Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 June 20

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June 20

Opposite of paedophile

I was wondering if there is a term for the opposite of a paedophile? In that the child is attracted to an adult. Such as in the movie The Professional or for that matter towards the end of Lolita (when Lo goes off with the other fellow) Lihaas (talk) 05:15, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Creepy? --Jayron32 05:16, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Possibly something akin to Oedipus complex. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:37, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

That's for boys attracted to their mothers or, by extension, any older woman. The Electra complex is for girls attracted to their fathers or, by extension, any older man. I'm not aware of any term for children with homosexual attraction to adults. StuRat (talk) 06:18, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Just for clarification, Stu, does the word "paedophile" in English only cover homosexual attracion of an adult to children? I'm asking because in (my native) German it's for homo- and heterosexual cases.--Zoppp (talk) 08:15, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

No, it has nothing to do with homosexuality in English either. — kwami (talk) 08:51, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

It includes both heterosexual and homosexual attraction, in English, too. StuRat (talk) 17:31, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

In any case, are we talking true sexual attraction here, or is it more like "hero worship", which is pretty common among kids, I should think. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:22, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Early-onset gerontophilia? —Angr (talk) 06:06, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

In what to me was an unexpected twist, our own Jimbo Wales comes up several times in a Google image search for that word. Dismas|^(talk) 06:28, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Wales is the opposite of a pedophile??? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:30, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Those pictures apparently come from this forum thread, where someone accuses him- or herself of gerontophilia for being attracted to Jimbo. Who is only 44, for crying out loud. —Angr (talk) 17:18, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I wasnt aware that i t had to be a homosexual attraction. Paedophile could be for heterosexual attraction too.

And in at least the 2nd example up above it is a sexual attraction.

But Angr i think that sounds about right. Thanks.Lihaas (talk) 08:58, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Is there a significant number of pubescent boys who don’t regularly bash one off whilst thinking about adult singers, supermodels, actresses and the like? I think the term you are looking to describe such attraction is simply sexual, as opposed to people who are asexual. — Chameleon 13:45, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Parrots

Does anyone know why parrots are so often called "Polly"? I looked in google and nothing useful came up. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:21, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't know but polly is also slang for politician, so possibly that is the connection.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 07:28, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

That seems unlikely to me, as (a) I've never heard of a politician being called a polly; and (b) there's no obvious connection (OK, maybe politicians spouting stuff without believing it). I suspect it's just alliteration. Doctor Dolittle's parrot was called Polynesia, but I guess that's a fancy form of "Polly" rather than the source of the name. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 07:59, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

The OED's first quote for the use of "polly" in relation to parrots dates to 1826. In the etymology section of "polly" it notes a quote by Ben Jonson in 1616 which may indicate a usage of "polly" to mean (or as a conventional proper name of a) parrot which was already current by then.

As to politicians, my understanding is that "pollie" (and usually not "polly") is simply the shortened form of "politician", taking only the first two syllables. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 08:46, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

In America, politicians are often called "pols" in print, though I don't know that I've ever heard anyone say it out loud. The parrot thing appears to be hundreds of years old. Thank you all for your efforts! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:28, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

"Pollies" for politicians is extremely common in Australia; it's not that common to hear an individual politician called a "polly", but it does happen. I just googled "pollies politicians" and got over 7 million hits, but the first few pages seem overwhelmingly Australian in focus. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 12:10, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I think it's particularly cruel to give a parrot a name with a /p/ in it, when they have no lips to 'ronounce them 'ro'erly. — kwami (talk) 08:50, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I suspect it has something to do with using the same initial letter for a familiar name, such as Bruin the bear, Brock the badger, Kitty the cat, and of course, Mickey and Minnie Mouse. --TammyMoet (talk) 17:17, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

In a similar vein, why are "Fido" and "Rover" dogs? --ColinFine (talk) 19:51, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Mortimer Mouse (Mickey's original name), Donald and Daisy Duck, Roger Rabbit, Daffy Duck, Porky and Petunia Pig, Bugs Bunny (!), etc. "Kitten" and "kitty" derive from diminutives of "cat" (Latin cattus). "Rover" is an odd one, as a "rover" is a synonym for a pirate. But to "rove" also means to wander around, and dogs are good at that. Fido claims that it comes from "I trust" or some such. Something to do with faithfulness, as dogs are supposedly faithful to their masters (as opposed to cats, which are faithful to whoever's feeding them at that moment). Wiktionary is no help. But cartoon dogs might have alliterative names. Goofy's original name was Dippy Dawg. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:44, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

pronunciation of Arthurian names

I asked this on the Humanities Desk, but no-one seemed to know of anything. I'm looking for a ref on how to pronounce the names of the Knights of the Round Table and other Arthurian stuff. I had to leave some blanks at List of geological features on Mimas, but we should have this at the Knights article too. — kwami (talk) 08:58, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

