| EWD 667 Dijkstra's "On the foolishness if natural language programming" "... the last decades have shown a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language." I have immediately to mind, despite it's not by far the most eloquent of EWDs letters on language. A moment of your search engine of choice, reading the results of his letters found by the qualification of "+ poetry" I enthusiastically propose to you despite I vaguely recall losing my argument with my English language tutor for my assertion that the"interactive reference" to a broad body is valid argument if proposed by requirement prior to reading my essay. The man first to be described as computer programmer or scientist of computer languages challenges me not to pursue the subject of his renown, but to learn Dutch so to learn instead of computing the tremendous subtlety of humanity which I have found overwhelming whenever I come across his expositions. The Victorian era I believe saw this distinction between man and nature which found exegesis and celebration in formal gardens and arguably even though the assiduous endeavour of naturalists and explorers in this age of classification, of delineation: Human Above Cruel Raw Nature. Nature seen as the result of forces and devoid of innate intelligence or even intrinsic logic possessed by itself and not discoverable by the obsessions of man's inquisition. Nature was about to give up its its all. Then Man would stand supreme, as if asked to defend the thesis by a passing hurricane. Are we not learning glyphic or visual narrative speech at considerable pace of adoption, right now in the west? Was the SMS messaging apotheosis the acceptance of conducting transactions in practical life circumstances entirely via emotional expression in a exceptionally complicated indirect tense and at times by suggestion and inferences avoiding noun and verb entirely? I'm not a linguist nor even familiar enough with the formalities so very helpful if not essential to discuss this subject which I find increasingly fascinating, if you can forgive me my inclination to attempt my expression in certain expectation of some technical error. But I hope my impression conveyed, at least, that I am sure that as a species the result of the communication explosion since the internet, must be a renaissance in language development and expression. I am unsure if I can articulate what's been a nagging feeling I'm yet to have attempted expressing to any audience, but if you take the extinction of historical languages to be accelerated by the isolation from urbanisation and other factors, if isolation from other speakers or potential new speakers is the past language killer, then talking to grandchildren over Skype might enable at least colloquialisms and dialects still extant or somehow developing to persist in the future? |