Gryphin wrote:
>
> At 12:58 PM 7/26/2000 -0400, you wrote:
> >Spike Jones wrote:
> > >
> > > Hey cool, Im like Shakespeare!
> > >
> > > Except he could write and I suck. Actually Shakespeare's
> > > *real* genius was in making a story just by stringing together
> > > a bunch of famous sayings... spike
> >
> >But Spike EVERYBODY talked like that back then, forsooth. Its a pretty clear
> >progression from Chaucer to Shakespeare to the present day that the grammar of
> >the english language is devolving to some point in the future of pure
> >gutteral.
>
> i think it's not really "devolving" as such, it's just that we live in a
> much more global environment than there was in Shakespeare's time, so the
> languages have had to become more flexible, and have assimilated more of
> the other languages than they did in the olden times. in another 100 years,
> i think we'll have probably 1-2 major languages instead of the 3 we have
> now, (Hindu, French, and English, IIRC) ofc, the words will be totally
> different than now as well. when was the last time (outside of Amish
> country or church anyway ;) that you heard someone say Thou, or Thee?
Actually, Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish, in that order, are the
dominant languages, counting only those using as their primary language.
English is the most widely spoken language, counting both primary and
secondary users.
There are now more people in China that speak English than English
speakers in the US.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:35:15 MDT