See Category:User ang.—Wavelength (talk) 14:24, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject King Arthur.—Wavelength (talk) 15:31, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Astronomical objects.—Wavelength (talk) 15:33, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the King Arthur project is a good place to ask. Thanks. — kwami (talk) 17:04, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Much better than members of Category:User ang, since Arthurian names are Brythonic as filtered through French and have nothing to do with Old English. —Angr (talk) 17:14, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Here are a few lists via Google Books. [1][2][3] --Cam (talk) 13:13, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Where Is The Evidence That Every Subsequent Language Learned Makes It Easier

I had a discussion with a customer and she claimed that learning a 2nd language made it easier for her to learn a 3rd.

How true is this/ is this anecdotal evidence?Curb Chain (talk) 12:16, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

It is widely known in second language acquisition that experience learning other languages previously is one of the factors affecting how well you acquire a language you're learning now. This makes common sense, since having learned another language before means you are familiar with strategies that will help you learn better. Of course, the effect is not linear (if you're learning you're 10th language, your 9th language probably won't help the exact same amount as your 2nd language helped when you were learning your 3rd language). I don't know any controlled studies or academic papers about this question specifically off the top of my head, but also I don't think anyone really doubts this. rʨanaɢ (talk) 12:31, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I think it also depends, to an extent, on which these first, second and third languages are, and how closely related they are to one another. If your mother tongue is English, for example, then having learned French will probably help you a bunch if you subsequently decide to learn Spanish. The situation might well be very different if the three languages were instead Japanese, Hungarian and Arabic. Gabbe (talk) 12:46, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

All languages have grammatical quirks, be it how they form the plural, negative constructions, verb tenses, case endings, etc. When learning a second language, some of this can be quite off-puting ("why the hell does French have all these weird tenses we never use in English ?" or "How can one possibly know whether a word is feminine or masculine ? and why does it matter ?"; or, going the other way "You don't say the greens fields in English ? how bizarre ! I've learned that the adjective should always agree in number with the noun.") The more languages you learn, the more you become familiar with these types of twists, and the less distracting they become. This is on top of similarities in vocabulary and phonetics which are also accumulative: if you've learned to say the "kh" sound for Spanish, you can say it in Arabic, for example. --Xuxl (talk) 15:00, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I once knew a guy who claimed to be fluent in something like 25 languages and he said that after you have mastered the first 14 everything after that is just a piece of cake.--Zoppp (talk) 22:14, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

It is definitely true. Having a grammatical concept from one language such as case from German makes learning Russian, Greek or Latin much easier. I shocked my Latin teacher when she asked us to guess what sum/es/est/sumus/estis/sunt was and I answered, easy, that's jsem/jesz/jest/sme/ste/sut from Ruthenian. Even when there's no close relation genetically between languages, concepts such as agreement or verb conjugations with incorporated object pronouns that you find in Zulu come much easier when you have them from French and Russian. μηδείς (talk) 01:16, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Um, the reason it is absolutely easier to learn a second language is because you know what a language IS. A person who doesn't speak English at all (pick some place in Africa) but has already learned a second language to a decent extent will NOT get caught up on what the word have "really" means -- how can the same word be used in "I have gone", as to have a cat or a cake. How can you "have" a gone? You can have a cake, like you have a cat, or you can have a cake like you have a coffee, and then you don't have the cake any more. you don't have children until you have some. what are all these haves, what does "have" really mean?? Well, anyone who has already learned a second language knows the truth: have doesn't mean anything. They know not to try to figure out what it "means", and instead focus on the sentence. --188.28.194.120 (talk) 01:38, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I just want to answer these responses (which I thank all for contributing, and welcome any further response(s)):

This doesn't make learning one language after your first easier, it just gives you experience learning a 3rd language. As I have mentioned that I had a discussion with the customer, I stated that the genetic relationship of a target language (i.e.: the 3rd language you are learning) is crucial to how well you will learn a language. For example, she was learning French and she already knew Spanish, so I suggested that learning vocabulary would be easier (and in my mind compared with chinese). If the only reason that learning more languages is easier is because of the language strategies that are developed, then I think that doesn't make it easier to learn another language, it is the strategies, in which they are learned to acquire more languages, makes it easier. There will be an infinite number of languages to learn, so it think it's the amount of effort and time spent learning a language. I wouldn't say it gets easier, it just makes more sense, like in above, you don't ask questions, you get it (you know what i mean).Curb Chain (talk) 05:39, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, there isn't any inherent effect on learning the actual grammar or vocabulary of a third language if you are already fluent in a second. That is, there's no substitute for doing the hard slog of getting the language input and building up the linguistic system in your mind - you need to do this whether it's your second, third, or twelfth language (or your first). The positive effects do exist though, and they come from three different sources, all of which have been alluded to above. The first is positive language transfer, meaning that if the grammar and the vocabulary of the language you are trying to learn is similar to one that you already know, then it will be a lot easier to learn it.

