Why Do Languages Change?

21 April 2005

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Have you ever left a Shakespeare performance feeling worn out from trying to understand what the characters were saying? It wasn't just because Shakespeare's English is poetic, but because the English that Shakespeare knew was, in many ways, a different language from ours. When Juliet asked "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" she wasn't asking where Romeo was -- after all, he's right there under the balcony! Wherefore meant why. But we no longer have that word because languages shed words all the time. And they also take on new ones, like blog.

Languages are always changing. It's as inevitable for them to change as it is for cloud patterns in the sky to take on new forms. If we see a horsy in the clouds today and walk outside and see the same horsy tomorrow, then something's very wrong. It's the same way with languages -- every language is in the process of changing into a new one.

In English, you can see this easily because our spelling often preserves the way the language was pronounced seven hundred years ago. The word name, for instance, used to be pronounced "NAH-muh." But we stopped saying the final /e/ and the AH sound (NAHme) drifted into an AY sound (NAYm). And then, grammar changes, too. English used to be a language where verbs at the end of the sentence came. That is, that's how you would have said that last sentence, with "came" at the end. We also used to have more pronouns. You was only used when you meant "y'all," while in the singular there was thou. And then for the "generic" you -- as in a sentence like "You only live once" -- the pronoun was man. Now we just use "you" for all of that.

This kind of change is why we face the task of learning foreign languages. If language didn't change, we'd still all speak the first language that popped up in Africa when humans first started to talk. But once the original band of people split off into separate groups, the language took on new forms in each new place -- different sounds, different word order, different endings. The result was that Chinese has tones; some Australian languages have only three verbs; some African languages have click sounds; many Native American languages pack a huge amount of information into single words; and English uses the same word you whether one or two people are involved.

The only thing that makes it look as if a language stays the same forever is print, because print does stay the same way forever. We think of Latin as a dead language, because it was written and we can see it on the page. And we know that no one speaks that particular Latin anymore. But technically, the Latin we struggle with in classrooms was just one stage in a language that never died. It just drifted into several new versions of itself like French, Spanish, and Italian. We don't think of the language of the opera Don Giovanni as "street Latin" -- it's a new language altogether. There was never a day when people in Italy woke up and proclaimed "We were speaking Latin last night but today we're speaking Italian!" Latin just morphed along like cloud formations, and after a while what was once a horsy was a wabbit.

But within our lifespans, it's hard not to think of changes in our language as mistakes. There was a time when people in France thought of early French as just grade-F Latin instead of as a new language in its own right. Gray zones are always tricky. So, when young people say things like "She's all 'don't talk to me like that' and I was like 'you shoulda known anyway'", they're pushing the language on its way to new frontiers. It was through the exact same kinds of changes that English got from Beowulf to Tom Wolfe.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. John McWhorter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at . In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: maria otero-davis at June 6, 2005 11:59 AM