Thread: Is Language Being Devalued?

The advent of Microsoft technology has meant that American spelling is the standard option. English is a rich language, drawing on several classical roots. This is often lost in the American alternative. Americans state that it's about evolution of language. Is that the case or is it rather degeneration?

Examples are the words "Paediatric" or "Paedophile", both of which have a Greek root which relates to children. The American "Pedophile", viewed from its root, would suggest someone with a foot fetish.

I don't think it's all the Americans' fault. Hearsay.

To answer your question correctly we'd have to agree on a definition of value for language.

For me, the value in language is as a communication tool. Regardless of the spelling we have a word where the connotative and denotative meanings are clearly understood, and the modality does not factor in that much. I'd hazard that most people who don't speak English also don't speak Latin, and its etymology would not really improve someone's chances of reasoning out the meaning.

So changing the spelling to a form that masks the Latin roots isn't a big loss as far as the primary goals of language. I agree you do lose a historical richness, but to me it's an acceptable trade for being able to boldly split both my infinitives and the schackles of Latin-centric prescriptivism.

Originally Posted by Foxee

I don't think it's all the Americans' fault. Hearsay.

I don't know of any other nation which gave birth to a corporation that has cornered the market on word processor software with dodgy spell checks.

@Capulet. Love of language is one of the attractions of writing. Etymology is an important aspect of that.

You could... you know... disable spell checking?

Anyways, I don't think word has anything to do with this. Word uses the English dictionary for spell checking, but that would mean the English dictionary being used is the actual offender here.

Language is set to English UK on all my computers that run Windows. That solves 90 percent of the problem. Doubts are resolved by Oxford Concise.

Edit - Capulet, it's not Latin the provides the true richness in many of our words. It's Greek. The Romans became literate when they conquered Greece.

A good reference to have is the Oxford Dictionary of Etymology.

People who aren't serious about language and its usage will stay with the defaults.

I was upset when the language started changing too a few years back. I wouldn't say that the language is being devalued, that would suggest that it once had a value measuable by some sort of unit. I would say it's either evolving or devolving the way words that shouldn't be words are being added to the dictionary every year. But i've come to accept it. You have to if you hope to ever make a profit in writing. You can just use this to your advatage and look at it from the viewpoint that it's more flexible now...or you could just brood over it and let the revolution pass you by.

Originally Posted by Baron

People who aren't serious about language and its usage will stay with the defaults.

People who aren't serious about language don't care to begin with.

Either way, if you buy the US-En word it will have US-En as the default dictionary, likewise for UK-En. It's all the same.

While I agree with you that going from Paedophile to Pedophile could be considered degradation, this has nothing to do with Word

When I started writing, I wasn't aware Word was preset to U.S. English. It took me a while to realise that we didn't spell 'realise' with a 'z' (as I type this my browser is telling me 'realise' is wrong). What it did, however, was teach me the differences between U.S. and Commonwealth English.

For the purposes of staying on topic, is language being devalued? Yes, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's the fault of U.S. English. One look at any Facebook post will show you just how illiterate the vast majority of the population is. That's a greater worry for me, as a writer, than the differences in spelling. I am a writer, and because of that I love words. I love writing correctly. I detest text-talk, leet-speak, and every other 'shortcut' devised by lazy people who can't be bothered writing a word in full. I text the same way I write a novel. I write IMs the same way I write a novel. I write posts on writing sites the same way I write a novel: with the least mistakes possible.

Whether the word has a 'u' or a 'z' in it doesn't really bother me. I've read countless thrillers by American authors. I rarely notice the differences unless I'm looking for them. I notice sloppy writing a lot quicker, and the rapid downward progression of the language is a worrying trend.

I'm more concerned about the ongoing normalization of newspeak and 'political speak' with its constant euphemisms and obfuscating. Anyone remember this beauty?

"[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. ”—Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Surely this is one of the oldest chestnuts there is, I half expect to see George Bernard Shaw posting here deploring the loss of beautiful words or the gain of ugly new ones, though he did display considerable sense in his approach to spelling. In some ways I feel that the emphasis on the classics has held back and restricted language. In prosody for example the emphasis on feet of stressed syllables is a direct borrow by generations of writers who were educated in a classical tradition. In the classical languages it makes perfect sense, but English has far more variation of stress and more 'lilt' and rhythm to it, I would love to see an analytical system developed that is based in English, rather than Greek or Latin.

English is a rich language, but it is based in more than merely classical roots, it draws its vocabulary from all over the world, a lot of its grammatical roots are in the Germanic languages of the Angles and the Saxons, and much of its lyrical beauty comes from the Celtic languages. To me the development of the language by writers from other cultures and languages bringing fresh concepts, new ways of looking at the world, into it is one of the most exciting developments. American English may not contribute to this as much as some.

Although the majority of Americans are not descended from English speakers they are from mainly European roots with conceptual systems which mainly resemble ours. Edward Sapir once spoke of the 'common European language' saying that every one from Russia to Spain and from Ireland to Yugoslavia spoke the same language, they simply used different vocabularies. For example some languages do not have a future tense, they can only speak of expectation, some decide what a verb is by the length of time something is in existence.
That other concepts are brought into the language seems to me a source of enrichment, that our spelling fails to conform to a standard that has been effectively dead these two hundred years does not worry me. The fact that other languages are dying out rapidly (Faster than species I believe) strikes me as far more worrying, but that is a separate issue.

I have to jump on board with Capulet, both in that we need a definition of terms and that my own definition of language's value lies in its communicative utility.

The lines being drawn in this debate are illuminating, though. One the one side, we have those such as myself who value language for its ability to transmit information. On the other, we have those such as Baron who seem to value language for its intrinsic worth and subjective aesthetics.

Neither side is going to come to a resolution on this topic, simply because we're all drawn to language for different reasons.

Language has utility, but language has its own beauty as well. To watch words play together and work together on the page is reason enough for a person to be a writer. My grandfather it was who insisted I learn to spell correctly, and that meant 'realise' and not that awful 'realize', 'harbour' and not the lazy 'harbor'.

At the centre of the discussion is the question of whether we respect the languages we use.

I don't think it's possible for language to devalue. It will only change and improve with usage as it always has. We don't speak English the same way people did a thousand years ago, but that doesn't mean ours is less valuable. It's actually much better. I also judge a language's value solely on its ability to communicate. Old methods and ways die out for a reason. They can be clung to out of faux-sophistication, but in the end the more practical, more efficient ways to communicate will survive.

Now that the world is so connected, I think in a few thousands years, if we haven't blown ourselves up, it's likely we'll have one world-wide language.