Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Orfew, post: 2658734, member: 74968&quot;]Grimms&#039;s law (yes this is the same Grimm as in the chronicler of many fairy tales), describes how sounds have changed and not why. We may never know why these sounds in particular changed across languages and over time, but language change is fairly constant within a language. As a friend of mine said one day &quot;If a language does not change...it dies&quot;. Indeed, language death has occurred many times over the ages. </p><p><br /></p><p>In fact, if you look closely at English you may notice some of the changes that have occurred in just the last few decades. There are many changes that came with the invention of the internet, and there are other changes in usage. If repeated enough, these changes will become part of the language. For example, did you notice that years ago in the early days of the internet, the term E-mail was exclusively used as a noun? How about &#039;impact&#039;? Other times grammatical distinctions are being dropped. For example, have you ever gone to a grocery store manager to get them to change their sign from &#039;Eight items or less&quot; to &quot;Eight items or fewer&quot;? How many people care that &#039;items&#039; are by definition countable nouns and that countable nouns must be modified by &#039;fewer&#039; and not &#039;less&#039;. Have you ever used &#039;they&#039; as a singular in order to avoid the choice between he or she?</p><p><br /></p><p>Languages change as people speak them over time. Did you wonder why there are several words for &#039;pig&#039; including swine and Pork? When French began infiltrating the English language after 1066 the peasants spoke what we now call late Anglo-Saxon, a language of the West Germanic branch of the indo-european language family. The peasants raised swine, but the ruling class were French and so they ate porc.</p><p><br /></p><p>Sometimes words pop into existence with no know etymological root. However, sometimes we use loan words. For example, did you know that glamour and grammar come from the same greek root?</p><p><br /></p><p>Now if you have read this and are still interested you might want to look up the great vowel shift.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Now here is a parting gift of sorts, a heteronym &quot;we must polish the Polish furniture&quot;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in