Geographically, English is the most widespread language on earth, and it is second only to Mandarin Chinese in the number of people who speak it. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has five official languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. The influence of these languages upon one another will inevitably increase.
It is reasonable to ask if changes in English can be predicted. There will doubtless be modifications in pronunciation, especially in that of long vowels and diphthongs. In weakly stressed syllables there is already a visible tendency, operating effectively through radio and television, to restore the full qualities of vowels in these syllables. This tendency may bring British English more into line with American English and may bring them both a little nearer to Spanish and Italian. Further, it may help to narrow the gap between pronunciation and spelling. Other factors will also contribute toward the narrowing of this gap: advanced technological education, computer programming, machine translation, and expanding mass media. Spelling reformers will arise from time to time to liven up proceedings, but in general, traditional orthography may well hold its own against all comers, perhaps with some regularization. Printing houses, wielding concentrated power through their style directives, will surely find it in their best interests to agree on uniformity of spelling. Encyclopedic dictionaries—computerized, universal, and subject to continuous revision—may not go on indefinitely recording such variant spellings as “connection” and “connexion,” “judgment” and “judgement,” “labor” and “labour,” “medieval” and “mediaeval,” “plow” and “plough,” “realise” and “realize,” “thru” and “through.”
Since Tudor (Owen Tudor of Wales, Grandfather of Henry VII: 1485-1603) days, aside from the verb endings -est and -eth, inflections have remained stable because they represent the essential minimum. The abandonment of the forms thou and thee may encourage the spread of yous and youse in many areas, but it is not necessarily certain that these forms will win general acceptance. The need for a distinctive plural can be supplied in other ways (e.g., the forms “you all, you fellows, you people”). The distinctions between the words “I” and “me,” “he” and “him,” “she” and “her,” “we” and “us,” “they” and “them” seem to many authors to be too important to be set aside, in spite of a growing tendency to use objective forms as emphatic subjective pronouns and to say, for instance, “them and us” instead of “they and we” in contrasting social classes. Otherwise, these distinctive forms may remain stable; they are all monosyllabic, they are in daily use, and they can bear the main stress. Thus they are likely to resist levelling processes.
Considerable changes will continue to be made in the forms and functions of auxiliary verbs, catenative (linking) verbs, phrasal verbs, and verb phrases. Indeed, the constituents of verbs and verb groups are being more subtly modified than those of any other word class. By means of auxiliaries and participles, a highly intricate system of aspects, tenses, and modalities is gradually evolving.
In syntax the movement toward a stricter word order seems to many to be certain to continue. The extension of multiple attributives in nominal groups has probably reached its maximum. It cannot extend further without incurring the risk of ambiguity.
In vocabulary further increases are expected if the present trends continue. Unabbreviated general dictionaries already contain 500,000 entries, but even larger dictionaries, with 750,000 entries, may be required. Coiners of words probably will not confine themselves to Greek and Latin in creating new terms; instead they are likely to exercise their inventive powers in developing an international technical vocabulary that is increasingly shared by Russian, French, and Spanish and that is slowly emerging as the universal scientific language.
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