The second, as Rjanag said, are learning strategies and communication strategies. There's a good chance that people who have already learned a second language will be adept at these strategies, and this can help them integrate with the target culture and get more useful language input. There aren't any articles on these strategies yet, but there is some related content at good language learner studies and language learning aptitude.

Finally, learning a second language increases your metalinguistic awareness, which can make it easier to notice linguistic features in the language input that monolingual speakers might miss. This is similar to language transfer, but is more conscious; you learn to expect the unexpected, as it were. By the time you've learned a dozen languages, you will have a large linguistic base on which to draw on, you will be an expert in learning strategies, and you will be able to spot unusual features in the language input much more easily. — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 08:02, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Modern_Language_Aptitude_Test "The design of the MLAT also reflects a major conclusion of Carroll's research, which was that language learning aptitude was not a "general" unitary ability, but rather a composite of at least four relatively independent "specialized" abilities." So I guess when people say that learning a second language makes it easier to learn more languages is just oversimplifying the concept, and the quote is addresses this: people who think is believe there is some sort of general intellegence factor when learning a 2nd lanuage which isn't true.Curb Chain (talk) 05:32, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I note from the article on MLAT that it doesn't contain anything about motivation. I know someone who picked up French to a very fluent standard with minimal formal instruction, just a lot of contact with French speakers, yet is finding learning Mandarin a real slog. Factors I can see potentially having a role are: how confident do you feel that you will learn the language, do you have confidence that the teaching methods proposed are right for you, how motivated are you to communicate in real situations as opposed to simply being a good student?

A study was done in Israel of Russian children (most of whom are bilingual) and it was found that not only were they able to learn a third language like English more quickly than Israelis who grew up only speaking Hebrew, they even spoke Hebrew more fluently! I don't remember where the study was I think Ben Gurion University or TAU. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie | Say Shalom! 15:42, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I was curious enough about this to look it up in my big tome of SLA, "The Study of Second Language Acquisition" by Rod Ellis ISBN 9780194422574. He says "De Angelis' study together with earlier work by Ringbom (1987) and Williams (1998) indicates that multilingual learners may draw on all their linguistic resources, not just their L1, but that the extent to which they do is determined by their perceptions of the typological similarities between the source and target languages" (p373). On pp382-3 he goes on to say there is evidence for transfer from the L2 to the L3 in Fuller (1999).

There are also more studies on pp390-392 (too many to list here) that show that learners perceptions about the distance of an L3 from their other languages can be the deciding factor in how much is transferred from the L1 and how much from the L2. This doesn't necessarily have any relation to the actual difference between the various languages, and the picture can be complicated by other factors such as skill level in the L2.

On p712 he says that "there is considerable evidence to support a link between learners' experience with language and/or language learning and strategy use". He cites Ehrman (1990) as showing that "professional linguists used more strategies more often" than other learners. Also, he says that Nation and McLaughlin (1986) found that multilingual speakers were better at implicit learning than bilingual or monolingual speakers. The information in this book is fairly recent (2008), but there may have been other studies done since then.

• De Angelis, J. 2005. "Interlanguage transfer of function words". Language Learning 55:379-414.

• Ehrman, M. 1990. "The role of personality type in adult language learning: an ongoing investigation" in T. Parry and C. Stansfield (eds.): Language Aptitude Reconsidered. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
• Fuller, J. 1999. "Between three languages: composite structure in interlanguage". Applied Linguistics 20: 534-61.
• Nation, R. and B. McLaughlin. 1986. "Experts and novices: an information-processing approach to the 'good language learner' problem". Applied Psycholinguistics 7: 41-56.
• Ringbom, H. 1987. The Role of the First Language in Foreign Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Williams, S. and B. Hammarberg. 1998. "Language switches in L3 production: implications for a polyglot speaking model". Applied Linguistics 19:295-333.

— Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 20:05, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Identifying unfamiliar languages by their leaving a "signature", e.g. characteristic consonant clusters, etc.

