Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

"Language change

Language change is variation over time in a language's phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features.

Causes of language change

• Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.the principle of least effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna [ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
• Analogy: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.
• Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from other languages. 
• Geographic separation: conversely, when people move away from each other, their language will diverge, at least for the vocabulary, due to different experiences. 
• The medium of communication.
• Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.
• Migration/Movement: Speakers will change and create languages, such as pidgins and creoles.
• Imperfect learning: According to one view, children regularly learn the adult forms imperfectly, and the changed forms then turn into a new standard. Alternatively, imperfect learning occurs regularly in one part of society, such as an immigrant group, where the minority language forms a substratum, and the changed forms can ultimately influences majority usage. 
• Social prestige: Language may not only change towards a prestigious accent, but also away from one with negative prestige, as in the case of rhoticity of Received Pronunciation. Such movements can go back and forward. 

According to Guy Deutscher, the tricky question is "Why are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society should never let the changes through." He sees the reason for tolerating change in the fact that we already are used to "synchronic variation", to the extent that we are hardly aware of it. For example, when we hear the word "wicked", we automatically interpret it as either "evil" or "wonderful", depending on whether it is uttered by an elderly lady or a teenager. Deutscher speculates that "[i]n a hundred years' time, when the original meaning of 'wicked' has all but been forgotten, people may wonder how it was ever possible for a word meaning 'evil' to change its sense to 'wonderful' so quickly."....

Please, see the rest of the article for more information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change

Human language is as any other phenotypic trait in that it evolves in time. Why? Is it common?

Why language complexity has been imposed by an intellectual minority disconnected from the learning environments covering all education levels?

If Learning is facilitated e.g. by making languages less complex, does it reduce stress and therefore improve the health status?

 Would it be useful also to remove the distinction between masculine and feminine expressions?

Would it be useful to decrease even more the mismatch between what is orally pronounced and what is written, e.g. if you don't produce an 's' at the end of word, you don't hav to write an 's'?

In the case of the French language changes, there have been efforts to decrease the mismatch between the oral and written expressions, e.g. to facilitate Learning and writing. 

In the past, expressions hae been made too complex, often for the wrong reasons?

How fast is written language evolving, and why?

For written Chinese language, it started as Oracle bone script then evolved to seal script, clerical script & then Traditional Chinese Characters in around 200BC.  From around 200BC till 1964 Traditional Chinese Characters started to evolve / transform into Simplified Chinese Characters for some countries.

Reason for the transformation was to simplify the complicated Chinese characters' strokes so that they are easier to write & learn for most of the Chinese.  Countries that adopt Simplified Chinese Characters are China, Singapore, Malaysia.  However, some countries still preserve & use Traditional Chinese Characters like Taiwan, Hong Kong & Macao.  Despite writing style is a bit different for both character sets but the meaning is the same.

Another example of cultural evolution?

For the Simplified Chinese characters, its transformation happened also during 1966-1976 China Cultural Revolution.

To know more about the evolution from Traditional to Simplified Chinese & how the look like, you can refer to the following links:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-simplified-and-traditional-Chinese-characters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

The fields of developmental psychology and socio linguistics have provided skills for analysis and synthesis that distinguish advanced stages in writing with abilities to reason back and forth between the concrete and the abstract, the personal and the impersonal, the local and the global cause and effect, the literal and the hypothetical or figurative, and between the past, present, and future; also, the abilities to retain and apply material previously studied and to sustain an extended line of argument in writing.

Donald Lazere (2005), Postmodern Pluralism and the Retreat from Political Literacy, jac 25.2 (2005)

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

Please, see this interesting Youtube regarding the thread. Its titled is "How languages evolve - Alex Gendler",.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWDKsHm6gTA

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

"Language change

Language change is variation over time in a language's phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features.

Causes of language change

• Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.the principle of least effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna [ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
• Analogy: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.
• Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from other languages. 
• Geographic separation: conversely, when people move away from each other, their language will diverge, at least for the vocabulary, due to different experiences. 
• The medium of communication.
• Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.
• Migration/Movement: Speakers will change and create languages, such as pidgins and creoles.
• Imperfect learning: According to one view, children regularly learn the adult forms imperfectly, and the changed forms then turn into a new standard. Alternatively, imperfect learning occurs regularly in one part of society, such as an immigrant group, where the minority language forms a substratum, and the changed forms can ultimately influences majority usage. 
• Social prestige: Language may not only change towards a prestigious accent, but also away from one with negative prestige, as in the case of rhoticity of Received Pronunciation. Such movements can go back and forward. 

