[Aurelius3]

The quality of spoken English goes down over time as well, and as far as I know the English language has no institute or governing body which attempts to regulate it. It seems to me that the languages erode regardless of the rules in place to become more convenient for people. It is a shame culturally but at the same time it is difficult to blame people for speaking conveniently. It will be interesting to see where this takes both languages in 50 to 100 years.

[giraffe_lady]

Why is it a shame culturally? What values are you using to establish that one form of the language is "good" or "pure" and another is "worse" or "eroded" and why should others subscribe to that value system?

Languages change and always have, people noting this is as old as written record about language. People have also always been complaining about it, and ascribing to it some meaning about the increasing degeneracy of the youth or the decline of society or whatever.

The language obviously continues to work fine for the needs people have of it, as it always has. You don't need to like the changes, but you should understand that that is an aesthetic judgement and nothing else. It doesn't indicate or represent anything "going down" or a cultural loss of any kind.

[Aurelius3]

I can agree with this line of thought, however, I feel obliged to warn you where this supposed reality can lead and I want you to consider if this violates any other beliefs you may hold. Another poster mentioned that the English have a rather strong dislike of prescriptivism, I think this is true, although I only have anecdotal evidence for this. Following this I find that the English and there derivatives in America also have a strong belief in multiculturalism, or the idea that varying cultures/perspectives strengthens a group. I would say that in certain intervals these two cannot coexist. Taking the example of french Canadians, they are considered to be relatively intolerant compared to the rest of Canada when it comes to religion, culture, language, immigration, and other facets of multiculturalism in an attempt to protect themselves. Yet it was that same multiculturalist mindset that saved them when the English let off and accepted them into Canadian goverment, giving them many rights even above the rest of Canada. So you can see that the lack of defence against cultural change inevitably results in another culture with a more defensive nature taking ground... But if you attempt to fight back it wouldn't be multicultural of you... So you can see that these two beliefs conflict at certain extremes. Karl Popper would have considered this to be an example of the paradox of tolerance (And I would add intolerance, as too much language purity gets you into a situation where your parisian institute bans the word poggers).

With this in mind I find your purely relativistic idea that all languages are equal, or more importantly that we should treat them as all equal, as somewhat misguided, and in many ways supremacist (it is easy for the culturally dominant, in this case the english, to wave hands and act like everyone else is irrational for trying to protect their culture, when it is implicitly understood if they don't then English will swallow it whole).

[qalmakka]

If this was a valid argument than Modern English is also a rump language which was vandalized by countless French and Latin loanwords and that lost its grammatical correctness when people stopped conjugating verbs and using grammatical genders.

Old English was a way more complex language, akin to German and had a different form for each person. For instance, to shine was "sċīnan", and the present tense was

- ic sċīne - þū sċīnst - hē sċīnþ ...

Nowadays, it's just "I shine, you shine, he shines", without no distinction except the third person's 's'. It's a vastly simpler language, and yet, it allows people to convey concepts as well as any other language.

A thing I find ironic is that in certain languages that do thoroughly conjugate verbs, there's a way to mock those foreigners who don't know how to use verbs properly. It often happens that those who lack the knowledge of the proper inflected forms use the infinitive everywhere as a stopgap - for instance, one may say in broken Italian "io avere freddo" instead of the proper "io ho freddo", and every Italian speaker would understand it perfectly, albeit a native speaker would probably scoff it off as a blatant sign of a lack of linguistic knowledge.

That's precisely what English went through during the transition from Old to Middle English. People started speaking "broken" English and they kept doing that, and after a while it wasn't broken anymore. Subjunctive tense? That's basically dead in modern English too.

The point I'm trying to convey is, what you consider as the rules nowadays come straight from the broken babblings of the illiterates of yesteryear. If those Roman scholars that were complaining about the broken Latin spoken by their contemporaries had their way, the Romance languages would have never existed. Ironically, the moment Europe dropped Latin and started adopting the "vulgar" actually languages spoken by the people is widely considered the moment Europe truly started blooming again, and a crucial first step towards the literacy of the masses.

[mjbeswick]

Language naturally evolve over time in a way which allows efficient communication, so it's not something which should be controlled. The simpler a language is the greater number of people it will be able to be understood by.

The whole purpose of any language is facilitate communication between people. I would argue that the quality and usefulness of English has increased over time, as it would be very difficult to use English from even 100 years ago in conversation today, as it would lack the words to express every day topics.