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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37173 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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English and its closest relatives have, as far as anyone can tell(and Old English is one of the few older Germanic languages well documented enough to tell how it worked- spoiler, a lot like modern German but without articles. But neither Old English nor Old Norse allowed pronouns to be omitted, even though verbs conjugated) never been pro-drop in the way Spanish is. Neither are English's close modern living relatives- Dutch, German, Afrikaans, the Norse languages, etc all require an explicit pronoun. For that matter the main non-Germanic influence on English is French, which is notable as the only non-creole romance language which isn't pro-drop.

If your argument is that English should go all the way in dropping inflections, just like Afrikaans did, it'll probably get there eventually. Unlike Spanish which seems to be developing some inflections, English is losing them and this is a process that you can see yourself if you care to.

English and its closest relatives have, as far as anyone can tell(and Old English is one of the few older Germanic languages well documented enough to tell how it worked- spoiler, a lot like modern German but without articles.

I'm not sure what I said that you're responding to with this paragraph.

If your argument is that English should go all the way in dropping inflections, just like Afrikaans did, it'll probably get there eventually.

I'm not arguing that English should drop inflections. My point was that if you're arguing that English should be as effective a tool for communication as possible, then there are hundreds of ways the language could be changed for that purpose (including removing obvious redundancies like some inflections) beyond simply insisting people use the word "literally" correctly. I don't think such measures are necessary, because languages are pretty adept at maintaining their ability to communicate all shades of human meaning effectively.

I know McWhorter's argued that there's been substantial celtic influence as well.

I don't expect it to drop inflections any time soon (at least, in American dialects. I imagine there are places which have already lost them). I think most of the loss came as a result of cross-contact between various cultures—Britons, Saxons, Norse, French—leading to a variety of dialects, with features from simpler dialects winning out over time. On the other hand, English now looks more standardized and stable, and I imagine the influence of online media to be a force gravitating people towards more standard dialects.

That's mostly conjecture, don't take what I said too seriously.

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