According to Guy Deutscher, the tricky question is "Why are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society should never let the changes through." He sees the reason for tolerating change in the fact that we already are used to "synchronic variation", to the extent that we are hardly aware of it. For example, when we hear the word "wicked", we automatically interpret it as either "evil" or "wonderful", depending on whether it is uttered by an elderly lady or a teenager. Deutscher speculates that "[i]n a hundred years' time, when the original meaning of 'wicked' has all but been forgotten, people may wonder how it was ever possible for a word meaning 'evil' to change its sense to 'wonderful' so quickly."....

Please, see the rest of the article for more information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

Please, see "How Do Languages Change & Evolve": 

Feminine versus Philosophy start with the same oral expression, which could therefore be Feminine and Filosofy.... (?), for instance

Why keeping masculin versus feminin?

Why did people from different origin keep this huge plasticity to learn quite different languages, hampering or speeding up language change?

How does mouth/muscle shape influence pronunciation, and therefore language expression and therefore language evolution? 

My native language is Dutch, but when I read Dutch from 400 years ago, I have difficulties to understand it. What will language be in 400 years from now?

It just shows that written language is artificially maintained constant for a short period of time?

Mastering a language is not more than memorizing the details of a technique disconnected from the ability to solve problems?

In these days (during internet age), written language is spreading rapidly. Written language has basically given a voice to those who cannot communicate through audio voice. 

Informal written English is ever-increasingly being littered with acronyms. Why? Because people have a larger circle of friends, thanks to social media, and they don't have all day to write two or three lengthy, well-worded and grammatically- correct messages. The effect/implication? Written English has evolved sometimes to the point of being a cryptic code. The rate of evolution is in tandem with the rate of adoption of new communication technologies and platform. For those in the know, messages may become increasingly fragmented and disjointed, without losing their meaningfulness.

If new technical tools are permanently imposed to citizens/professionals, why not imposing language changes to improve mental plasticity and tolerance towards other languages?

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

"Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art."

                                      -----   E. L. JAMES, Fifty Shades of Grey

While Hazim has summarized very well some of the common factors of language evolution, my take is that there are deeper forces which drive change. These being, Complexity and expressive power of the language.

As the language becomes to complex to handle individuals will more than likely simplify the language to their needs. Some elitist movements will try to make the language more complex as a measure of inclusion/exclusion criteria. On the other hand, the language must have enough expressive power to convey the messages it is intended to carry.

If the language is simplified to much it looses its expressive capability. Too much complexity, the language will become unmanageable.

Will language become less complex when you just change 'spelling'' without changing the number of different words, e.g. filosofi (as pronounced) versus philosophy (as written)?

Marcel,

In my opinion(and it is just that), the impact of the change will depend on the initial complexity of processing the initial representation and the impact on the language as a whole. Language is not just the lexicon and one has to look at syntactical, semantic and pragmatic impacts of the change. It also depends on how engrained is the language across the population

An example would be the ñ in Spanish, younger generations would have less trouble just texting using the n than using the ñ. This change will more than likely come about not from academicians but from the younger generations integrating the change due to texting. Your example provides a more complex change that occurs because of a deeper transformation process rather than a mechanical economy and it is not as straightforward to qualify the change as resolving a  complexity issue (it may bring about other changes that could increase complexity such as harmonizing the interpretation of other words).

Why would an 'ñ' replaced by an 'n' be a less substantial change than a 'ph' replaced by an 'f' (For instance, in Dutch photo would become foto)?

Perhaps it would also decrease the difference between languages (e.g. phamacie becoming farmacie becoming farmasie?)? 

Many unexpected spelling obviously results from old languages (e.g. Latin), but is that an argument to keep it that way? Be flexible?