The consonant cluster /sk/ is characteristic in the Skandinavian languages. /zdr/ - in the Slavic ones. /γr/ and /rγ/ - in the Berber ones. /st/ - in the Indo-European ones. /mz/ and /zm/ - in Turkish. /bh/ and /dh/ in Hindi. Щ - in Russian. /tl/ (the /l/ being unsounded) in the Mayan languages (e.g. in the Nahuatl language, and the like), /kn/ (the k being pronounced) in Old English. Additionally, the English r (rather than the Spanish one and the French/German one) is a characteristic of English (although it exists also in some dialects of Chinese), while the ayin is a characteristic of the Semitic languages (although it exists also in few American languages), etc.

Such characteristic "signatures", enable us to identify a given language we don't understand, just by listening to (or by reading) its frequent consonant clusters (and sometimes - also by listening to its vowels).

My question is about whether Wikipedia has any article dealing with those "signatures", or any list of languages and their "signatures", and the like.

HOOTmag (talk) 13:14, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Language recognition chart (WP:LRC).—Wavelength (talk) 14:29, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanx.

Unfortunately, this article deals with characteristic scripts, rather than with characteristic sounds, e.g. characteristic consonant clusters - and the like. I'm more interested in the issue of identifying an unfamiliar language - by listening to it... HOOTmag (talk) 14:54, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

See Category:Wikipedia IPA and Category:Language phonologies. Maybe someone can organize the details in a convenient chart.

—Wavelength (talk) 16:00, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I had a look at some of the articles mentioned in those categories, but I suspect those articles have nothing to do with the "signatures" I've been talking about. HOOTmag (talk) 17:55, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I understand perfectly well what you are talking about, but can't imagine what to look for. I don't speak a lick of it, but was once eavesdropping on some Hungarians on the train when, upon recognizing the language, I absent-mindedly mumbled "a Magyar nyelv", which means "the Hungarian tongue." They were astonished, and started speaking to me, but I had to say I didn't understand. They didn't understand me saying I didn't understand them in English. Then I tried "Ja ne hovorim po-Madjarski" to no effect. I finally explained satisfactorily in German that "Ich spreche kein Wort Ungarisch, aber Ich habe Sprachen gern" and they got up and changed cars. μηδείς (talk) 00:58, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Is Ukrainian your native tongue? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 08:41, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Ja ne hovorim po-Madjarski is Slovak. The hint is -m in 1st person singular present; Ukrainian has -u/-yu, on the other side of the isogloss. No such user (talk) 09:20, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Hracias! -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 09:23, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Well correctly it'd be já nehovorím po maďarsky - Slovak has the letter Ď, and the po-xxx hyphen for languages and the negative marker separating from the verb are East Slavic language traits. - filelakeshoe 13:06, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I thought it was Russian. I do not understand any Slavic language well enough to even have the most basic everyday conversation, but I have heard and read enough Russian to pick up at least the most simple basics from context. I still can't distinguish one Slavic language from another. I actually understand Hungarian better than Slavic languages, even though I have only had one basic Hungarian course and forgot the most of it because of lack of use, so what I now remember and understand is only the very basics. This is interesting because I speak Finnish natively, and Hungarian is supposed to be related to Finnish. The truth is that it is quite distantly related, but closer than the majority of the European languages. I understand Estonian better than I understand Hungarian, despite never having studied Estonian, but when talking to Estonians, I always tend to try to talk to them in Finnish. JIP | Talk 20:18, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

It's close to Russian, except for: (a) "hovorim" would be govoryu (there is a word govorim, but that's used in 1st person plural, whereas this verb is 1st person singular); and (b) "po-Madjarski" would be po-mad'yarski (small m, although "Hungarian" (the language) is capitalised, Mad'yarskiy. And, if we're being consistent with romanisation, it would be "Ya", not "Ja". -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:44, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

While one is unlikely to remain misunderstood if one refers to the Hungarians as мадьяры, it is better to use the contemporary conventional Russian terms: Венгрия (the country), венгры (the people) and венгерский язык (the language). Also, I'm not sure languages are capitalised in Russian; capitalisation only applies for proper names (like Hungary): он венгр из Венгрии и говорит по-венгерски. Here по-венгерски is an adverb, and the last part of the sentence means literally "he speaks in the Hungarian way; he speaks like the Hungarians do; he speaks like a Hungarian; il parle à la hongroise". --Theurgist (talk) 21:44, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

So? (OP's comment) HOOTmag (talk) 13:08, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

