Piercing the Mother Tongue

03Apr09

Is English Disappearing or Just Evolving?

istock_000008471920small English is the greatest, most varied, flexible, colourful, poetic language the world has ever known. It’s a real pity they don’t teach it in school anymore.

There is a sad generation of people who were taught “phonics” instead. The result? Legions of young people who can’t tell the difference between “your” and “you’re”, or “yore” for that matter. People who find using the dictionary difficult because their spelling is too poor to find the words they want. People who hold advanced degrees but who don’t know the difference between “then” and “than”. Reading is perhaps harder for these victims of educational blundering, limiting their exposure to the way words are supposed to be used. Follow this with a generation who gave up on the language altogether and uses primarily textspeak. Lovely old words are falling into disuse and dying unsung by living poets, replaced by the less mellifluous words of today- blog, Twitter, Google, wifi, widgets, Tivo, spyware, ringtone, tagcloud, big-box, podcast, unibrow, boomers, internet, username, Cow-Pox, aerobicize, aquafit, cyberpunk.

So what? Well, we are killing off the English language, word by word, phrase by phrase, metaphor by metaphor, piercing our mother tongue to near death until it is a sad, dull, lifeless language. Imagine all the books you love, but only containing a vocabulary of a few hundred words, and written in Textspeak. Good old Willie told us, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I wonder? How would he like his words translated into Textspeak?

Hamlet

2b, r nt 2 b To be, or not to be,

dat iz d Q that is the question.

wthr ts noblr n d mnd whether tis nobler in the mind

2 sufr d slngs & arows to suffer the slings and arrows

of outraAjs fortun of outrageous fortune

r 2 tAK armz agnst or to take arms against

a Cf trblz, a sea of troubles,

& by oposn nd em. and by opposing, end them.

MacBeth

2mrw & 2mrw & 2mrw Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

crEpz n dis pety plAs creeps in this petty place

frm dA 2 dA from day to day

2d lst silabl of rcrdd tIm to the last syllable of recorded time

& al our ystdAz and all our yesterdays

hv lItd f%lz have lighted fools

d way 2 dsty def… the way to dusty death…

tis a tAl tld by an ejit, tis a tale told by an idiot

ful of snd & fury full of sound and fury

sgnfyn nutin. signifying nothing.

Some see a language not of poets, but of punks.

Such is the effect of a poorly thought-out adjustment to teaching. See what phonics has wrought upon our language? But I stop, in mid rant, to wonder. (Librans do that. “On the other hand” is our favorite phrase.) Is it just that this shift in language is too new, too unfamiliar? It strikes me that Textspeak is oddly similar to the early dark ages when things weren’t spelled “properly” since what was proper hadn’t been decided, yet you could understand it, with effort. When Chaucer wrote, his language was an English which had been invaded by French influence, nearly overtaken by it, or so said the elders of earlier generations who remembered a purer language and hated change as much as anyone.

Perhaps it’s not being destroyed so much as changed. The only language that is unchanging is Latin and other “dead” languages. Why? They do not change because they are not used. To be used the language must describe life today.

Everything affects the language. The Romans had a hand in shaping it, so did the Greeks, the Vikings, the Celts, the French, the Germans, the Normans, the Americans and on and on down through time down to phonics and texting. Perhaps people cried the same thing at each new juncture “There goes the language!” er, sorry. “thr gOz d lang!”

Let’s face it, we are constantly mucking about with English, but it’s still here. If we were to meet Chaucer, suddenly undead and strolling down the street, we could still make ourselves understood, despite all the evolution our common language has withstood. Well, we could once you taught him how to use the BlackBerry.

Laurel Ennis, April 2009