Amo, amas, amat

[pozorvlak]

Here's a thought that struck me the other day: Latin, like Sumerian before it, endured as a scholarly and priestly language for hundreds of years after people stopped speaking it as an everyday tongue. Will English go the same way? Will the people of 2500 (or even later) be forced to learn this weird language, full of exceptions to rules and

Comments

[susannahf]

Having never formally learned Latin, it really annoys me when people use Latin phrases where there are perfectly good English ones that everyone will understand ("inter alia" was one I had to look up yesterday). So there's another issue - that of being better educated than thou - as well.
Rant over.

[johnckirk]

There's a novel I read ages ago (either by Willard Price or Clive Cussler, I think) where someone's built a pod that can be lowered a long way under water. These are often referred to as "bathyscapes", but the guy who built it didn't see any reason why normal people should speak Greek so he just used the English translation instead: "DeepBoat".

[pozorvlak]

And a lot of the time, Latin/Greek derived words are preferred to (shorter, simpler) Anglo-Saxon ones - "ornithology" as opposed to "birdlore", for instance. I don't know how many people use Latin expressions specifically to sound clever or exclude others - they seem to be part of the common working vocabulary in a lot of professions (the law, medicine, etc). mi_guida and r_e_mercia can no doubt help us here... Though undoubtedly some people do overuse Latin/Greek to sound clever: I suspect I may be guilty of this sometimes.

[susannahf]

I agree, and that sort of use is fair enough, as is jargon/domain-specific use if you know that the other person is familiar with it. But randomly using things like "inter alia" and "mea culpa" sorta annoys me. To be fair, the guy I'm referring to is a doctor, so may be accidentally using doc-speak, but I have worked for someone who continually dropped in unnecessarily archaic or latin/greek words just to get one over on other people (ie. me and my colleagues), which probably make me more sensitive to this than I should be.

[totherme]

Just as English, French, etc evolved from Latin (and other stuff too), it seems to me that the next dominant language is likely to evolve partly from English. In our future world, in which something like RP is the "official" or "scientific" language (but probably with a Boston or Washington accent... Probably also littered with domain specific jargon...) - I expect that local every-day languages might well sound something like hinglish, chinglish, etc. That's not to say that "english will have won" - just that there's likely to be a fair bit of it still mixed up in there.

I wonder about global telecoms though - will we have distinct "languages", or will we be more likely to call them "accents"? Or "dialects"? If we're lucky, maybe the "official" language will be close enough that native accent listeners will all be able to understand it without extra training - even if they can't understand one another's colloquialisms...

And maybe jargon will play a more important role than we're used to - leading to IT-jive, law-jive, etc ;)

[pozorvlak]

law-jive - I like it :-)

One of the things that motivated this post was Warhammer 40k's use of Latin to represent the language used in the Dark Age of Technology - which I think they said somewhere was a descendant of today's Pacific Rim languages, so not actually anything like Latin at all. The machines accepted spoken word commands, but only in the DAoT language: over the millennia, this led to tech-priests who didn't have a clue what they were doing, reciting phrases in DAoT-jive to make the machines work, and thinking of them as prayers or spells.

Fragments of English are already making its way into a lot of languages - for instance, did you know that the standard German word for mobile phone is "handy"? As you say, this process will probably only accelerate. And English is likely to gain more words from Hindi, Chinese et al (we have some words from both already, but far fewer than from, say, French).

[r_e_mercia]

If it's of any interest to you, the English that I speak at work is quite a way away from the English I speak to my English friends at home: International English is pretty different already from the Native English I've always spoken. But, that said, there are lots of English words in the international French which I come across at work - so maybe international languages just evolve quickly to meet the needs of the speakers. I rather like international English. Particularly given that English is such a hybrid doggerel mess all the way down to its roots; it makes it very rich indeed, and easy to use for communicating. Though the downside is that I get several documents a week to rewrite into English which will pass muster in a legislative setting. Native English is a rare and precious commodity (and makes up for my rubbish French etc!)
Oooh look I seem to have started waffling. Back to translating for me...

[totherme]

That's interesting :)

Are there contexts in which one is clearly more expressive than the other? Or is the choice of which language to use solely a function of the ratio of native vs non-native speakers you have on hand?

Can you give us an illustrative example of an International English sentence, or are the differences more apparent in the spoken word?

[totherme]

One of the things that motivated this post was Warhammer 40k's use of Latin to represent the language used in the Dark Age of Technology

That was also why I started thinking about the difference between accents and languages - it comes up in Space Marine by Ian Watson. Three different lads, brought up in different levels of the same continent-sized city theoretically spoke the same language, but couldn't understand a word one another said.

Since reading that, I've heard that it's happened in real life too - I think someone may once have told me that there were similar issues in China - but that's a single unreliable source.

[pozorvlak]

You don't need to fast-forward to the year 40,000AD to observe that: I've been living in Glasgow for over two years, and I still occasionally (say, once a month to once a fortnight) meet someone whose accent is so thick that I have no idea what they're saying. You could argue, as some do, that Scots should really be considered a separate language - have a look at this to get some idea, but it gets a lot less intelligible than that. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy, and all that...

[Which is why people tend not to talk about Serbo-Croat any more...]

Chinese: yeah, I think most Chinese "dialects" are mutually unintelligible. Mandarin provides a scholarly/administrative language for the whole country, but most people don't speak it. But somewhat bizarrely, Chinese characters are independent of dialect, and can be read by anyone who speaks any Chinese dialect. Have you read Zompist's page on writing English with logograms? Very interesting.

Another interesting language to consider in this context is Modern Standard

[johnckirk]

I can think of a couple of aspects to this

[michiexile]

Really funky, speaking of βoυστρoφεδoν, from the conlang/conscript point of view, are boustrophedral scripts. There are historic examples, and a few hobby-scripts I know of that use it.

[pozorvlak]

I like boustrophedal printers :-)

[susannahf]

boustrophedal street numbering, on the other hand, can lead to very lost people (particularly if the street is quite long). Although so can odd/even numbering if one side of the street has much bigger properties (cf. Woodstock Rd in Oxford, where 73 is a good 5 minute walk from 72).