Our Mother Tongue

[timwilky]

Is it only me, or are standards in the use of the English language no longer slipping, but instead careering downhill at mach 2.


Yes I know language is dynamic, I read Dickens as a child, Shakespeare and attempted Chaucer as a teenager and is is obvious that language constructs, spelling, even words evolve. However, even then language had constructs and rules.

It would appear that today, a *******isation of the language is taking place in order that sub cultures can have their own unintelligible language. Such as in the case of Polari amongst the gay communities of the 30-50s.

However, this sub group who feel the need for their own language are our children. I have had many a discussion with my son and his friends. Who refuse to accept that the way that they speak will leave them stuck in the stereotype mould of wasters and nerdowells. Strange then that my thoughts seem to have hit home with my eldest. She at least is now attempting to shake of the shackles of a vocabulary and pronunciation formed on the concrete school yards of comprehensive Britain. Strange that she should now feel the need to learn her own language, 15 years too late.

When I was at school, the boys as well as girls had to undertake an element of deportment. We learnt how to stand in a room, to walk with our shoulder back, head upright. We learnt how to pronounce words and articulate clearly. Basic grammar, good reading and taught to shun certain popular childrens authors. For me, an Enid Blyton in my satchel would have got me six on the knuckles with a 3 ft wooden rule. Girls got the flat, boys the edge. Note in the above. A measuring stick, is a rule, not a ruler. A ruler sits on a throne. We were taught to use a fountain pen, cartridge pens were frowned upon, and work was rejected if thought to have been written with a ball point pen. Some of this still sticks with me today. I always use a fountain pen for my hand written correspondance.

Why the drivel in the above paragraph?. Well just to point out there was a time when our educators thought about quality of education. Now it would appear that they no longer have this concern and instead have lowered the standards to ensure large number of exam passes. My concerns were raised some years ago when my own daughter with a GCSE grade A in English was unable to tell me what an adjective was.

Is it not time that a body equivalent to the French Académie Française was formed, to protect and direct the evolution of the English language. Sloppy English should be rejected by all, we should no longer be compelled to put up with the use of street slang and vulgarity within daily life.


It is my own personal opinion the worst offender for the use of poor English has to be the BBC in the insistence of referring to the oblique character within URLs as "slash"

I do recognise that I too use poor and sloppy English. However, since it is now 30 years since I last had an English lesson. Please excuse it as yet another premature senility moment.

[Stingo]

Well said that man. Sadly though, whilst language evolves, there will always be the ever increasing street-talk element of it which will inevitably cross into general usage. So, how to stop standards slipping...we've probably reached a stage today where even the people we look to to deliver education have already slipped into the ever deepening pit of verbal-tripe despair. To educate effectively, you need to teach the teachers first...it ain't gonna 'appen me owld china innit. Whatever! Bovvered? Not. Oi - (If you can't beat them - join them).

No, but yeah, but no, but yeah, but no, but yeah, but no.....

Shut up!!

[Viney]

I is from souf lunun aint i, so i aint go no chance init. Naw jus you keep up norf an we will be schweet!

I havent got a clue either, and toaly agree with you old been

Tally ho!

I too also write using a fountain pen, and I am astonished when people ask to borrow a pen reply "Sorry I can't use one of them".

When a new employee, also new to Cardiff asked me directions, I gave him the A to Z, his reply was I can't read maps, - he's got an honours degree in geography.

Did your parents not hate the way you spoke when you were younger?

They probably did, while slang and pcking up words from other cultures/area's is always feared just like your post says (because you dont understand it).

It is the only way for language to evolve, if we didnt accept new words into our culture we would all still be oohing and arring at each like cavemen.

And its not as if our language came from one specific place, its a mixture of all the slang you can think of, german, french, gaelic, latin and spanish but to name a few.

Yes prenunciation as you know it has gone down the pan, but look how much the language has changed in the past 100 years, you cant expect it not to.

Why have non-Jamaicans started using the accent?

This is one of the current trends that I am very confused about

[northwind]

No offence, but you talk about the english language as though it sprang into the world fully formed and is gradually being corrupted away from its ideal... If you read, for example, learned written english from the 1600s- for example, Hooke's diaries- it's close to incomprehensible. Little things like the apostrophe- contractions were still extremely rare. Hooke his diaries insteead of Hooke's diaries.

English is a dog tongue... We have roots from latin, greek, french and german. The oldest surviving spoken form of English is Lowland (lalan) Scots, it's the closest thing we have to "real english"- and Shakespeare, Dickens and Chaucer wouldn't have understood it.

Incidentally, it's ne'erdowells, or ne'er-do-wells And that's slang, just slang that grew common. The entire english language as we speak is is a corruption of a corruption of a corruption of a mongrel. It's no purer than jamaican patois or Aberdonian Doric, or txt. That's why it's so succesful IMO.

I don't disagree with the general point though. Standards are definately being allowed to slip in some areas, though how common it is, I don't honestly know. Where it crosses the line is when schools allow the use of "improper english"- allowing essays to contain slang or txt, as has been reported, seems a step too far. That seems to be teaching something which shouldn't be encouraged. Although to be fair, I have no idea where that line would be drawn. Creative writign in txt, for example, would be fair play if done appropriately, but a history exam wouldn't.

As for the language as a whole, I'm personally of the opinion that there are modern writers producing work that far exceed Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy et al. Romeo and Juliet, written today, would get maybe one performance in the Fringe with a selection of one star reviews. The pacing is poor, the use of language frequently awful and the characterisation pitiful. The whole thing is utterly unconvincing, right down to the sudden Tarantino-esque death toll at the end. Feeble. And stolen, for that matter, and extensively rewritten since Shakespeare's death.

A lot of the great works of modern literature willfully abuse the language and syntax- Ginsberg anyone? Kerouac? I'd add Jeff Noon to that list as a matter of taste. Philip Larkin or Seamus Heaney... Heinlein. We don't speak a dead language.

I tell you what though.

If the young folks' regional dialects throughout Britain become anymore Eastender-fied, I will get seriously worried