ALT TEXT:
- Panel 1: A person with the text “Singular ‘they’” written on them smiling with open arms.
- Panel 2: “Singular ‘They’” beaten up by others who said, “Singular they is ungrammatical. It’s too confusing,” “How can anyone use plural pronouns for singular,” and “Every pronoun should only have one purpose.”
- Panel 3: “You” hiding from the mob who was beating “Singular ‘They’”
- Panel 4: “German ‘Sie’” hiding with even more fear next to “You”
People have been crying about language change in all languages since the dawn of speaking. You can look back to relatively recently with the Romans, they’d always complain about non-standard dialectal and colloquial speech and how the youth are ruining our language, or people from X geographical area are butchering Latin rather than using the standard dialect (Classical Latin).
It’s no different today. People (upon political/cultural motivation) complain about using “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, saying it’s confusing (even though we’ve used it as a singular pronoun for those of unknown gender since “they” was borrowed into English), but don’t bat an eye at “you” which was first a plural only (as opposed to singular “thou”) and then gradually shifted to a formal singular pronoun, then to just the only second person pronoun for both numbers. People also complain about pronunciations of words like nuclear, asks, comfortable, etc.
The myth of mispronunciation is a plague upon human language.
It’s not change itself that I hate, it’s when the change makes language less useful. Example, “literally” meaning its opposite, “figuratively,” through common misuse. “It was literally the million-dollar question” used to mean that it was a question that, if answered, would actually be worth a million dollars rather than figuratively meaning it was an important one to answer. Now it’s unclear.
I like you, you get me. Adapting the language to serve the common denominator isn’t great since the common denominator is generally an idiot. We, as a people, are fairly stupid on the whole. Codifying the literal opposite of a word into that words definition is reducing the clarity of the language, requiring further clarification for the uncertainty, suddenly a relatively terse statement becomes a long unwieldy mess of clarifications for all the idiosyncrasies of the words, since the words have so many contradictory meanings that the statement can be interpreted in any number of ways, instead of how it was intended.
Over time, the common meaning of terms has been diluted to the point where most statements need clarifying context to even be correctly understood.
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Literally (ha) all linguists would disagree with you there. The word “literally” here has gone through the same evolution that EVERY WORD GOES THROUGH. EVERY WORD YOU SPEAK went through the same thing where you would call it “less clear” or “useless” or whatever.
Language is always unclear. You do not have the same perception of words as someone else does. If we arbitrarily assigned some word uses as “useless” based on someone’s personal idea of what’s useful, we wouldn’t have language. A lot of people would call articles useless (words like “the” or “a/an”), a lot of people would call pronouns useless (I/you/they/etc.), a lot of people would call marked tense useless (no more past tense or future tense!). A lot of languages don’t have these features. English speakers might think grammatical case is useless. Why do you get to decide what’s useless or not? Why is using “literally” as something for emphasis useless to you, and why do you think it’s so objective that you should have the authority to remove that from the language?
Care to give examples?
Of languages that don’t have articles? Russian, Japanese, pretty sure Arabic, a majority of synthetic languages have no articles.
Japanese has no pronouns depending on what you consider a pronoun, pro-drop languages like Spanish or Italian don’t use subject pronouns except for emphasis.
Chinese languages have no tense. Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese have no tense. Pirahã has only future tense. Japanese only has 2 tenses, one is past and one is combined present and future.
Pirahã is also debated to have no number system and no names for colors.
There’s plenty of features that people who speak a language think is necessary that plenty of other languages just don’t have. Languages are extraordinarily different and fluid. Word meanings shifting over time, in the case of “literally” where it starts meaning something very different is one of the most common, and gives you the words like “black” in English (which came from the same word that “white” in other languages like French or Spanish came from).
No, examples of words that mean two opposite things at the same time, since you apparently said that every single word in existence has always been that way. “Bad” comes to mind, though it’s a lot easier to tell from context which meaning it has compared to “literally.”
Another non-english example would be the german word “umfahren” which can mean both driving around or over something, depending on context
I have never said that every single word in existence has had 2 opposing definitions at once. I simply said all words went through the process where people think the “new” uses are confusing. And one of the most common mechanisms for that is something being used in a seemingly opposite way than its common definition. But since you asked, here’s some of them: https://www.dailywritingtips.com/75-contronyms-words-with-contradictory-meanings/
And Wikipedia has a list of common contranyms: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_contranyms
And some examples of words that used to mean one thing but now mean something completely different or even opposite: Every word. Lol, I’m not kidding, almost no words have ever meant the same thing over a long period of time (usually the ones that have are things like “water” or “horse” which our ancestors needed to survive over time). But some specific examples would be: Awful, Terrific, Nimrod, Trust (noun).
Semantic drift is one of the most important concepts in linguistics. It is THE REASON we have separate languages. The reason we have French and English and German and Russian as different languages is semantic drift (and phonological shifts for the pronunciation part).
Or extensive, originally meant spread out, but is also used for comprehensive.
I don’t disagree with you, but the changes I tend to have a problem with, as samus12345 pointed out, is that it robs the statement of clarity. I just want language, any language, to be as specific as it can, so that misunderstandings are minimized because the words used have specific definitions, which are all similar. Instead of the contradictory definitions many words seem to have.
It’s by far not the majority of words that have this problem, but it’s definitely a non-trivial number of them that do.
There is no such thing as a specific as possible language. Language is literally JUST ambiguity. Again, every word you use right now was complained about when its definitions slowly shifted in the same way you complain about words “losing their clarity”. That’s called LANGUAGE CHANGE.