But just like the river analogy, just because it’s prone to change doesn’t mean a every change is inevitable.
With enough effort you can divert a river, or stop it flowing at all with a dam. Likewise if enough people look at a chaneg to language and decide “no that’s dumb and I’m not doing it”, then the change doesn’t happen.
Otherwise I could tell you that gnark is now the word for you as an individual, and you’d have no way to tell me that I’m wrong.
If enough people are willing to actively resist the change then the change won’t stick. There’s nothing magic about the new thing that makes it inevitable.
I’ll add to the analogy and say that “downhill” is an apt word choice for where things will go if you let them. Nothing wrong with letting a river take it’s natural course but if we want it to work for us it has to be directed and controlled. We can have both aspects of language we just have to conscious of what we want and where it’s going.
Strong disagree. Languages are self-correcting. The trope of “The Martians have no word for war!” is bunk because they can simply borrow the term from another language.
For a real-world example, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is very much a Thing, and it is by no means a degenerate form of speech. If anything, it has a richer TAM system than English does.
But just like the river analogy, just because it’s prone to change doesn’t mean a every change is inevitable.
With enough effort you can divert a river, or stop it flowing at all with a dam. Likewise if enough people look at a chaneg to language and decide “no that’s dumb and I’m not doing it”, then the change doesn’t happen.
Otherwise I could tell you that gnark is now the word for you as an individual, and you’d have no way to tell me that I’m wrong.
If enough people are willing to actively resist the change then the change won’t stick. There’s nothing magic about the new thing that makes it inevitable.
I’ll add to the analogy and say that “downhill” is an apt word choice for where things will go if you let them. Nothing wrong with letting a river take it’s natural course but if we want it to work for us it has to be directed and controlled. We can have both aspects of language we just have to conscious of what we want and where it’s going.
Strong disagree. Languages are self-correcting. The trope of “The Martians have no word for war!” is bunk because they can simply borrow the term from another language.
For a real-world example, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is very much a Thing, and it is by no means a degenerate form of speech. If anything, it has a richer TAM system than English does.