Giving the written language a little room to change is the way to ensure both stability and vitality
By R.L.G. | BERLIN
LAST week’s column looked at the long history of language declinism: for more than 600 years people have complained that youngsters cannot write proper English anymore, and even ancient Sumerian schoolmasters worried about the state of the “scribal art” in the world’s first written language. Two universal truths emerge: languages are always changing, and older people always worry that the young are not taking proper care of the language.
But what if the sticklers have a point? Of course language always changes, but could technology (or a simple increase in youthful insouciance and lack of respect for tradition) mean that in some ages it changes faster than in others? Is change accelerating? In this case, a real problem could arise. Even if language change is not harmful, the faster language changes, the less new generations will be able to understand what their forebears wrote.
The Middle English quotation in last week’s column proved the point for some readers: it is all but impenetrable to modern understanding without special training. It is, in effect, a foreign language. Is this a problem? Perhaps it is too much to expect writing to stay fresh on the shelf for 600 years. More recent writing holds up quite well. Pupils read Shakespeare with only modernised spelling and a bit of help from teachers. And Thomas Jefferson and Jane Austen are perfectly readable.
But maybe a greater conservatism would let modern readers peer further back in their own literary history. If change had been slower, perhaps Chaucer would be only as difficult as Shakespeare is to us; “Beowulf” only as distant as Chaucer is now. What’s not to like?
The problem is that conservatism works differently on writing than it does on speech. Writing is more permanent, so people choose their words carefully and conservatively. It is slow and considered, so people can avoid new usages widely seen as mistakes. It is taught carefully by adults to children, which naturally exerts some conservative drag on the written language. And it is often edited, so (say) a young journalist with a breezy contemporary style may well be edited to a more traditional 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 their surroundings. Speech will—at almost any level of linguistic conservatism—change faster than written language.
The problem with overly successful conservatism then becomes clear. Speech moves on, writing does not, and the two diverge over time. Take just one example: English spelling. As with all languages, the pronunciation of English has changed a lot over the centuries. Spelling has changed much more slowly. Thanks to the Great Vowel Shift of the middle of the last millennium, English uses vowels differently from almost all other European languages. Silent letters like the gh in night are a remnant of an earlier pronunciation (a bit like the German nicht). Other odd spellings were intended to keep etymologies clear: a b was inserted into debt to show the link with Latin debitum. Some linguistic innovations do not make it into writing at all: nearly everyone says gonna and writes going to. The more a language pays homage to the past, the more modern schoolchildren will find learning to write a bit like learning to speak a foreign tongue.
Extreme cases come when a prestige variety of the language changes hardly at all. The Arabic of the Koran is the model for all written Arabic today. But over 1,400 years, the spoken language has become a bundle of dialects only partly intelligible to each other and roughly as different from the written form as Italian is from Latin. A roughly similar situation applied to Chinese until the early 20th century, when writing based on the vernacular finally replaced classical Chinese.
Some say that “language must change”, but these examples show that near-perfect conservatism is possible, especially when there is a near-universal reverence for tradition. But even in such societies, nothing seems to be able to stop spoken language from altering. So there is a natural problem, found the world over: how quickly to allow writing to adapt to changes in the spoken language? If spelling were adapted to pronunciation, the result would be a radical and destabilising break with centuries of tradition. If English grammar were codified based on speech today, gonna would probably be recognised as a standard auxiliary (virtually everyone uses it), and whom might not survive at all. Most people already educated in the old way would hate any such sudden shift, though.
In this imperfect world, then, written language only partly reflects speech. Younger writers introduce spoken or new words or usages into their writing, annoying their elders as they do. But no one dares write anything serious in phonetic spelling; English-speakers are stuck with an archaic and anarchic system. Liberties with grammar—making the written language look like the spoken one—should be few and cautious. Giving the written language a little room to change, but not too much, is the only way to enjoy the best of both stability and vitality. The alternative—perfectly conservative writing—is a recipe for making writing less and less like the language future generations will speak, and thus less relevant to writing about the world they live in.
