9 Dec 11 Less QQ. More PEW PEW.

[Davidj]

I think going forward in time would make the language much harder to understand than going back; we've all grown up with everything since Shakespeare lumped into the broad category of "modern English," and atavisms of everything since Roman times hidden in our own language, whereas so much of our language today would be nearly unimaginable.
)

Nope. Someone who knew english from any time after the invention of the dictionary would be able to communicate in basic English and learn what vocabulary has been added over the years. The invention of the dictionary has done a huge amount of retardation of linguistic drift and standardisation of usage.

[oddtail]

I think going forward in time would make the language much harder to understand than going back; we've all grown up with everything since Shakespeare lumped into the broad category of "modern English," and atavisms of everything since Roman times hidden in our own language, whereas so much of our language today would be nearly unimaginable.
)

Nope. Someone who knew english from any time after the invention of the dictionary would be able to communicate in basic English and learn what vocabulary has been added over the years. The invention of the dictionary has done a huge amount of retardation of linguistic drift and standadization of usage.

Yup. The other major change to that effect was the introduction of radio and later television. It served to create a uniform frame of reference that more and more people were familiar with (as opposed to dictionaries which, let's face it, weren't used by the average Joe most of the time, probably still aren't).

[Freemage]

"Twink" has also more-or-less become gamer shorthand, whether it be tabletop, electronic, or card game, for "someone who can only find a game fun by ruining other players' enjoyment of the game, and/or someone who thinks buying all the expensive stuff that 'pros' use is what will bring them to victory, instead of actually becoming skilled." I know that in my circle of gamers, twink-gamers are shunned vehemently.

*Nods* They were, online, too. We pretty much treated them like an exotic and vaguely repulsive species (like lungfish). Hell, I even had a long-running thread on their forums in the day that was a nomenclature of twinks--Lord of Ink, Angst Queen, Combat God, The Polyglot, and so forth.

[mindstalk]

I think going forward in time would make the language much harder to understand than going back; we've all grown up with everything since Shakespeare lumped into the broad category of "modern English," and atavisms of everything since Roman times hidden in our own language, whereas so much of our language today would be nearly unimaginable.
)

Nope. Someone who knew english from any time after the invention of the dictionary would be able to communicate in basic English and learn what vocabulary has been added over the years. The invention of the dictionary has done a huge amount of retardation of linguistic drift and standardisation of usage.

This seems either false, because dictionaries are thousands of years old, or hard to evaluate, as dictionaries in their modern form are only a couple centuries old, and would be competing for influence with printing and mass literacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary#History

[oenone]

I thought dictionaries did more to standardize spelling than to standardize language?

[Davidj]

Nope. Someone who knew english from any time after the invention of the dictionary would be able to communicate in basic English and learn what vocabulary has been added over the years. The invention of the dictionary has done a huge amount of retardation of linguistic drift and standardisation of usage.

This seems either false, because dictionaries are thousands of years old, y

Not English dictionaries. Akkadian dictionaries aren't going to affect linguistic drift in English. (In fact they wouldn't have done much for Akkadian because you need general literacy before dictionaries can do their thing.)

[Valerie]

Isn't this just assuming you're sent to an English-speaking country? What if you wound up in like Korea or something?

Also, I think standardizing spelling would have a lot to do with preventing language drift. I wonder if it counts as an example, but I've heard "privacy" pronounced as "PRY - vis - ee" and "PRIH - vis -ee." If not for the spelling being there to give us a general idea of how it should sound, it might shift into "PRIH - vas - ee," "PRAH - vas - ee," "PRAH - vos -ee" and so on until it's hard to recognize at all.

[oddtail]

I thought dictionaries did more to standardize spelling than to standardize language?

In theory. In practice, a big book that people can look into and find out what a word means equals less "inappropriate" use of words, and this "inappropriateness" is one of the major reasons language evolves in the first place (the other being new ideas, which need new language to be properly expressed).

Also, who said standardised spelling was not part of standardising language?