Once we had thou, thee, and thine, for use in talking down to people.We lost interest in distinguishing those. Why not use 'your' for 'you're', and distinguish 'is a characteristic of you' from 'belongs to you' purely by context? Wouldn't be hard.
Thing is that this is a matter of statistical usefulness, and it might be a good idea or a bad idea, and I have no way to be sure, and neither do you. The words just have to fight it out by themselves to prove their worth empirically. The whole explicit side of the discussion is fascinatingly pointless.
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Fri 30 Nov 2007, 18:05,
archived)
Thing is that this is a matter of statistical usefulness, and it might be a good idea or a bad idea, and I have no way to be sure, and neither do you. The words just have to fight it out by themselves to prove their worth empirically. The whole explicit side of the discussion is fascinatingly pointless.
Nonsense, the words don't fight it out in some remote Antarctic arena.The obvious way to determine word usage is to talk about it. And be annoying by pointing out others 'mistakes' :)
We probably lost thou, thee, and thine because we became a less polite society (and less boring, frankly). I don't see people not caring about the difference between possessives and contractions.
Anyway, yes, it is all a bit academic, since in a decade the language will be txtspk.
(We probably lost thou, thee, and thine because we became a less polite society (and less boring, frankly). I don't see people not caring about the difference between possessives and contractions.
Anyway, yes, it is all a bit academic, since in a decade the language will be txtspk.
The Alchemist king of the needlessly complicated,
Fri 30 Nov 2007, 18:16,
archived)
Well, OK.Still, we're all massively affected by convention and by preferences we can't easily justify. And it's hard to explain the evolution of language convincingly even in retrospect (perhaps we became a more polite society, too polite to want to talk down to people alot?) I think the bulk of the process takes place below the surface, great though it is to discuss things.
In summary, yay for free markets, boo to central planning.
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Fri 30 Nov 2007, 18:32,
archived)
In summary, yay for free markets, boo to central planning.