Colin Gurrie's actual framing was When Will Modern English End, but as he places it between 1900 and 1950 I changed it. We will have to find a new name for what we are speaking now, and I regret to say that Postmodern English does in fact describe what we have become. There is no longer a single center or even two competing centers for English now, there are many Englishes. Pluricentrality is the term Gurrie uses. The other divisions of English have been because of historical events, the Norman Conquest and Caxton's printing press, and such are found for the first half of the 1900s as well. There were two world wars , which put English speakers in much greater contact with not only English in other countries, but the dialects within their own countries. There was a steady increase in oral communication at a distance: radio, telephone, movies, TV. This increased the colloquiality of English (and all languages, but they can make their own division decisions), the decreasing distance between written and spoken language.
the decreasing distance between written and spoken language
ReplyDeleteI was just listening to Jackson Crawford discussing Indo-European alphabets with Danny Bate (evidently a scholar of the history of alphabets) and one of the points they made was actually the reverse of this. In their view, spoken language changes much more rapidly than written, with written retaining more archaic forms, depending on context of course, but also more intelligible over a wider time span.
I think that is the long truth in all written languages. But the current written form is closer than usual to speech, and getting closer. It will always lag and preserve, but less so now, and likely going forward. But they will never meet.
ReplyDeleteI see where you are going with that. Since they are both scholars of ancient languages, I think their bias might have been towards observing older forms are still understandable rather than how closely current writing conforms to current speaking, and I recall an emphasis on standardized spelling more than grammar and usage.
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