Language-Change, Slang, Evolution

[Tachikaze]

There are some good, intelligent posts here. Some of you understand language much better that they average person.

Language is my profession, so I have a lot of thoughts on it. A few points:

A language evolves constantly. Even from one day to the next a particular language has gained some words and lost others. Nouns are turned into verbs; new contractions are created; specialized jargon and foreign words are incorpotated into the mainstream.

There is no one "English". There are hundreds or thousands of variations, many of which are mutually unintelligable. They are all equally valid forms of English.

There is no English today that has not changed significantly over the past few hundred years. There is no "original" or "true" Engish, and, actually, never was. Linguists have pointed out that the English today that is closest to Shakespeare's English is spoken by the people of the Appalechian Mountains of West Virginia.

English has grammatical features of the Germanic languages and Latin languages, plus grammar developed on its own right up to now. If people had put artificial restrictions on it—saying it could only have "pure German" structure, for instance—it never would have evolved into the language we have today. The grammar of American English only 100 years ago had different grammar than today. The English of 2106 will be quite different from today's English.

There should be no restrictions of the mixing of languages as long as the language is useful. 20% of Japanese vocabulary is made up of words from foreign languages. Japanese who speak not a word of English use the same word for elevator, door, table, romance, computer, taxi, helicopter, melon, and even chance that I use when I speak English. This hasn't hurt the Japanese any.