The best I could find was Non-native pronunciations of English and Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages, although it may not be as good as you might want. But I, like μηδείς, perfectly understand your question, and myself have thought a lot about it when you know what language you're listening to even without being capable of understanding it. Someone may wish to commence an article on "signatures", starting with basic phonetic and phonotactic peculiarities of given languages or language groups (for example [r̝] is unique for Czech and sje-ljudet is unique for Swedish, so a language featuring any of those is Czech or Swedish respectively; on the other hand, it is easy to tell apart Slavic from Polynesian languages, knowing that Slavic are abundant in various consonant clusters while Polynesian allow no more than one consonant per syllable). --Theurgist (talk) 19:43, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

@μηδείς: Hungarian and Slovak do not usually capitalise nouns and adjectives denoting nationalities or languages: "a magyar nyelv"; "maďarčina", "maďarský jazyk". --Theurgist (talk) 19:58, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

HOOTmag, such an article would be useful for finding languages with the phonemes and phoneme clusters of the English word wavelength.

—Wavelength (talk) 23:23, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Ja ne hovorim ni po-slovatsky ni po-ukrainsky, ale malo znam ponashomu. Я мало изучал русский язык в школе. Jak kazala moja baba, izhe tyzh sja uchila pomoskovsky v shkole, "My hovorime nit po-moskovsky, ale po-nashomu." Ja ne znam pisati po-nashomu, a lem bars malo hovoriti.

Rusyn byl i budu, rusinom rodil sja. μηδείς (talk) 04:36, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Oh cool! :) --Theurgist (talk) 05:20, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

English in the future

Hello. Approx how many years in the future, extrapolating from historical and current trends, will spoken English become non-intelligible with that of right now? If you need a number I tentatively define "intelligible" as 50% compr. but a linguist may feel free to revise this to better reflect "intelligible" in the sense of the qusetion thanks in advance — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.128.95.0 (talk) 13:19, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

its highly postulated but one can compare old english and trace its changing roots over time to see roughly how long it takes to change. of course in the modern era with large diasporic communities the same language gets distorted over time. Take for example american english and british english, which is largely comprehensible (colloquialisms apart) at the moment, but you can see the tide of change coming in.

You can also see the timeline of english proper from old english to the shakespeare era to today (or perhaps even add the 19 century before today) and note the changes. Fascinating study that would be though, linguistically speaking.Lihaas (talk) 13:33, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I would think modern trends would tend to slow down the evolution of English, because worldwide standardization would tend to prove more resistant to change, mostly because standards would be established artificially and adhered to for the sake of worldwide communication. Small pockets may continue to evolve apace in localized settings, but any overarching standard I think would be resistant to change. Bus stop (talk) 14:15, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Still, and despite modern trends, the spoken language continues to evolve in divergent directions. For example Southern American English and Multicultural London English are among the faster growing varieties of spoken English, both changing largely independently of each other and the standard varieties used in broadcast media. If our civilization continues for some time into the future, on current trends, I would expect diglossia to develop, similar to the situation for Arabic today, with a historic global standard, and divergent (and mutually incomprehensible) spoken varieties, probably within 300-400 years. Because diglossia involves some degree of comprehension of the standard, however, modern English would remain comprehensible to speakers of local varieties in principle for as long as diglossia persisted. That mutual comprehension would disappear, however, as soon as most people stopped learning the standard variety. An abandonment of the standard (or the relegation of the standard to a small elite, similar to the process that occurred with Latin in the early middle ages) would most likely coincide with the end of our civilization as we know it. When that might happen is impossible to predict. Marco polo (talk) 15:19, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Bus stop but thats the point there isnt a standardisation.Lihaas (talk) 17:17, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

There isn't much officially imposed standardization, but there is a lot of de facto standardization. —Angr (talk) 17:22, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Listen to English newscasters around the world and they will all sound somewhat similar, even in places where the locals are utterly incomprehensible to one another. StuRat (talk) 17:28, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

It will always be intelligible: no one will ever stop watching classic films. Just as nineteenth century novels are highly readable BECAUSE they're novels (a very new form of art!) and BECAUSE everyone still reads them in today's high schools, they remain part of the definition of English. In order for people to stop understanding Dickens, people would first have to stop reading Dickens in high school: but when would that be? Never. Likewise, in order to stop understanding our spoken language from films, people would have to stop watching classic films. But when would that be? Never. We are living, to people of the future, as people lived in ancient Greece, with the exception that we have far more media, sound and movies, than they did. People don't know how to pronounce Greek, but everyone will always be able to pronounce and understand modern English (of 2011), in all lands and for ever.--188.28.194.120 (talk) 17:51, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

188.28.194.120 your time-line is far too short. Dickens is only half a dozen or generations ago - my own great-grandparents were born before Dickens died. Shakespeare (spoken with the original pronunciation) is a fair challenge and Chaucer may as well be writing in Klingon. The language of for example the US Constitution causes highly educated judges many days of hard work trying to figure out the exact meaning of clauses that were perfectly clear and simple to the original authors.

