Linguistics and jargon
Sep. 19th, 2019 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealFact: language is changing all the time. That's not good or bad, it just is.
Probably the types of change that are easiest to see on an individual timescale are changes in vocabulary. We make up new nouns/verbs/adjectives, and old ones fall out of fashion. You can "unfriend" someone (a noun, "friend," turned into a verb, "friend"="add as a friend on a social networking platform," which then combined with the existing prefix "un"); we tend to no longer call things "groovy."
On the scale of centuries, though, there are more drastic changes in stuff like pronunciation and syntax. Shakespeare rhymes "proved" and "loved," which means these words probably rhymed five hundred years ago. If you compare Latin to modern Spanish, you can see lots and lots of cognates, but Latin has different case endings for nouns (subject, direct object, indirect object, possessive, being addressed...); Spanish basically has none of this, except for pronouns.
Another fact: language change is from the ground-up. There isn't an authority that dictates "hey everybody, we're going to stop pronouncing 'e' on the ends of words now!" People just gradually change, sometimes one region or one cultural group at a time, and then it slowly spreads.
Especially in English, the role of dictionaries/linguistics scholars in general is to document changes in the language, not tell people how to speak. ("descriptive" versus "prescriptive grammar.") In other languages, there are more prestigious bodies that try to regulate the prestige dialect (the French Academy), but even they don't have the authority to arrest people for slipping in English-influenced slang.
Also a fact: spoken language changes faster than written language. I might say "I'm'a watch the ball game," where the 'a comes from "going to-> gonna -> m'a -> 'a," but I wouldn't write that in a formal document.
Also a fact: especially in this day and age (as opposed to 100 or 500 years ago), there's a lot more opportunity for subcultures to develop their own jargon that's kind of impenetrable, even meaningless, to outsiders.
A lot of my metaphors come from religion, because I'm a religious person, but also know that many of my peers are not. If I say something like "Protestants only recognize baptism and the Eucharist as sacraments; they perform ordination too, but don't consider it a sacrament like Catholics do" out of context, a lot of my friends would be like "...what...those sure are words." Which is fine. If they need to know what I'm talking about, they can get a dictionary.
But just because an authority registers some use of language as accepted within a language community, that doesn't make it any more meaningful than it was before--very likely it was already established among many people. And it doesn't mean that it reflects an objectively verifiable concept! So you can't use it as a weapon to put words in someone else's mouth.
(I have a lot of abstract rants like this, where it's easier to couch them in, say, a religious context than in terms of contemporary hot-button issues.)
Probably the types of change that are easiest to see on an individual timescale are changes in vocabulary. We make up new nouns/verbs/adjectives, and old ones fall out of fashion. You can "unfriend" someone (a noun, "friend," turned into a verb, "friend"="add as a friend on a social networking platform," which then combined with the existing prefix "un"); we tend to no longer call things "groovy."
On the scale of centuries, though, there are more drastic changes in stuff like pronunciation and syntax. Shakespeare rhymes "proved" and "loved," which means these words probably rhymed five hundred years ago. If you compare Latin to modern Spanish, you can see lots and lots of cognates, but Latin has different case endings for nouns (subject, direct object, indirect object, possessive, being addressed...); Spanish basically has none of this, except for pronouns.
Another fact: language change is from the ground-up. There isn't an authority that dictates "hey everybody, we're going to stop pronouncing 'e' on the ends of words now!" People just gradually change, sometimes one region or one cultural group at a time, and then it slowly spreads.
Especially in English, the role of dictionaries/linguistics scholars in general is to document changes in the language, not tell people how to speak. ("descriptive" versus "prescriptive grammar.") In other languages, there are more prestigious bodies that try to regulate the prestige dialect (the French Academy), but even they don't have the authority to arrest people for slipping in English-influenced slang.
Also a fact: spoken language changes faster than written language. I might say "I'm'a watch the ball game," where the 'a comes from "going to-> gonna -> m'a -> 'a," but I wouldn't write that in a formal document.
Also a fact: especially in this day and age (as opposed to 100 or 500 years ago), there's a lot more opportunity for subcultures to develop their own jargon that's kind of impenetrable, even meaningless, to outsiders.
A lot of my metaphors come from religion, because I'm a religious person, but also know that many of my peers are not. If I say something like "Protestants only recognize baptism and the Eucharist as sacraments; they perform ordination too, but don't consider it a sacrament like Catholics do" out of context, a lot of my friends would be like "...what...those sure are words." Which is fine. If they need to know what I'm talking about, they can get a dictionary.
But just because an authority registers some use of language as accepted within a language community, that doesn't make it any more meaningful than it was before--very likely it was already established among many people. And it doesn't mean that it reflects an objectively verifiable concept! So you can't use it as a weapon to put words in someone else's mouth.
(I have a lot of abstract rants like this, where it's easier to couch them in, say, a religious context than in terms of contemporary hot-button issues.)
