The relic

The first thing I learned in my studies of linguistics is that languages aren't static.

It's a good thing, because my field is historical linguistics, and if languages didn't change over time I kind of wouldn't have anything to study.  There's an ongoing battle, of course, as to how much languages should change, and what kinds of changes are acceptable; this is the whole descriptivism vs. prescriptivism debate about which I wrote only last month.  My own view on this is that languages are gonna change whether you want them to or not, so being a prescriptivist is deliberately choosing the losing side -- but if lost causes are your thing, then knock yourself out.

Where it gets interesting is that the rates of language change can vary tremendously.  Some cultures are inherently protective of their language, and resist things like borrow words -- a great example is Icelandic, which has changed so little in a thousand years that modern Icelanders can still read the Old Norse sagas with little more difficulty than we read Shakespeare.

Speaking of Shakespeare, it bears mention that the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries isn't (as I heard some students call it) "Old English."  Old English is an entirely different language, not mutually intelligible with Modern English, and by Shakespeare's time had been an extinct language for about four hundred years.  Here's a sample of Old English:

Fæder ure şu şe eart on heofonum, si şin nama gehalgod.  To becume şin rice, gewurşe ğin willa, on eorğan swa swa on heofonum.

I wonder how many of you recognized this as the first two lines of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.

There's been a discussion going on in linguistic circles for years about which dialect of English has changed the least -- not since the time of Old English, but at least since Elizabethan English, the dialect of Shakespeare's time.  We have a tendency, largely because of some of the famous performances of Hamlet and Macbeth and Richard III, to imagine Shakespeare's contemporaries as speaking something like the modern upper-class in southeastern England, but that's pretty clearly not the case.  Analyses of the rhyme and rhythm schemes of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, suggest that Shakespearean English was rhotic -- the /r/ in words like far and park were pronounced -- while the speech of southern England today is almost all non-rhotic.  Vowels, too, were probably different; today a typical English person pronounces words like path with an open back unrounded vowel /ɑ/ (a bit like the vowel in the word cop); in Shakespeare's time, it was probably closer to the modern American pronunciation, with a front unrounded vowel /æ/ (the vowel sound in cat).

Analysis of spoken English from dozens of different regions has led some linguists to conclude -- although the point is still controversial -- that certain Appalachian dialects, and some of the isolated island dialects of coastal North and South Carolina, are the closest to the speech of Shakespeare's day, at least in terms of pronunciation.  Vocabulary changes according to the demands of the culture -- as I said, there's no such thing as a static language.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alumnum, Primary Human Languages Improved Version, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason all this comes up is that linguists have come upon another example of a dialect that preserves a relic dialect -- this one, from a great deal longer ago than Elizabethan English.  In the region of Trabzon in northern Turkey, there is a group of people who speak Romeyka -- a dialect of Pontic Greek that is thought to have changed little since the region was settled from classical-era Greece over two thousand years ago.

Since that time, Romeyka has been passed down orally, and its status as a cultural marker meant that like Icelandic, it has been maintained with little change.  Modern Greek, however, has changed a great deal in that same time span; in terms of syntax (and probably pronunciation as well), Romeyka is closer to what would have been spoken in Athens in Socrates's time than Modern Greek is.  "Conversion to Islam across Asia Minor was usually accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valleys retained Romeyka," said Ioanna Sitaridou, of the University of Cambridge, who is heading the study.  "And because of Islamization, they retained some archaic features, while the Greek-speaking communities who remained Christian grew closer to Modern Greek, especially because of extensive schooling in Greek in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...  Romeyka is a sister, rather than a daughter, of Modern Greek.  Essentially this analysis unsettles the claim that Modern Greek is an isolate language."

The problem facing the researchers is that like many minority languages, Romeyka is vanishing rapidly.  Most native speakers of Romeyka are over 65; fewer and fewer young people are learning it as their first language.  It's understandable, of course.  People want their children to succeed in the world, and it's critical that they be able to communicate in the majority language in schools, communities, and jobs.

But the loss of any language, especially one that has persisted virtually unchanged for so long, still strikes me as sad.

It's a consolation, though, that linguists like Ioanna Sitaridou are working to record, study, and preserve these dwindling languages before it's too late.  Especially in the case of a language like Romeyka, where there is no written form; without recordings and scholarly studies, once it's gone, it's gone.  How many other languages have vanished like that, without a trace -- when no more children are being raised to speak it, when the last native speaker dies?  It's the way of things, I suppose, but it's still a tragedy, a loss of the way of communication of an entire culture.

At least with Romeyka, we have people working on its behalf -- trying to find out what we can of a two-thousand-year-old linguistic relic from the time of Alexander the Great.

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Grammar wars

In linguistics, there's a bit of a line in the sand drawn between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists.  The former believe that the role of linguists is simply to describe language, not establish hard-and-fast rules for how language should be.  The latter believe that grammar and other linguistic rules exist in order to keep language stable and consistent, and therefore there are usages that are wrong, illogical, or just plain ugly.