Marcel,

While the impact of the 'ñ' is more substantial, it is driven by a very strong force in younger generations which is texting. In doing speed texting, a phenomenon very similar to phoneme assimilation is taking place on the keyboard with the 'ñ'. Its impact on pronunciation is substantial but in texting it has a strong trend towards that change.

Dear Arturo,

I understand what you mean. Technology influencing language evolution

If the goal is to match as close as possible the written and oral expression of a language, there is obviously the problem of dialect expressing variation at small spatial scales?

Personally, I believe that the age of "moving and talking pictures" has slowed the evolution of the written language. More likely, the "acted" and spoken  language, intensified by the internet and other social media devices has significantly reduced the impact of "postage" communication. It is sad, but that is the direction of communication system. It started with the phase out of the telegraph.

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

"Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development."

                                                           -----   David Crystal

Observation of language change (e.g. yes versus no; much versus less) versus interpretation of observation of language change (e.g. OK versus not OK; good versus bad; efficient versus non-efficient)?

At what scale should language change be defined/studied given that each individual is unique in language expression (both oral and written) also implying that language (both oral and written) is family-specific, village-specific, city-specific, region-specific, etc...?

Why should a dictionary be more representative for what a language should be rahter than a book written by a child or local personality or famous writer or scientist or... ?

Why is liberty in written expression only allowed in poetry?

Marcel, it is, I guess called "distribution". Before, written communication almost monopolized the system. It had the lion's share of evolution, and perhaps, the fastest. Now communication is distributed, to the "disadvantage" of the written one.

Tamil language is more than 5000 years old and its literature is vast and varied. There are several classics in Tamil language covering every gamut of man's life - family, children, love, State administration, war, morality, ethics etc. The language follows a threefold classification of writing called IYAL, ISAI and NAATAKAM - prose, music and drama. It has an excellent grammar codified 5000 years ago. Tamil kings had patronized literature, dance, drama and music and built massive marvelous temples in stones which are in good shape even today. They are standing examples of scientific architecture and fine sculpture. Tamil language is easy to learn and pleasant to speak. There are several good Tamil books on a variety of subjects - Astrology, Medicine, Novels, Poems, Cookery, Yoga etc.

Marcel, the entry of new people bringing new products (and words) change language, I guess, Marcel.

Language obviously evolves because of the discovery of new phenomena, like the discovery of new species or stars? Of course, do they truly impact language when only a minority is using these new words?

In a dictionary, all words are given equal importance. This is obviously not the case in spoken or written language used in practice?

Over a period of time Sanskrit appropriated many Tamil words altered a bit phonetically and made it Sanskrit.Tamil was not used in official dealings. Instead of calling Tamil family of languages they chose to call it ‘Dravidian’.’Dravidian’ only means ‘Tamil’ in Sanskrit

http://indiaopines.com/tamil-oldest-language-world/

Is the ancestor of Tamil unknown? Such a complicated language must have Evolved from another more simple language, right? Animals also communicate with vocaizations well before 5000 B.C., right?

I don't see very well how the history of a spoken language without written traces can be tracked appropriately. Do you?

@Marcel

Tamil is the oldest language in the world. It is the mother of all Indo European languages including Sanskrit. Recent archaeological (Adhichanalloor and Indian ocean) evidence shows that the language is related to sumerian and that Tamil was spoken in South India more than 5000 years ago. The language has changed very little over these years and old tamil is still comprehensible to tamil speakers. Tamil legend says speaks of a lost continent, "Kumari Kandam" which is believed to be submerged under Indian Ocean. Recent excavations in Indian Ocean seem to support this legend.  

http://vaidehishanker-tamil.blogspot.in/2011/12/oldest-living-language-of-india-and.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_language

http://trueorigin.org/language01.php

Can animals have primitive forms of written language, therefore being older than Tamil?

E.g. putting signs/traces in the sand or other substrates recognized by conspecifics?

http://www.bear-tracker.com/bear.html

When animals (bears, tigers..) leave traces on trees they indicate information of body size, ownership... to conspecifics understood by conspecifics? Is this a primitive form of animal writing?

Nobody can scientifically reject that animal traces resemble writing in the Framework of communication!

We can observe substantial changes in language over a period of about 100 years. First of all, new words emerge, partly coming from other languages, partly to denote new concepts. The reforms in writing letters and grammar also comes.

