Why we need English 2.0

11-17-2008: I wrote this, in ignorance of a lot of truth about language.  As Seth pointed out, most of my complaints were aimed at written English standards, as determined by some abstract association of English scholars, dictionary authors, and organizations like the MLA.  All other rants were naively uninformed.

English has been changing since it’s creation, just like any language. The difference between American English and most other languages is the incredible amount of hybridization that is constantly occuring. As referred to as a cultural melting pot, the States are also a great linguistic melting pot.

So which version becomes 2.0? Ebonics? 1337 Speak? TexMex? Engrish? or what? Well this is part of the problem and the reason that there hasn’t been a huge movement to renovate our language. The concept isn’t really all that new, nations have been implimenting new standards for languages and alphabets since mass communication has been possible, and somewhat before. Korea for example created an original phonetic alphabet in the 20th century and it only took a little over half a century for it to become the primarily used written alphabet.

My ideas for 2.0

-Remember when you learned the alphabet in school? How they tried to explain long vowels and short vowels and they used little symbols to designate which made which sounds. Why don’t we see these after learning about them, they would make reading english much more user-friendly and much more easily standardized so as to prevent the changing pronunciations of “oo” versus “u” versus “o.” Why does the sound have to depend on the word it’s in? Doesn’t this seem a little stupid?

-Along the same lines as above, get rid of types of phonetics that are rare or outdated. Most people mispronounce “climb” as “clime” anyway, so why not change the spelling? The dictionary could be re-written, they make new editions frequently anyway.

-Get rid of stupid grammar rules. I have to hand it to the guys in charge on this one, they’re working on it. It is now somewhat acceptable to verbify words and split infinitives, but there are still a large amount of pointless grammatical rules that are being maintained for reasons no better than tradition.

-I could list a hundred and one specific instances of things that are stupid, but I’m getting tired of ranting, I think you probably get the point.

I do however recognize the challenge that reworking the entire language (and quite a hefty language we have) poses to everyone, speakers and writers alike. What would we have to do to actually change it? Make people interested in simplifying it, on a large scale. That’s really all it takes.

Jargon

Jargon is in my humble opinion, the most annoying linguistic dilemma EVER.  Definitively Jargon is a terminology used within specific fields of work, interest, or society.  It’s a problem because people that use Jargon want to keep using it and aren’t interested in communicating to people outside of their jargon-using group.  As I’ve said before anything that inhibits communication is a problem.

Nowadays with great things like the internet we have access to a lot more information than we did some time ago.  People have however extended the use of jargon from spoken words to written words.  It’s very difficult for people that are not-proficient in a specific field to understand instructions that are heavily laden with jargon.  The conundrum being that one can’t learn proper use of the jargon without already knowing it.  It’s paradoxical and incredibly frustrating for many people including myself.

To most members of older generations than mine (born in 1986) ours seems to have a jargon.  With modern high-tech playtoys like I-pods, DVD players, PS2s, Halo, LAN parties, AIM, and anything else beyond e-mail on the internet we’ve linguistically separated ourselves from them.  It’s a problem, and we could help to solve it by using more general terminology for items whenever we can.  Instead of an I-pod you can refer to it to your grandparents as “a music player,” a DVD as a “movie” a PS2 as a “Video game system.”  If you need to use specifics then go for it, but general terms are better for understanding between the ages.

So… Be considerate of those that don’t follow your line of speech.  Please?

Names

It’s really amazing, this mp3 by John Hodgman and Jonathon Coulton exemplifies some interesting aspects of what I’ve been pondering with respect to linguistics and names. The names of 700 hoboes… Why not? They could be any kind of person’s names but William Fenimore Cooper (famous author) the Hobo just sounds more interesting.

I really would like to do a descriptive comparative analysis of naming conventions across time and cultures.