Of course, most linguists don't fall squarely into one camp or the other; a lot of us are descriptivists up to a point, after which we say, "Okay, that's wrong."  I have to admit that I'm far more of a descriptivist bent myself, but there are some things that bring out my inner ruler-wielding grammar teacher, like when I see people write "alot."  Drives me nuts.  And I know it's now become acceptable, but "alright" affects me exactly the same way.

It's "all right," dammit.

However, some research published in Nature shows, if you're of a prescriptivist disposition, eventually you're going to lose.

In "Detecting Evolutionary Forces in Language Change," Mitchell G. Newberry, Christopher A. Ahern, Robin Clark, and Joshua B. Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania describe that language change is inevitable, unstoppable, and even the toughest prescriptivist out there isn't going to halt the adoption of new words and grammatical forms.

The researchers analyzed over a hundred thousand texts from 1810 onward, looking for changes in morphology -- for example, the decrease in the use of past tense forms like "leapt" and "spilt" in favor of "leaped" and "spilled."  The conventional wisdom was that irregular forms (like pluralizing "goose" to "geese") persist because they're common; less common words, like "turf" -- which once pluralized to "turves" -- eventually regularize because people don't use the word often enough to learn the irregular inflection, and eventually the regular one (in this case, "turfs") takes over.

The research by Newberry et al. shows that this isn't true -- when there are two competing forms, which one wins is more a matter of random chance than commonness.  They draw a very cool analogy between this phenomenon, which they call stochastic drift, to the genetic drift experienced by evolving populations of living organisms.

"Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English – and indeed other languages – is that the language changes,” said Joshua Plotkin, who co-authored the study.  "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side.  The prevailing view is that if language is changing it should in general change towards the regular form, because the regular form is easier to remember.  But chance can play an important role even in language evolution – as we know it does in biological evolution."

So in the ongoing battles over grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling change, the purists are probably doomed to fail.  It's worthwhile remembering how many words in modern English that are now completely accepted by descriptivist and prescriptivist alike are the result of such mangling.  Both "uncle" and "umpire" came about because of an improper split of the indefinite article ("a nuncle" and "a numpire" became "an uncle" and "an umpire").  "To burgle" came about because of a phenomenon called back formation -- when a common linguistic pattern gets applied improperly to a word that sounds like it has the same basic construction.  A teacher teaches, a baker bakes, so a burglar must burgle.  (I'm surprised, frankly, given how English yanks words around, we don't have carpenters carpenting.)

Anyhow, if this is read by any hard-core prescriptivists, all I can say is "I'm sorry."  It's a pity, but the world doesn't always work the way we'd like it to.  But even so, I'm damned if I'm going to use "alright" and "alot."  A line has to be drawn somewhere.  And I'm gonna draw it a lot, all right?

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The ship sails

As a linguist, one of the things you have to get used to is that languages change.

The denial of this basic fact is at the heart of the argument between prescriptivists (people who think there are hard-and-fast rules regarding "proper" or "correct" speech and writing) and descriptivists (people who believe that a linguist's job is not to codify language for the purpose of determining what's correct, but simply to describe it and monitor how it changes).  I tend to be strongly descriptivist -- after all, my M.A. is in historical linguistics, and if the vocabulary and syntactic rules of languages didn't evolve, I'd be out of a job.  On the other hand, there's a line (no, I don't know where exactly it is), because if there were no grammatical and pronunciation rules whatsoever, it'd make communication pretty difficult.

So I understand why we teach prescriptively.  But it behooves us all to realize that the language is gonna change anyhow, whether we want it to or not, and fighting like hell against it is the very definition of an exercise in futility.

One of the places things change the fastest is in slang.  When I taught high school, I used to run into new slang expressions very nearly on a daily basis.  Some of them have interesting origins.  For example, the slang use of the word ship -- meaning, to watch or read a piece of fiction and hope that two characters fall in love -- comes from the characterization of fans who want that outcome for the characters as "relationshippers."  This got shortened to "shippers," and finally converted into a verb -- e.g., "I ship Mulder and Scully."  (And in fact, the word did come from fans of the iconic television show The X Files.)

The capacity for sinking yourself into the lives of a celebrity or a fictional character led to another coinage, this one from none other than a song by Eminem.  It's the word stan -- a portmanteau word made up by combining stalker and fan.  Initially, it had a completely negative connotation, implying the person was deranged, perhaps dangerous.  But over time it's moderated, and like ship has become a verb, meaning "to behave like a fanboy/fangirl."  The recent sweet queer romcom Red, White, and Royal Blue led to a lot of people stanning Alex and Prince Henry -- and I have to admit I felt a little of that myself.

Then there's yeet, which dates to 1998, and means "to throw something."  The origin of this word is uncertain, but may be imitative, representing the noise you make when you pitch something heavy.  I posted on social media last week something about this word -- "Linguistics question of the day: is the past tense of yeet yote?  Because it should be."  This generated a rather hilarious discussion over whether it should be yote, yot, yaught, yet, or yut, and one person who patiently explained to all of us that because yeet is a modern coinage, we shouldn't expect it to follow any of the patterns from Middle English strong verbs, so it should be yeeted.