Grammar rules are often complex because the reflect language as evolving organism. No language starts from grammar design; its rules reflect the evolutionary status of language today. Maybe except for artificial language like esperanto.

Marcel, I do not mean that esperanto cannot evolve in time. I mean that only for artificial languages grammar can be designed as an optimal set of rules. Just think about "grammar"of computer languages.

Some languages did not have their written form just a century ago. For example, Abkhaz language started to use Cyrillic letters and Russian words for terms unknown before with added letter A in the beginning. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhaz_language

Grammar of Catalan language was constructed by Pompeu Fabra less than a century ago; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_grammar

What is 'optimal' when only a minority is able to follow the rules without errors and people can understand each other when the rules are not followed 100%?

A more relaxed world when vulnerability as expressed in grammer errors are accepted, also in a working environment?

Historical experience: I cannot understand why people are fully stressed when they deviate from the 'rules defined by a minority' given that the rules will change anyway?

'written' language was apart from 'spoken' language in the early humanistic development... like my 5 yrs old who rely on listening, mimic and repeating sound-bite to communicate with people around him... on that stage, learning English was very much the same as learning colloquial/spoken Chinese.  But back in the warring Kingdoms of China, 'written' or formal classics of Chinese was very much unlike spoken dialects of local/provincial communicative means, it was dense in historical references and contextual edicts.  Chinese classics combined philosophical/religious/rhetorical elucidations into one.  That's the beauty of it.  Modern Chinese adopts Western grammatical rules in hope to better differentiate subjective intent from objective means, but the experiments aren't as successful as we would like to believe. 

To illustrate a point of view, how do you paraphrase this Emily Dickinson's poem in your rendition of English and your 'other' tongue? What's the difference between poetry and rhetoric?  what was spoken then and what was written now are mostly rhetoric.

Dreams — are well — but Waking's better,

If One wake at morn —

If One wake at Midnight — better —

Dreaming — of the Dawn —

Sweeter — the Surmising Robins —

Never gladdened Tree —

Than a Solid Dawn — confronting —

Leading to no Day —

F449 (1862) J450

Some inspiration?

https://books.google.fr/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=AOxPAAAAcAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=modern+versus+old+coptic+writings&ots=AtD2UeaDC8&sig=7sqU_Vfxuesk7gBSlviC4rRsoBE#v=onepage&q=modern%20versus%20old%20coptic%20writings&f=false

It is not possible that the art of picture-writing was brought to any degree of perfection by one man or nation, or even by one generation; but was gradually imroved and extended by the successive hands of individuals in the societies through which it passed; and that more or less according to the genius of each people, and their state of civilisation; the ruder générations requiring fewer signs or représentations than the more cultivated.....  

... Thus the figure of the sun, expressed or denoted that planet only; a lion or a dog, simply the animals these depicted: but, in process of time, when men acquired more knowledge, and attempted to describe qualities a well as sensible objects, these delineations were more figuratively explained; then the figure of the sun, besides its original meaning, denoted Glory or genial warmth; that of the lion courage; and that of the dog fidelity..... 

Why do people continue to think that being able to 'correctly' spell/write a word is linked to the ability to conduct research and the ability to think about problems?

Any language is evolving as fast as is needed (usually) by young people. Some of the grammar does not make sense today, so they change or simplify it.

For example, "you" can also be written as "y". The sound is the same, so why don't make it shorter.

"you" can only reflect "y" in small social groups that reached consensus how to communicate, e.g. via experience during social interactions among the group members?

Yes, current marketing reinforces emerging slang of the type: 4U (for you), U2 (you too), etc. But this will not come to literature and journalism.

Americans cut English words. On the highway you can see "thru" instead of "through".

A lot of slang emerges among computer users. Typically it is more understandable for younger generations, while their parents might be even not aware of that.

It becomes more common within not small groups. But is this language evolution? We perceive language as something common for the whole nation, but not a part of it. In some countries dialects disappear because of centralized TV (Russia is an example) while in others they persist. Globalization creates new geography for clusters of new dialects: they may be trans-boundary, but concentrated in some social groups organized via internet. I guess we need a separate scientific study for these newly emerging phenomena.