I haven't looked up any quotes reflecting this view. I don't want to assume once stance or the other based on articles i've read or knowledge I've obtained. I want you guys to make me take one stance or the other, I'm sure someone has an opinion on this and a reason why they have that opinion. Discuss.
Types of language change All languages change constantly, and do so in many and varied ways. Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external evolution[2] and internal evolution of languages.[3] [edit] Lexical changes The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology. The ongoing influx of new words in the English language (for example) helps make it a rich field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words. Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token, they may tag some words as "archaic" or "obsolete". More......... http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j...zoGIBA&usg=AFQjCNEAgESMlv3AfsuKB_R0hvYF-2h0CQ
Yes, if those new forms describe new things, relationships or phenomena. No, if the new forms are invented to obfuscate, denigrate, inflame or defraud.
Conations? Where did you find that rather obscure word? It's not often used today. I haven't found it used in reference to language, although "desire, volition and striving" obviously affect language. As for hyphenation, English has a rich compounding facility compared to most other languages. The typical evolution of a neologism is for two words to be used together and written with a space between them (bird house), then to be hyphenated (bird-house) and finally joined (birdhouse). Highly inflected languages like the Romance tongues have a built-in barrier to compounding because it goes against the speakers' established thought patterns to omit inflections and/or prepositions. Spanish speakers say casa de perro, so they would never form perro-casa or perrocasa. It's a little easier for the Germans, but they still can't stop themselves from retaining the inflected endings of the original words, so their compounds tend to have twice as many syllables as ours. Chinese completely lacks inflections, so compounding is rampant, far more than in English. This is handy. Since the phonetics of Chinese are so different from most other languages, it's almost impossible for them to borrow foreign words, so they have no choice but to make up their own. They often copy ours: shi (stone) + you (oil) = shi-you (petroleum), exactly the way we borrowed the Latin words for stone and oil, except we ended up with four syllables instead of two. We were set on this course after the Norman Invasion in 1066, when French became the official language of Angle Land. French words from government, the church, business and other domains found their way into English as the common folk were forced to become used to them in their daily lives. Ultimately the francophone leaders adopted English and assimilated into the occupied population (not an uncommon phenomenon) and brought with them some everyday words like color, face, question, second and use. The haphazard mixing of the two languages accelerated a trend that had already begun: the simplification of English grammar. We lost most of our inflections (only a few remain such as -s, -d, -ing, -er). This streamlining made the language more efficient at compounding, since we didn't have to carry all of those extra syllables with us. We don't get to control that. People need words that express strong feelings, even negative ones. As for obfuscation (from Latin obfuscare, "darken"), words that are created for the precise discussion of things that are peculiar to a profession, sport, etc., and for which the general population have no need, are called "jargon." Words that are created in order to make a discussion incomprehensible to the general population are called "cant." The most well-known cant is Ig-pay Atin-lay, and of course since we all know it, it doesn't really work. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Since the technology of printing sparked a revolution in education resulting in near-universal literacy, a new method of word creation has arisen: the acronym. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation became LASER and then laser. In laymen's language the words "acronym" and "abbreviation" have been muddled, but the difference is that when an abbreviation is read aloud it is pronounced as the names of the letters: IRS is read Eye Are Ess, not "erz." As I've noted before, in English USA is an abbreviation, but the Hungarians treat it as an acronym and pronounce it OO-sha. It's important to recognize the role of technology in the development of language. People who enjoy assuming that "fuck" is an acronym for "for unlawful carnal knowledge" are ignorant of the fact that when that phrase was in use most people could not read and would not have understood the joke. I'm convinced that some words arise as the result of multiple forces converging. "Okay" or "OK" has been traced to borrowings from several different languages including Scots Gaelic and African and Native American tongues, as well as two different abbreviations, in one of which the O is actually a zero.
I had in mind the Newspeak invented by political speech-writers, bankers, military apologists and public relations spokespersons. Though those specialized forms add to the language, i truly do not believe they enhance or enrich. I mean, how many expression do we really need for "torture" and "kill"?
Time will tell. Most of those words don't last enough to be noted by lexicographers. If they do, then we must have found a good use for them. Although all manners of killing feel the same to the victim, the reactions of the survivors and/or perpetrators vary in important ways, so we need words for those. Murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, collateral damage, friendly fire... Those are all different. Snuff, waste, take out, ... sure, those words are nothing but slang and they're eventually forgotten and replaced by exciting new ones.
I have no objection to the slang expressions that clearly mean "kill". Nor do i object to legal and/or moral differentiation of motives. I do object to such terms as "collateral damage" "neutralize" and "extreme prejudice", ("friendly fire is a bit odd, but describes a real event, like "own goal", so i'll put it aside for now) as well as "enhanced interrogation" - terms that say something other than they mean; whose purpose is to distort perception through psychological manipulation. These terms impoverish both the language and the people who speak it. I have to side with Orwell on this.
Collateral damage is also a real event. People and/or buildings and other objects that are not targets of the battle and which, in fact, the military force might ordinarily try to avoid hitting, can in this case not be avoided. So the generals have to decide if achieving the military goal is worth the cost of the collateral damage. Yes, I'm a pacifist and I think all people with military proclivities should be sent to another planet where they can kill each other off and leave us out of it. I'm simply explaining their reasoning, since we have not yet found that planet, nor developed a means to send them there. It is damage, and it is collateral.
Ill give you that one. Now, explain the - linguistic, not political - need for "enhanced interrogation". It's not the existence, or even the function, of the armies i was talking about; it's the presentation of their activities to the general populace. No, it's okay. I'm not going to look up the Byzantine terminology in that legislation to increase the powers of the US military over civilians at home and abroad. You understand.
Well that one truly is obfuscation. Most Americans know that torture is forbidden by treaties our government has signed. Most of them (although probably not precisely the same segment of the population) also know that torture is simply immoral. By now a lot of them even know that people who are tortured (or merely mistreated like some police interrogations) don't necessarily tell the truth, they just say what they think will satisfy the torturers so they'll stop. So if our government wants to torture people, they have to come up with a euphemism so we don't remind them that they're doing something illegal, immoral and unreliable.
