On the evolution of English as a written or spoken language.

Parasomnium writes:

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Does anyone know how to pronounce "ghoti" in English?

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Ah, yes...the canard of "fish."It's clever, but the problem is that the expectations of the "phonetics" fall victim to the rules of orthography.Yes, "gh" can be pronounced as /f/, but only when it's at the end of a syllable, not the beginning.Yes, "o" can be pronounced as /I/, but only when it is in certain unstressed syllables. The way this word is written, the first syllable is likely to be stressed.Yes, "ti" can be pronounced as /sh/, but only in certain constructions where the "i" is followed by a vowel.For all the weirdness of English spelling, there really are rules. There are always exceptions, but those are usually based upon the etymological derivation of the word. That's why spelling bee participants ask for the country of origin. It lets you know what orthography will likely be followed.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

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Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

Imagine the confusion if we weren't trying. It would be like a convention of Dawn Bertots.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

And ironically, in language the words and constructs most used are also the ones subject to the most change.I first came across that observation with the subjunctive mood in German. In contrast to the indicative mood, which we use the most and with which we make statements about actual events, conditions, etc, the subjunctive is basically used for imaginary and contrary-to-fact things. We rarely use it in English anymore, having relegated it to stock phrases (eg, "If I were ...", "Be that as it may.", "Long live the king!"). In Spanish and French, it is much more widely used to also express doubt and uncertainty, etc. German is part-way between, using it more than English for its basic functionality, but also for indirectly quoting somebody (eg, "Er sagte, das hier liege." ("He said that that is hier.") -- sorry, my German is pre-reform).Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language has encountered irregular verbs. Most verbs are regular, meaning that they follow the regular rules of conjugation. But there's always a handful of verbs, usually numbering around a 100 or so, depending on the language, that are irregular, meaning that they don't follow the regular rules but rather have unexpected changes in them -- well, many of the changes do tend to follow certain patterns that you learn as a student. The problem for the student is that those irregular verbs are also the most commonly used verbs, so the student must not only learn all of them, but he also must learn them very early in his study of that language. There's just no way around it, because most the things that he would most commonly want to express require irregular verbs.Now, when we were learning to conjugate German verbs in the subjunctive (die Mglichkeitsform -- my high school and JC German teachers were old-school and taught us German grammatical terms, rather than the Latin terms that the Germans use nowadays), we found that there were no irregular forms for any of the verbs except for one and only one, "sein" ("to be"). The most frequently used verb in the language is also the most irregular verb in the language.

I'm not sure that I agree with this. Perhaps Jon can step in and comment. My assumption is that new additions to a language tend to be somewhat ad hoc. However, over time, they become regularized. But the most frequently used parts of language never regularize because they are too heavily used for the regularizing changes to persist.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

In German linguistics class we encountered older forms of German from just a little more than 1000 years ago and could only begin to decipher a few words, but only after learning what they were; it was an entirely different language. The same thing in my one-semester seminar in Old English, though my German helped me a lot there -- and it helped clear up in my mind where some of the conjugations of "to be" came from. Those examples demonstrate how incredibly much a spoken language can change in just a half-dozen centuries.But then, after two semesters of ancient Greek -- Koin, actually -- I picked up a modern Greek book out of curiosity and was amazed to find that the language had hardly changed at all in more than 2000 years. Yes, the verb system and case system had changed as well as pronounciation (perhaps the greatest amount of change), but most of the words were still highly recognizable from their ancient forms.What was different? Writing! Greek was a written language with, I would assume, a sizeable literate population, whereas older Germanic languages were verbal. In the more purely verbal form, a language is freer to change, but when the language has a written literature then that literature can be used as a guide for the spoken language and thus slow down the rate at which the language changes.Similarly, there's the effect of writing causing the formation of a new language. Martin Luther is credited with creating modern German with his translation of the Bible, which then became a standard for writing and even speaking. There were German translations before him, but when those earlier translaters encountered Latin words that did not exist in German, then they would simply keep the Latin words and not try to translate them. What Martin Luther did was to borrow the Latin practice of building new words out of roots and affixes and create new German words by taking the Latin words apart and replacing those parts with their German equivalents; eg: express --> ausdrucken (to press out).A common English example is the dictionary. Whereas before people would write down words based on how they sounded, which led to great lack of uniformity, even in the same individual's writing. With the compilation and printing of dictionaries, people now had standards to follow in spelling words. Which has slowed the rate at which English changes, in particular regarding word spellings.

