding or rare in British English, but for whatever reason so much more common in IE.
(I can't think of a good example for the latter at the moment, for the former I mean things like 'I myself have noticed this' or 'it's common in Indian English only'.)
It also provides one of my favourite words/concepts (which isn't quite an example of the second point as I meant it): timepass. Something you do to pass the time, or a (not exactly positive, nor negative) review of something that served that purpose.
I always wondered if the, common in IT, phrases like 'do the needful' and 'do the necessary' that you hear from Indian English speakers evolved from Hindi phrases.
Interestingly India got "do the needful" from Britain, but then it dropped out of use there, while India kept it.
There are things like that idea though. I hear "different different" from Indian coworkers pretty regularly, which is apparently a direct translation of a common Hindi expression.
I'm not familiar with that one but I believe it - there's a lot of repetition for emphasis like that, and for example 'same same' or 'slowly slowly' (धीरे-धीरे) leaks into Indian English for sure.
(And to be honest, my own if I'm talking to people I attempt to speak Hindi (or Hinglish) with - once you're aware of it it seems pretty natural and effective, all of these things do, which is what I find so fascinating really. I've grown up speaking BrE completely without it, but then you hear it and it makes sense. Even head movements other than nodding-yes and shaking-no: couldn't reproduce them, but somehow they immediately make sense, and are so much more expressive than I know how to be with words, certainly to be so succinct anyway.)
Art and architecture have had this problem already. Linguistics still has post-modern to use.
Maybe something like Singlish. There are already more english speakers in China than the US.
nothing to wonder about, they already call it boomer english
"ye" is just "the." The "y" is being used to represent the letter thorn.
My understanding is that it is rather "you".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun)
oh ye of such little faith... was GP referring to you and what have ye?
FWIW I note that Google Translate offers no Old English, or even Middle English.
There may not be a big enough corpus for adequate training. The problem with both is that the main people writing would either prefer Latin (or later, French). The number of people who could write and used the vernacular to do so, were small.
Point taken. Altho I'm sure an AI could take a stab at building a corpus. Accuracy maybe better than 90% ?
I do not think I have seen a better example of a post being so drunk on the LLM kool-aid.
I'm not saying it would be accurate.
Most LLMs do well at Middle English (it is not that difficult of a task). Old English is significantly harder but I have found Claude Opus to give good results.
He did this translation as a part of his job or out of passion?
Maybe, I think, it's both: professional duty and personal enthusiasm
Apparently aided by his talented stepdaughter, Thorpe started to earn his living as a translator of, mostly, Anglo-Saxon texts...
Nice achievement while being a SPOF in this field is interesting.
In 1826, at the age of forty-four, Thorpe studied early English antiquities at the University of Copenhagen
And here I am, in my late 30s, thinking that my productive age is far behind me
I guess if money wasn't such a limiting factor, more of us would be productive in different ways later in life. Instead of implementing already invented ideas, we could invent now that we are at the peak of our knowledge and mental capabilities.
It's really hard to justify the financial loss required to (full time) pursue novel ideas when you're middle aged. It's much easier to just put in the 8 hours per day and collect the paycheck.
Money is rarely a limiting factor as much as the desire for more money.
Live in the US (not a native) and my health insurance is tied to my employment. Coupled with my mortgage, kids' education costs, etc. sustaining what we have is far more pressing than the desire for more money.
Money may not be a limiting factor in that you might actually need a very small amount of money to live on to do something similar to what Benjamin Thorpe did, but Money in the form of existing obligations and the inability to get out of those obligations is very much a limiting factor for just about everyone who reaches that age.
The age of mental peak is also generally the age of most obligations accrued.
Modern life does not make it easy or very safe to live modestly. Obligations are often long term and costs are unpredictable. I don't think most people are kept from pursuing their dreams due to greed...more so by fear.
Financial pressures and fear can be significant obstacles
> Money is rarely a limiting factor as much as the desire for more money. reply
Posted by someone whose apparently always had enough.
How do you figure?
Need vs. want.
Is a health insurance a need or a want?
That's going rather beyond the spirit of OP here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773726>
But looking at this another way: some societies effectively transfer needs into wants by making them contingent on other factors. In the United States, healthcare coverage remains difficult to obtain even if you have significantly above-average wealth or income, unless you have access to an employer's coverage. This has improved somewhat under the ACA, but there's a significant variance on a state-by-state basis.
More generally, though "if money wasn't such a limiting factor" and "Money is rarely a limiting factor as much as the desire for more money" both suggest that it's the pursuit of wealth itself that ZaoLahma and dr_dshiv meant. And there are certainly people, particularly amongst the ultra-wealthy, who seem motivated in this way, with wealth at which access to healthcare simply isn't an issue: they could hire their own doctors, pay out of pocket, or travel to where healthcare access isn't an insane torture device of its own.
Given that there are parts of the world where health insurance is not tied to employment, there may be more relevant axes that the one you're considering.
Strictly speaking, it's a want. The classic needs are food (and water), shelter, clothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_needs
I personally have gone uninsured for a few years at a time and there was no instant calamity, just an elevation of risk.
Wouldn’t that vary from person to person? I have several medications that I objectively need in order to remain healthy. The cost of those would be prohibitively expensive without a good job and/or health insurance.
I think they're trying to suggest that since they survived a period in their life without health insurance and did not experience calamity, that everyone else who needs to live must also be able to do so.
And thus, by extension: Those who cannot live without health insurance needn't remain alive.
I think you'll find that those who pursue anything in mid life are not lacking in what you might deem wants. In no one's value judgement would they jeopardize reliable income, when there's a mortgage and kids that need providing, unless it made no difference. Plus, pursuits themselves often cost money.
Your meaning isn't entirely clear, but I suspect you're agreeing with me.
It's wants that drive the dynamic originally commented on. It's the confusion of wants with needs that's being distinguished. E.g., many people do in fact have their needs met to a degree that would afford freedom, it's their wants which inhibit them.
> many people do in fact have their needs met to a degree that would afford freedom, it's their wants which inhibit them.
Thats the point I was hoping to make.
I think, age is truly just a number when it comes to pursuing passions and achieving goals.
i bet this person was an aristocrat with a bunch of servants to rear their children.
According to Wikipedia he started off as a banker, before switching to scholarship.
He was then granted a ‘civil list pension’ - basically a government annual grant in recognition of his valuable but unpaid work
Most likely. But what was your point? It's surely well known that free time is what you need to get anything done.
> But what was your point?
The point is that usrnm shouldn't compare their own productivity if their circumstances are different.
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So productive, we could call him Octathorpe.