Illustrating another general principle, which is that no matter how obvious you try to make humor, some people are going to take you seriously.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Even accents change, and it's new research in this field that brought the topic to my mind today.  A recent study at the University of Georgia found that the traditional Southern drawl -- for example, pronouncing prize as /praz/ and not as the more standard American English /praiz/, and face as /fɤis/ and not as /feis/ -- is fast disappearing.  The last generation of Southerners whose pronunciations are characteristic of the old drawl are Baby Boomers.  (There are exceptions, mainly in rural areas, but their numbers are dwindling quickly.)  The homogenizing effects of movement from one region to another, and hearing the more common accents of the Pacific Coast and Midwest on television, have gradually shifted the way people speak.  (And another factor has a darker subtext, one that as a native Southerner I'm really sensitive to; people using a fake Southern accent to code someone being stupid, bigoted, or backwards.  These ugly perceptions are why a lot of people who move north strive to lose their Southern-ness.)

The South is not the only area in the United States experiencing this, of course.  "The demographics of the South have changed a lot with people moving into the area, especially post World War II," said study co-author Jon Forrest, of the University of Georgia department of linguistics.  "We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics."

While I understand the reasons behind all this, and I know it's inevitable, I can't help but find it a little sad that regions are losing part of what makes them unique.  Our mobility and the role that television and movies have in culture are blending a lot of the distinctness out of us.

So while we'll continue seeing new coinages like ship and stan and yeet, we'll see other features of our language fade and eventually disappear.  It's the way of things.  Take, for example, this recounting of an argument from printer and writer William Caxton in 1490, when Middle English was inexorably evolving into Modern English, leading to the older generation having some difficulties being understood even in matters as simple as what the plural of egg was:

In my dayes happened that certayn marchau[n]tes were in a ship in Tamyse [the Thames] for to haue sayled ouer the see into Zelande [in Holland] and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte Forlond [in Kent]. and wente to lande for to refreshe them[.]  And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows [house] and axed [asked] for mete [food], and specyally he axyed after egges[.]  And the good wyf answerde, that she coude speke no Frenshe.  And the marchau[n]t was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges and she understode hym not.  And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren, then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym wel.  Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certainly it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite [&] chau[n]ge of langage.

Forsooth, Caxton, thou hast said it.

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Grammar wars

In linguistics, there's a bit of a line in the sand drawn between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists.  The former believe that the role of linguists is simply to describe language, not establish hard-and-fast rules for how language should be.  The latter believe that grammar and other linguistic rules exist in order to keep language stable and consistent, and therefore there are usages that are wrong, illogical, or just plain ugly.

Of course, most linguists don't fall squarely into one camp or the other; a lot of us are descriptivists up to a point, after which we say, "Okay, that's wrong."  I have to admit that I'm more of a descriptivist bent myself, but there are some things that bring out my inner ruler-wielding grammar teacher, like when I see people write "alot."  Drives me nuts.  And I know it's now become acceptable, but "alright" affects me exactly the same way.

It's "all right," dammit.

However, some research from a paper in Nature shows, if you're of a prescriptivist disposition, eventually you're going to lose.

In "Detecting Evolutionary Forces in Language Change," Mitchell G. Newberry, Christopher A. Ahern, Robin Clark, and Joshua B. Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania explain that language change is inevitable, unstoppable, and even the toughest prescriptivist out there isn't going to halt the adoption of new words and grammatical forms.

The researchers analyzed over a hundred thousand texts from 1810 onward, looking for changes in morphology -- for example, the decrease in the use of past tense forms like "leapt" and "spilt" in favor of "leaped" and "spilled."  The conventional wisdom was that irregular forms (like pluralizing "goose" to "geese") persist when they're common; less frequently-used words, like "turf" -- which used to pluralize to "turves" -- eventually regularize because people don't use the word often enough to learn the irregular plural, and eventually the regular plural ("turfs") takes over.

The research by Newberry et al. shows that this isn't true -- when there are two competing forms, which one wins is more a matter of random chance than commonness.  They draw a very cool analogy between this phenomenon, which they call stochastic drift, to the genetic drift experienced by evolving populations of living organisms.

"Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English – and indeed other languages – is that the language changes,” said Joshua Plotkin, who co-authored the study.  "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side.  The prevailing view is that if language is changing it should in general change towards the regular form, because the regular form is easier to remember.  But chance can play an important role even in language evolution – as we know it does in biological evolution."

So in the ongoing battles over grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling change, the purists are probably doomed to fail.  It's worthwhile remembering how many words in modern English are the result of such mangling; both "uncle" and "umpire" came about because of an improper split of the indefinite article ("a nuncle" and "a numpire" became "an uncle" and "an umpire").  "To burgle" came about because of a phenomenon called back formation -- when a common linguistic pattern gets applied improperly to a word that sounds like it has the same basic construction.  A teacher teaches, a baker bakes, so a burglar must burgle.  (I'm surprised, frankly, given how English twists words around, we don't have carpenters carpenting.)

Anyhow, if this is read by any hard-core prescriptivists, all I can say is "I'm sorry."  It's a pity, but the world doesn't always work the way we'd like it to.  But even so, I'm damned if I'm going to use "alright" and "alot."  A line has to be drawn somewhere.

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