Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 May 29

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May 29

Language evolution

Why do languages become less formal over time? --108.222.4.112 (talk) 04:02, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't think they do. We just interpret archaic language as "formal" because churches and lawyers prefer old words, since old language makes them seem "more established". (Would you want a lawyer who spoke the latest slang ?) StuRat (talk) 04:30, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure there's even an objective measure of formality we can use here. Slang has always been a part of language, so I'm not sure even that can be shown to have increased with time. Even the King James Version of the Bible, using words like "thou" and "thee", utilized what was at the time fairly standard English in use between everyday people; it would not have been considered excessively formal language, or, indeed, formal language at all at the time of its composition. As Stu said, churches and courts, along with other more "formal" institutions tend to be slower to change their use of language with the times, so this tends to create an interesting illusion.

However, as someone who speaks something on the order of one-and-a-half languages (English fluently and Hebrew very badly), I would be interested to know if other languages have any peculiarities in this regard -- i.e., observably moving away from formal, tightly structured speech, to looser, more flexible types of communication. Evanh2008 ^{(talk|contribs)} 05:15, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

The King James Version did not "use fairly standard English in use between everyday people": it used deliberately archaic language based on previous English translations of the Bible, because that's what people thought Biblical language should sound like. They thought the older language sounded 'right' and more reverent, because they were used to older language in their Bibles. Now, earlier translations probably played this game less, but by the time the KJV was being written, the language of the popular English Bibles sounded old and formal. This is a prime example of older sounding more formal to later ears. 109.155.32.126 (talk) 10:03, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

That comment doesn't sound correct to me. Are you claiming that Shakespeare also used archaic language in his plays? Dbfirs 20:22, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

It's right there in our article on the translation, as well as every article I've ever read on the translation. No, Shakespeare mostly didn't use deliberately archaic language, except for effect. That's why, unlike the KJV, Shakespeare doesn't consistently use "thee/thou" for the singular. The language of Shakespeare is not Biblical (KJV) language, although it does sometimes use older English phrases such as were found in existing Bibles and prayers. 86.161.209.111 (talk) 09:03, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Language was indeed changing at the time of the KJV, but not as quickly as it is now, so the words used in the translation would not sound particularly archaic at the time. In parts of northern England, use of "thee" and "thou" for the familiar singular is retained to the present day, though it is becoming less common. The KGV translation might have sounded slightly formal, but I don't see how it can have sounded "old" when Shakespeare used similar language for his popular plays. Dbfirs 09:26, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Just because it sounds similar to you now, especially with both bodies of writing having become cliche, doesn't mean it sounded similar to people then. Even so, Shakespeare is full of strangely-modern sounding phrases and exchanges, and the KJV Bible is not. And language was changing more quickly when the KJV was written than it is now: there was less of a written culture (and now a broadcast culture) to resist change and homogenise language. Don't take it up with me: take it up with every scholar who has written about the language used in the KJV. Take it up with the translators, whose methods and philosophies we know quite a bit about. The KJV is pretty much the classic example of using older language because that is what people are used to hearing in that context: it even specifically took older translations as the basis for the wording. This is no secret, or obscure opinion. Seriously, it's right there in our article, linked further up in this section. 86.167.12.64 (talk) 10:00, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Well we have retained many, many phrases and expressions from both Shakespeare and the KJV in our modern language, mainly because of the popularity of both. Shakespeare wrote less formally in his plays, and obviously included more colloquial conversations. When I read formal documents written around 1611, they sound (in general) very similar to the KJV, but if your scholars can see a difference, I suppose I'll have to defer to them since I'm not an expert. My point is that the difference, to modern ears, is not particularly great. Dbfirs 17:01, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

