Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[AwfullyAmateur]

I have a French speaking exam today, Wish me bonne chance...

[keenir]

I have a French speaking exam today, Wish me bonne chance...

I have full confidence in your success; all the best to you.

[AwfullyAmateur]

I scored 25...out of 25. I think ma prof was going easy on me, though, cause it was only cinq questions. But actually parle francais is hard, so that's a win.

[Travis B.]

I scored 25...out of 25. I think ma prof was going easy on me, though, cause it was only cinq questions. But actually parle francais is hard, so that's a win.

As I've mentioned before, I don't get why people think French is easy. Sure, a lot of English vocabulary is borrowed from Old and Middle French... but French morphosyntax, phonology, and orthography? Yeah...

[abahot]

Are you sure it isn't different from the spoken English you speak? There are substantial differences between written Standard English and spoken English in practically all English dialects.

Nothing I'm particularly consciously aware of -- at the very least, I don't remember having to make any substantial effort to learn Standard English, which I imagine will not be the case in a few centuries.

I do wonder though, will the perception of current English as a "classical" language develop in the future? If so, will the existence of spoken media from today change people's view of English as compared to, say, Vedic Sanskrit or Latin which are not widely spoken natively?

[Darren]

I scored 25...out of 25. I think ma prof was going easy on me, though, cause it was only cinq questions. But actually parle francais is hard, so that's a win.

As I've mentioned before, I don't get why people think French is easy. Sure, a lot of English vocabulary is borrowed from Old and Middle French... but French morphosyntax, phonology, and orthography? Yeah...

French morphosyntax is fairly Englishy for a romlang. Phonology, also very Englishy save front rounded and nasal vowels and /ʁ/, the latter two of which are well-known as shibboleths of French speech so tend to come naturally. Orthography is also Englishy and again, there's enough unassimilated loanwords that people are already familiar with it.

[Travis B.]

Are you sure it isn't different from the spoken English you speak? There are substantial differences between written Standard English and spoken English in practically all English dialects.

Nothing I'm particularly consciously aware of -- at the very least, I don't remember having to make any substantial effort to learn Standard English, which I imagine will not be the case in a few centuries.

I do wonder though, will the perception of current English as a "classical" language develop in the future? If so, will the existence of spoken media from today change people's view of English as compared to, say, Vedic Sanskrit or Latin which are not widely spoken natively?

The key thing is written Standard English. Even everyday spoken Standard English differs a good bit from written Standard English. Take for instance the plethora of forms found in everyday spoken Standard English such as hafta, be gonna, have gotta, be sposta, kinda, sorta, d'you, and so on, and that is not even getting into things like common variation in past participle forms in spoken English varieties, the fact that practically all spoken English varieties have innovated new second person plural forms, less commonly-known contracted forms like I onno and y'on't, the fact that many English varieties preserve an optional distinction between gerunds and present participles, and so on. Many of these differences are register differences rather than differences in dialect, and hence if one has learned Standard English one has probably learned these forms even if one does not use them in writing (and even if one does not use them in speech oneself one is almost certainly at least passively familiar with them).

About 'classical' English, I highly suspect that written Standard English will stay much more static in the coming centuries than spoken English, such that in writing people across the English-speaking world along with speakers of English as a second or foreign language will remain able to readily communicate with one another in writing for the foreseeable future even as language change affects spoken English. Note, however, that I think that English-speakers across the world will be able to understand each other's spoken English well at least in the near future even when language change is taken into account not because English varieties will converge globally (because they probably won't, as that kind of change requires close everyday contact, and for the most part people are not moving between the US and the UK much anymore) but due to simple familiarity with each others' varieties from hearing them in media (which requires only passive exposure).