When a news reporter for whom English is a second language is reporting from the non-English-speaking world to the English-speaking world—that strengthens standardization of one form of English. That is just one example. Consider a person for whom English is not their first language, working in a non-English speaking area of the world, but whose job entails interacting with English-speaking people. That person is reinforcing a version of English which is representative of an international standard. Or consider a person for whom English is not a first language traveling to an English-speaking part of the world for business reasons—their use of English strengthens standardization. In all of these instances the priority is given to basic communication rather than using the language in the innovative ways that can result in the evolution of the language. I think that international usage slows down evolution not because of any externally applied force, but rather because of the priority placed on simple and basic communication at the expense of those things that native speakers in a self-contained group might consider priorities. I think these priorities that appeal to native speakers are in general more frivolous that the priorities of basic communication, but it is nevertheless these minor concerns that lead to the evolution of the language. Bus stop (talk) 18:29, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

That is what you would expect, but apparently the opposite is occurring: English dialects are becoming more and more different from each other. Read this quote from William Labov, one of the leading dialectologists for English: "Whatever the influence of the mass media are, it doesn't affect the way we speak everyday. And the regional dialects of this country are getting more and more different, so that people in Buffalo, St. Louis and Los Angeles are now speaking much more differently from each other than they ever did.[4]". If one day these dialects become so different that people have trouble communicating, then they will probably come up with a variety used specifically for communicating with people from other regions, much like speakers of German use Standard German to communicate with people outside their region who can't understand their dialect. --Terfili (talk) 18:47, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

That's interesting because I don't think it is happening in the UK. It is becoming increasingly rare here to hear children with a really strong regional accent because TV and schools both work towards standardising English (with only partial success in some cases). Dbfirs 19:09, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm actually skeptical of Labov's findings. They're based on the data collected for the Atlas of North American English, which looked only at people who were "locals" in the city where they lived. The fieldworkers (who worked by telephone rather than visiting in person) deliberately sought out people who belonged to the ethnicity that had originally settled the city under investigation, who still lived in the city where they were born and had grown up and ideally where their parents had also grown up. If the phone book listed both a "John Smith" and a "John Smith, Jr." they would call Junior, because he would be likely to fit their profile of the ideal informant. People who had grown up somewhere else from where they lived as an adult were excluded. And in the United States, that excludes a whole lot of people - my entire nuclear family, for example. No one of my parents' or my generation in my family was born, grew up, or lived as an adult in the same city, or for that matter even lived their entire adult life in the same city. Enormous numbers of Americans are very mobile, and Labov didn't take them into account in his study at all. And they are exactly the people who don't speak in local accents, but speak General American. Labov personally doesn't even believe in the existence of General American, but that's hardly surprising since he designed his study to weed out most people who speak it. So even if the accents of the people who are stationary are growing apart, that isn't necessarily true of the people who are mobile, and I bet the numbers of mobile people in the U.S. are growing while the numbers of stationary people are declining. —Angr (talk) 19:35, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

These two things can both occur at the same time. Regional dialects can evolve separately from one another and grow more different from one another, while standard English remains relatively constant. Standard English would be thought of as bland by regional devotees but I think it would be understood totally by almost everyone. Bus stop (talk) 19:54, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

The future has already arrived, in some cases. I watched The Social Network last weekend, for the first time. You know how sometimes you don't quite get the opening lines of a scene, but you keep on watching and the gist reveals itself? Well, I watched and watched, and waited and waited, but by the end of the opening scene I had not the slightest idea of what the 2 people were talking about. If they'd been speaking in Swahili, I would have been no worse off. Seriously. If asked to guess what I thought they were saying, I don't know what I would have said but I'm sure it would have been way off. (It didn't help that there were few if any external visual cues, or that neither of them ever finished any of their sentences before the other interrupted, or (as I later discovered) that they were talking in what amounted to a secret code, or that they were trying out for the Rapid Fire Speaking Olympics, or that the guy has a single "one size fits all" facial expression.) So I stopped the DVD, put on Subtitles, and started again. What a revelation! It was a totally new experience. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:05, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Kind of a Geek Jive, maybe? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:32, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Maybe. He was a geek, but she wasn't. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 22:53, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I didn't see the film. Did they talk in that monotone that so many kids seem to talk with nowadays? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:06, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

You better believe it. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 02:46, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure that wasn't just bad acting? :) rʨanaɢ (talk) 05:00, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, that might go some way to explaining it, but it doesn't sit too well with Jesse Eisenberg's nomination for Best Actor at both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. I reckon he was taking his surname too literally (it's German for "iceberg"). -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 08:37, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

