[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by DewarHolmes

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "…many things you consider "deterioration" are actually parts of the language that have been around longer than the "proper" bits."

I mean that a lot of the popular examples of words that have been "corrupted" into different spellings, meanings, and uses... Often originally meant the "wrong" meaning. Grammatical patterns that are often brought up as wrong, lazy, etc etc.... Are actually predecessors to the modern patterns that were simply used in areas that were considered "lower class" so were tossed out because they weren`t new and fashionable.

The meaning of a word can't be corrupted until there is a meaning to corrupt.

Obviously. And where do these words come from? They do not spring from the air - they either evolve from other words or are invented. A pattern that doesn`t differ much from what you term corruption - having a new meaning assigned, being abbreviated, a new morphing of two words, etc.

A phrase can't be hacked up into bits and boiled down to a series of letters which represent that phrase unless the phrase itself has a meaning to begin with.

And in turn those newly "corrupted" words are used in new phrases, or pounded out into an easily used form - oops, "hacked up into bits and boiled down", right? This is what has been happening for as long as language has existed.

Rules can't be broken if they don't exist.

You speak as if someone sat down and said "Hey, let`s make a language called English! I`ll write up a list of words, and you write up a list of phrases! Then we`ll make a set of rules for it!"
Language doesn`t work that way. It is added on to, modified, warped, twisted, revised, abbreviated, etc etc through history. There is no beginning and no end. The rules are made and changed on the fly.

You say that the English language is 'evolving', but I don't see how the alteration of meanings, abbreviated texts, simplistic words (and simplified concepts), poor grammar, misspellings, incorrect punctuation, and above all, a lack of concern for the dumbing-down of the language itself is an improvement in any way. It seems that, if anything, our language is 'de-evolving'.

But yet this is exactly what happened to create the languages spoken in the world today.
Take a look at the OED - see how many words still retain their original meanings. See how many retain their original spellings. Note how many seemingly useful words have been simplified along with the concepts they describe, or tossed out altogether to be replaced by something that seems much less intuitive. Note also how much grammar has changed over history. Did you know that English, like many other languages, used to have genders? I`m quite glad it was "dumbed-down" somewhere along the line.

Why change something merely for the sake of change? It's silly. If our speech and written word have worked well for us until now-and produced better results in the past-why attempt to change them?

No one changes things for the sake of change - in fact, attempting to manually change language (for whatever reasons) is pretty much hopeless.
I am completely sure that Old English worked perfectly well for the people who spoke it. But we no longer speak it - why? Because it evolved into something better and more accessible.

I don't think that everybody LOL-ing and ROTFL-ing is especially useful in any way. U KWIM?

Neither do I. You don`t see me doing it, do you? Please do not misinterpret what I am saying. I am all for using proper speech and spelling - I just realize that language is not static and should not be expected to be so.

Abbreviations like those above have been used as long as people have been writing. A lot of historical texts are a pain to translate because they are sprinkled with abbreviations unfamiliar to modern scholars - and these are formal texts. It is NOT a new phenomenon. The biggest difference between now and thousands of years in the past is that the majority of people are literate. Pretty much everyone can write in some capacity, and thanks to the internet the writing of virtually all of these people is available for viewing. Historically, only the elite of the elite would have had their words displayed so publicly.

What matters in the end is what withstands the test of time. Not everyone spoke or wrote like the classical writers of the past. They are an extremely small example of a tiny slice of society. Because they were abnormally skilled their work remains. If everyone had been their equals, they would have had little appeal.