One of the most famous archaisms in the KJV is "to-broke", where "to" is not really the ordinary English preposition, but corresponds to zer in German zerbrochen; I doubt whether Shakespeare used it. Also, the thou/thee vs. ye/you contrast in the KJV is "static" (depending only on who is addressing whom, and their relative statuses), while in Shakespeare it's rather "dynamic" (depending on the particular context at the moment when a pronoun is uttered, and sometimes varying back and forth in utterances by the same speaker to the same addressee). The "dynamic" usage seems to more closely represent the spoken English of the early 17th century (though there were limits to how far things could be varied without giving offense). AnonMoos (talk) 17:30, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

I can find the "to-broke" construction only in Chaucer and other Middle English writings. It's not in any of my versions of the KJV, even ones printed a couple of centuries ago. (Have they all been modernised? If so, where can I find the original text? Wikipedia claims that the KJV was written in Early Modern English in common with Shakespeare's plays. The Standard text of 1769 seems to have corrected mainly just spelling and misprints.) I agree that Shakespeare would use a more "modern" colloquial usage in his plays, as would be expected by his audience, but, to me, the more formal writings of Shakespeare (e.g. Sonnets) appear at least as "old-fashioned" as most of the KJV. Dbfirs 09:07, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

It appears in a printed KJV that I have here as "to brake" (Judges 9:53). Not sure if that's modernized, or I misremembered... AnonMoos (talk) 09:23, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

"And a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech's head, and all to brake his skull" sounds almost like modern English to me except for the old spelling of "break". The spelling "brake" was used up to about 1800, so was far from archaic in 1611. I agree, though, that the meaning was probably just a report that his skull was smashed (not reporting her purpose), so this is indeed an isolated example of retention of Chaucer's English, just as some of our legal documents retain archaic English expressions from hundreds of years earlier. Dbfirs 11:53, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

I really don't know what "formal" is supposed to mean in this context; formal is a description of particular speech-styles in particular contexts, not an inherent characteristic of a whole language. However, if 108.222.4.112 means "inflectionally complex", then linguists have documented cycles of languages accumulating and shedding inflection over long historical periods. Within the Indo-European languages, the overall average tendency over time has been mostly towards less inflectional complexity, but that isn't true for all languages... AnonMoos (talk) 05:29, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

By "formal", I suppose I meant grammatically rigid, with strict prescriptions for constructing phrases and sentences that are rarely deviated from. As I understand it, English is actually a more grammatically flexible language than most others. While technically SVO, English in common use can be modified to allow for an OSV syntactical structure in many circumstances. Evanh2008 ^{(talk|contribs)} 06:00, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

My guess would be that formal means using grammatical constructs, such as the T-V distinction, and employing a large Greek-Latin vocabulary. When language seems to have become less formal, I would guess that there are two socio-economic reasons for why that could be. When it comes to the TV distinction, I think it is less used now, giving language a more informal twang, because of egalitarian movements, such as Communism and Anarchism, that wanted to eradicate the rigid social hierarchies, and showed equality by changing the way they addressed each other. (Using a simple 'Comrades!' rather than 'Your excellencies, highnesses, duchesses, dukes, ladies and gentlemen!')

The same could be said when it comes to the vocabulary being used. As literacy has increased, the potential target audience for literature has increased, and in order to reach that audience, literature has to accomodate the mass audience's level of education. Similarly when it comes television and movies, as disposible income has gone up, the potential market increases, if you target the mass market rather than a niche market. If we assume that the mass market is less educated, it would make sense that the language used is less formal than if targetting a more educated segment of the population. V85 (talk) 07:11, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

108.222.4.112 -- It's a little unfortunate that you're asking a series of "big" or "deep" questions that may not have any very simple answer, and that you don't seem to be prepared to properly understand the partial answers that people are able to give (as was seen conspicuously with the Creole question above). Maybe you should be a little less grandly ambitious -- or at least try to fully digest the answers to the last question before moving on to the next one... AnonMoos (talk) 05:29, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't say English has become "less formal" but I would say it's become more euphemistic and less plain in its formality. We scrapped T-V distinction and replaced it with this system of prefacing everything with a bunch of completely unnecessary modal verbs we have now, (e.g. "come here" vs. "if you'd just like to come around here please"). There are also different levels of formality - the register you use to talk to customers, your boss, your teacher at school and a police officer are all markedly different, and I doubt this was always the case. I guess a similar thing must be happening in Hungarian too, since one of the three pronouns they use for distinguishing levels of formality is falling out of use. - filelakeshoe 08:47, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