"Iron mountain", actually. Iceberg is Eisberg. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 13:41, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, yeah, iceberg, iron mountain, same diff ...  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:31, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

And when I watched The Full Monty here in Germany, I had to read the German subtitles to understand the Yorkshirese. —Angr (talk) 20:10, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I appreciate 188.28.194.120's belief in shared literature to maintain continuity in English but I'm doubtful that it will be effective in the long-term. Take the suggested example of teaching Charles Dickens in high schools. I asked two high school teachers of English, both about retirement age. They did not teach any book by Dickens in their entire careers. Wanderer57 (talk) 22:47, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

it was just an example (maybe not the best one). I don't see how anyone can go through high school without reading 19th century literature. It is inconceivable that a well-educated person 1000 years from now will not understand what I say when I say: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." And that is quoting from 400 years ago. --188.28.194.120 (talk) 23:04, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I dunno. Even in that fairly straightforward quote, the word players is used in a way most of us wouldn't use it in normal English today. It does require interpretation, even now. HiLo48 (talk) 03:06, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree with 188's arguments. Consider the parallel case of Classical Latin: when Caesar and Cicero, Pliny and Virgil were writing it 2000 years ago and speaking it in formal situations like the Senate, the everyday vernacular Latin in Rome that they themselves would have used while, say, buying something from a market stall had already diverged in the direction of what ultimately would become modern Italian, while in other parts of the Roman Empire, similar divergences had begun that would eventually result in Portugese, Spanish, French, Romanian and so on. [Yes, a simplification bearing in mind regional dialects and minority sister languages, but I think broadly true.]

Despite those divergences in local vernaculars, however, Classical Latin itself continued to be used Europe-wide by the educated successors of Cicero et al, when writing to or for each other and when two such people from different areas, whose vernaculars were no longer mutually intelligible, met. It also persisted as the liturgical, administrational and international language of the (originally pan-European) Roman Catholic Church up to the present, and the international language of secular Science up to at least the 17th Century. Because it was and still is taught using the writings of Caesar, Vergil and their contemporaries, it remains even today understandable (though more in written form) to all those acquire it, alongside its descendents Italian, French etc.

I would also mention (although I'm far less familiar with it) that a similar thing has happen with Arabic: the Classical Arabic of the 1,400 year old Koran is widely learned, and a single 'educated' modernised form is used worldwide in formal situations, by politicians and officials, newsreaders, etc, although the everyday forms of Arabic spoken in different countries have become, I have read, largely mutually unintelligible.

Similarly it seems (to me) likely that, given the enormous corpus of (printed, and therefore 'fixed') "classical" English literature from at least as far back as the 16th century currently intelligible to anyone with modest education, even if modern spoken vernacular Englishes continue like Latin's daughters to diverge and evolve towards mutual unintelligibility, a mutually understandable ""classical" English will, as Latin did, continue in use potentially for centuries and perhaps millennia. Just how long no-one (surely) can realistically estimate (though a professional linguist's input would be useful), because nobody has a crystal ball capable of predicting long-future world-changing events. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.110.44 (talk) 02:36, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

It is becoming increasingly rare here to hear children with a really strong regional accent because TV and schools both work towards standardising English (with only partial success in some cases? Really? When I watch Hollyoaks. I can hardly understand Kieron Richardson, who's from the Manchester area, whereas the Irish actor Emmett J. Scanlan is much more understandable, to my ears (of course, he is older). One of the things that makes it hard to understand the English dialect, for me, is the use of the "f" and "v" sounds to replace "th" sounds, as well as some of the words, themselves. The Mark of the Beast (talk) 02:08, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I have exactly the opposite problem with Hollyoaks, having problems with the Irish accent, but neither of the accents is particularly strong. I haven't watched enough of Hollyoaks to judge this, but in some other soaps, I laugh at the attempts of non-native actors to imitate regional accents (though they probably do better than I would if I had to imitate a non-native accent). My point was that the really strong dialects of fifty years ago (where different words were used) have become less common. Perhaps I should have written "dialect" rather than "accent", though I still think that even the pronunciation is becoming more standardised. Dbfirs 07:01, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Hardly a new development, though. Those substitutions have been standard in the Cockney/London accent(s) for, conservatively, well over a century. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.110.44 (talk) 02:41, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Just saw a bit of graffiti on a school desk - I♥U4EVA. Very sweet, but incomprehensible to many aged over 30. HiLo48 (talk) 05:40, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I have to disagree. I'm over 50 and have never in my life 'texted' (or even used a mobile phone in speech mode), but instantly understood the above. The use of rebus is hardly an invention of the present generation - it has featured in children's publications for centuries - and people over 30 are generally no more slow-witted than those under :-) . {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.110.44 (talk) 09:47, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Oh lord, ive heard peopel speak computer in real life conversation too "FYI..."

but even travelling for a non-english speaker the variations are not standardised. see foreigners working for the bbc vs. cnn for example. the standard may be more written at the moment (though with the spelling changes creeping in in the last 100 years that is showing slower signs of change). Conversational english is changing more rapidly. Much like Arabic where folks from the gulf/levant cant understand much of what Maghreb-Arabs speak.

