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I've recently watched René Clair's movie "I married a witch". At some point the spirits of the witch Jennifer and her sorcerer father are set free after being trapped for 250 years in a tree and they discover modern society and overhear conversations. Jennifer immediately points out to her father how much the language has changed and wonder how they will understand the people of today. I thought that given the state of language these days, it will be easier for an average person from the 17th century to understand today's language than vice verso. It also made me think on the relation of society to language. What is the effect of today's impoverishment of language on us? Is it important to deal with this impoverishment and how? Or is it not something that matters and today's society is after all better even if its tools of expression have diminished?
What do you
mean precisely by an "impoverishment of language"? Is it a lack of vocabulary or more an absence
of sophistication. To put it in "lego"-terms. Do we have too few
buildings blocks or do we have plenty but lack the creativity or the desire to
construct anything beautiful with them?
From 1650 till 1950 english has added roughly 1,000 words a year. Since 1950 that rate of accretion has increased to 10,000 per annum. Why do you think someone plucked from 1650 would find it easier to understand a vastly enriched modern english vocabulary of over 1,000,000 words than we to understand them?
....and not forgetting all the words that existed before that have changed their meaning, or at least, changed within certain cultural groups, e.g. gay, cool, wicked, awesome, etc.