Possible. I was a foreign language major (German, before I majored in non-human languages like FORTRAN, PL/I, Pascal) so our exposure to linguistics was more introductory and as a survey of the subject, especially as it pertained to foreign language instruction. Add to that the observations made by a foreign language student of what he was finding.Perhaps related to those regularizing processes is what my Greek prof described to us. She would often point out where sound changes over time, such as the absorption of a consonant sound into an accompanying vowel sound had resulted in the form that we find. In one case, she showed where two different form had come from and that, since the one had changed into a form similar to the second more common form, that first form then got changed by analogy into that unrelated form. IOW, the speaker saw a spelling that looked like it should have been something else and "corrected the obvious error." It would be like someone seeing the English principle parts ring, rang, rung, and sing, sang, sung, and assuming that the principle parts of ding should be ding, dang, dung.

From http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/humor/Better_English.html

dwise1 writes:

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And ironically, in language the words and constructs most used are also the ones subject to the most change.

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Actually, it's the other way around. The ones that can survive being different can only do so if they're used often.It's why "be" in English is such an irregular verb. None of its conjugated forms match the pattern. It should be:I be
You be
He/She/It bes
We be
You be
They beInstead, it's:I am
You are
He/She/It is
We are
You are
They areThe only reason that this has managed to stay that way for so long is because it is such a common word. That's the only way such irregularity can remain stable. If a word is not that common, it will lose its irregularity and eventually become regular. The past tense of "help" used to be "holp." It's now "helped."As was published in Lieberman, E. et al. Nature 449 713-716 (2007), examining the speed by which such verbs change, "The half-life of irregular verbs is proportional to the square root of their frequency." Looking at 177 irregular verbs from Old English, only 98 are still irregular.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

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Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

There's a street in St. Louis called:Loughborough 'round hurr, its pronounced as "Loff - Burrow".I think it should be Loff - Burroff, or Low - Burrow, but to change it within one word is ridiculous!

You can't expect loofoles to be systematic.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

Actually...The forms of English 'be' weren't always so irregular. What we have today is the combination of the paradigms of about two OE verbs both meaning roughly 'be'. One of those paradigms (inf. beon) went something like you laid out in the first list: beon:

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beo (1S)
bist (2S)
bi (3S)
beo (1/2/3P)the other: wesan:

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eom
eart
is
sindI agree with you in some sense: we certainly need heavy usage to maintain such high levels of suppletion in the paradigm of a verb such as PDE 'be'. But, this only tells part of the story. We still need to figure out where the irregularity came from in the first place; figure out why certain words are more subject to the processes that produce irregularity than are other words.Jon

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Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

Why?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

But what happens when something frequently used stops being used and assumes a 'default' form, such as case endings? Do we say that the feature stopped being frequently used and was therefore subject to regularization, or that the feature began to become regularized and so was no longer frequently used? I'm not so sure. Evidence seems to suggest that the most frequently used forms are the ones most likely to be 'irregular'. It also appears that many of these irregular forms start out 'regular' and then become irregular. So, it certainly seems like there is a correlation between frequency of use and irregularity. What that correlation means in terms of causation, though, may be a different matter. At a minimum, though, higher frequency of use certainly makes possible more of the processes that lead to irregularities. Afterall, no part of a language can change without being used; thus the higher the usage of any given form, the more likely it is that change will be introduced.Jon

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Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

Isn't that the purpose of this thread? To figure out how the English we have evolved to be what it is today?Jon

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Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

Possibly, but I don't see that as very important. But I'm still at the level where I am unsure whether written English and spoken English are the same language.Baby-steps я Us

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!