Agreed with Bus stop on the matter that Dickens is too close to call for a change (though how many read him today in school is still quizzical). The evolution of shakespeare ahs already changed. see for example, in his day his works were for the common/uneducated/illiterate, today its considered educated to appreciate shakespeare (ie- deciphiering)

Also Hindi has evolved around india so much so (and this more obersarvable in the diaspora) that N. Indians and W. Indians (Mumbai) dont/cant speak to each other as the former is more of the "original" and the latter consists of a misture of hindi/marathi/english. Same changes that can be seen to creep into spanish vs. Mexican Spanish, portugueuse vs. Brasilain potuguese, French vs. African (and im sure S. Indian) french

ps- this debate/conversation is awesome, will it be comprehensible in 10 years? ;)Lihaas (talk) 06:12, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

"Incomprehensible to many aged over 30"? As someone who is well over 30 I have no trouble understanding it. We're not all completely past it, you know. The I♥NY rebus dates from 1977, so that part of it should be familiar to many people, and the rest is easy enough to work out. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 08:40, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

... agreed! Perfectly comprehensible at more than double that age! HiLo48 did write "incomprehensible to many", and I suppose there are many in every age group who wouldn't understand the abbreviated text. Dbfirs 07:09, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Responding to Angr's point about mobility further up the thread, in fact, domestic migration (and, for that matter, immigration) is in a secular decline within the United States. The decline in immigration is only about 10 years old, but the decline in long-distance domestic migration (people who moved across county or state lines) has been gradually accelerating since the 1960s. This article emphasizes the sharp drop in domestic migration during the current economic slowdown, but it also documents a more secular decline since the 1950s and 1960s. Also, anecdotally, I would argue that those who make long-distance moves in the United States, at least since the 1970s or so, are predominantly members of the educated upper middle class, who already speak a variety of English relatively close to the national standard. Their movement merely reinforces the class dimension of dialect difference within the United States without really influencing the increasingly divergent speech of the less mobile, lower-middle- and working-class majority. If the theory of peak oil is correct, then we can expect mobility to decline further, even among the upper middle class. Consequently, regional dialects would be likely to gain vitality. Marco polo (talk) 12:37, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the info, Marco. I also (by looking it up in Wiktionary) learned a new definition of secular, namely "continuing over a long period of time". I had never heard the word used that way before; the only meaning I knew was the opposite of sacred. —Angr (talk) 21:13, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

The "long time" sense is seen in the phrase in saecula saeculorum, heard in the Gloria Patri, for example. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 10:25, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

No one has yet referred to linguist David Crystal, author of The Encyclopedia of Language, The Encyclopedia of the English Language, etc. From our article:

Crystal hypothesises that globally English will both split and converge, with local variants becoming less mutually comprehensible and therefore necessitating the rise of what he terms World Standard Spoken English (see also International English). In his 2004 book The Stories of English, a general history of the English language, he describes the value he sees in linguistic diversity and the according of respect to varieties of English generally considered "non-standard".

See also "Globish". BrainyBabe (talk) 16:34, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

It took me a little while to track this down, but in 1943 there appears in Hansard a quotation from Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain:

You will have more difficulty with some of the local dialects. It may comfort you to know that a farmer or villager from Cornwall very often can't understand a farmer or villager in Yorkshire or Lancashire.[5]

That, surely, is no longer the case. The Parliamentary debate was -- not in so many words -- about the civilising effect of Received Pronunciation (so much more a dialect than an accent). BBC English has homogenised the land. BrainyBabe (talk) 16:58, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes! That's exactly the point that I was trying to make above. I can remember a time when many Yorkshire farmers would have struggled to hold a conversation with anyone from the south of England or America who was unfamiliar with the local dialect, but now they are only incomprehensible when they want to be! I suspect that the same applies to most American regional accents and dialects. We are all more familiar with others' accents than we used to be, and nearly all of us can make an acceptable attempt at standard English when we want to communicate. Dbfirs 19:54, 22 June 2011 (UTC)