Re: [tied] English.

Mark Odegard wrote -

> Currently, English is severely constrained by its literature (and
> universal literacy). We need keep ourselves literate in what's gone
> before and thus subject ourselves to the prescriptivists,
> notwithstanding a generations-long revolt against them. Innovation
> often gets stillborn.

I've never heard this opinion before and as a speaker of a small, heavily English-influenced language it's a weird experience to read that one of its native speakers is so critical of the present state of English and that you believe that English is a constrained language. What do other people on the list say - does universal literacy really constrain a language? I think you've got hold of a small and often overlooked part of the truth, but the major part of the truth is the opposite of what you're saying: literacy makes people want to be creative with language (but perhaps in other, more self-conscious ways compared to a society without books). Literacy also makes newly coined, cool expressions spread like wildfire. To a foreigner like me, present day English is an extremely creative language, it's rapidly coining new words and expressions, in the street, in newspapers, in business and science. People in the humanities are fond of creating new and impressive-looking multi-syllable words, and how much of our internet-related terms would be understandable to someone living in the 1980s?

What's typical of English is the ease with which nouns can be made into verbs or vice versa. Words and expressions quickly turn into abbreviations, which soon are used as words in their own right, and new abbreviations and compounds are formed from them. I used to read Suck (www.suck.com) - those writers made English sound like an innovating, developing language - to me at least.

> It would be so nice if English could go its merry way and fracture
> into a number of interesting daughter languages. But this seems to not
> be in the cards.

Let's say we cut off all international communication and transport tomorrow - would anyone like to speculate how fast such a fracturing might happen? My guess is that it would happen pretty fast. A couple of generations and there would be obvious differences. Any conlangers out there who would like to construct such a future language developed from English for a change, instead of yet another Tolkienesque elvish language or yet another Volkspraak based on Ur-Germanic? I'd be interested to hear the results of such an experiment.

Mark -
I marvel even more at how you have to travel to Great Britain or Ireland to find something that gets difficult to understand dialect-wise (but just about everyone whose native dialect gives a problem can code-switch to something resembling MidAtlantic).

What does MidAtlantic sound like? "Blub, blub, blub"?

All the best,
Hakan