Interesting post and interesting linked article. One part strikes me as especially noteworthy:
“Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues expect that some 15 of the 98 modern irregular verbs they studied -- although likely none of these top 10 -- will regularize in the next 500 years.”
Now, is this based on previous evolution of verbs? Because the past thousand years have had a certain feasibility of communication, locally, nationally and globally. I think the past 100 years with the advent of radio, television and now the internet, language is really going to evolve at a rate previously unseen in history.
The whole globe is connected, textually, verbally and visually, and it's immediate and constant. The past thousand years the only way to get your novel usage of a particular word or grammatical construct was to either go to some venue and talk, send a letter, or write a book. Now you can spread your literary love everywhere, constantly and with a wide audience. And not only to people with your local dialect, but every dialect. What a melting pot.
I'm quite a lover of language evolution. I moved to Italy a year ago in a very multilingual office, and my French and Italian colleagues noted how nice it is in English that you can verb nouns. It hadn't occurred to me that this wasn't possible in French or Italian. I expressed that though English is quite liberal and almost anything goes in a lot of areas, I still wish that people were more accepting of linguistic novelties. People scorn you if you play with language, or actively drop old ways, or invent new words, with the exception of high school kids who, in my experience, are the most inventive English speakers I've seen. When I was in school the amount of new language and idioms introduced every week was overwhelming.
I'm quite descriptivist, though. I like dictionaries that are extremely up to date, like [Wordnik](http://www.wordnik.com/), that encourage people to just use words freely, and take 3 seconds to explain to their partner in conversation what the word means, without fear that their new word isn't cromulent! (I just added "cromulent" to Chrome's dictionary.) Some words I like to use when talking to myself (hey, kids do it, so sue me), are words that don't exist already but are the 'root' of existing words, like inane (“That's quite ane.”), edible (“I think I'll ed some peanut butter sarnies”), etc.
On the other hand, prescription has a far bigger reach today than even thirty years ago. Trivial example: When everything you write gets spell checked automatically, new orthography develops slower.
Also immediate communication can slow down a language, and homogenize it. Radio and TV certainly brought the German dialects closer together.
It depends on the patterns of communication. The internet allows lots of small groups to interact with each other all over the world. That has a different effect than the few to many pattern you get with traditional mass media.
“Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues expect that some 15 of the 98 modern irregular verbs they studied -- although likely none of these top 10 -- will regularize in the next 500 years.”
Now, is this based on previous evolution of verbs? Because the past thousand years have had a certain feasibility of communication, locally, nationally and globally. I think the past 100 years with the advent of radio, television and now the internet, language is really going to evolve at a rate previously unseen in history.
The whole globe is connected, textually, verbally and visually, and it's immediate and constant. The past thousand years the only way to get your novel usage of a particular word or grammatical construct was to either go to some venue and talk, send a letter, or write a book. Now you can spread your literary love everywhere, constantly and with a wide audience. And not only to people with your local dialect, but every dialect. What a melting pot.
I'm quite a lover of language evolution. I moved to Italy a year ago in a very multilingual office, and my French and Italian colleagues noted how nice it is in English that you can verb nouns. It hadn't occurred to me that this wasn't possible in French or Italian. I expressed that though English is quite liberal and almost anything goes in a lot of areas, I still wish that people were more accepting of linguistic novelties. People scorn you if you play with language, or actively drop old ways, or invent new words, with the exception of high school kids who, in my experience, are the most inventive English speakers I've seen. When I was in school the amount of new language and idioms introduced every week was overwhelming.
I'm quite descriptivist, though. I like dictionaries that are extremely up to date, like [Wordnik](http://www.wordnik.com/), that encourage people to just use words freely, and take 3 seconds to explain to their partner in conversation what the word means, without fear that their new word isn't cromulent! (I just added "cromulent" to Chrome's dictionary.) Some words I like to use when talking to myself (hey, kids do it, so sue me), are words that don't exist already but are the 'root' of existing words, like inane (“That's quite ane.”), edible (“I think I'll ed some peanut butter sarnies”), etc.
Anyway, I'm rambling, too.