For linguists, formality is not primarily a matter of structure or even vocabulary. Instead, it is a matter of register. Different languages mark higher (or more "formal") registers in different ways. In some languages, more formal registers use distinct vocabulary, in others they use distinct structures, in others it is a combination. As others have said, formal registers are often (but not necessarily) marked by usages that are archaic or obsolescent in the colloquial language. They may also be marked by greater use of structures and vocabulary from a sometimes ancient sacred language (such as the greater use of Sanskrit in more formal registers of Indian languages). I don't think that linguists have documented a trend toward the disappearance of register in any language, though such a trend might (hypothetically) occur if a society were to experience a decrease in social complexity and hierarchy (such as a collapse of civilization followed by the development of an egalitarian subsistence society). However, the features of register certainly do change over time, like all other aspects of language. Usages that once belonged to a higher register may pass out of use entirely. Usages that were once part of the colloquial language may be reassigned to a higher register. Certainly these processes have happened in English over the past few centuries. Marco polo (talk) 14:13, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Also, unlike now, back then, written works used more formal language than everyday speech, with a few exceptions, like Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Since the written works are all we have of that era, it seems to us that everyone spoke more formally. StuRat (talk) 01:00, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

In traditional "sword and sandal" epics (until stuff like Xena and Merlin came along) it was the norm for people to talk in severely restricted ways. It was always "Yonder lies the castle of my father", not "That's my Dad's castle over there". But in reality, I'm sure they were just a little more relaxed about things when talking among themselves away from courts and kings. Merlin is probably far more accurate in terms of the naturalness of the language they spoke - but it just seems so wrong and so easily dismissable to those of us who grew up expecting the uber-romanticised version. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 20:27, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

You mean "Yonda lies da castle of my fodda"! Adam Bishop (talk) 10:53, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Exactly. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 20:22, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Funny. The article about that movie points out that the quote is apocryphal, at least for that movie, but also editorializes about "American snobbery". That comment was probably posted by someone who doesn't realize how much America makes fun of its own accents of all varieties. One oft-quoted item is Howard Cosell at a critical moment in an Ali-Frazier fight: "Down goes Frazhuh! Down goes Frazhuh!" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:42, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Arabic question about a merchant inn

Ibn Battuta mentions in his travel log that merchants who came to the Chinese port cities had to impound their money with proprietors of merchant inns called "Funduq." What are the Arabic characters for this word? Thanks. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 05:45, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

فندق, "from the Greek, pandocheion, an inn", according to the etymology section in our article on Caravanserai. See also ar:فندق, the Arabic Wikipedia's article on hotel. ---Sluzzelin talk 05:52, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 06:24, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

I have nothing to add to Sluzzelin's answer, I just wanted to say that that's a fascinating word, which is sometimes mistaken as a native Arabic word. It has a broken plural, "fanadiq", which makes it seem somehow more Arabic (although that pattern is also used for other borrowed words). It was even adopted from Arabic into European languages around Ibn Battuta's time (actually a bit earlier), "fundacium" in Latin and "fonde" in French (and something similar in Italian too). In French the "fonde" was the marketplace in the cities of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem - an adoption of the Islamic funduq, which was itself borrowed from the earlier Byzantine pandocheion that Sluzzelin mentioned. Adam Bishop (talk) 13:17, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Indian Ocean Trade

The Indian Ocean is one of the oldest trade routes between Africa and Asia.Important trading routes linked the east coast of Africa and Madagascar with the Arabian Peninsula , India and Indonesia.

How trade begins and expands Trade begins locally with the exchange of goods among individuals. Trade expands with migration and the spread of information about different resources available in other areas. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shanthini Ragoonaden (talk • contribs) 13:20, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

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