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In older days, going back to Middle English rather than all the way back to the last days of Rome, language used to be much more flexible than it is today. If you read one of my other pages [1], you might have caught what I mean.
Old English had two letters to make the th sound, and they could be interchanged freely. Thorn (þ) and Eth (ð). There were also numerous accepted ways to spell words, iegland was their word for island, but ysland was also considered acceptable spelling. Since I promised this was not entirely about Anglo-Saxon, here is a Middle English one: Emeraude, which means emerald. But also viable were emeraud, amyraude, emeroude. The first trend you might notice here is that a and o tended to be very interchangeable, as are i and y, or and e and a. Consider how Americans pronounce hand compared to how the British do, and you will see closer vestiges to that old trend in the UK compared to the New World.
The point herein being that as long as it looked and sounded mostly the same, it flew. This was true in many other ancient languages, Sumerian was particularly well known for it. The major exception being proper nouns, whose composition was static as another way to differentiate people before the surname became popular. Much different from today where most words only have one concrete spelling, with the only real oddballs being those handfuls of words that differ between the USA and Commonwealth: Center/centre, gray/grey, color/colour to name a few. Even then, you're expected to use one and stick to it. If you attempted to use both in one piece, you would get lambasted forthright.
Language services are one of the many things that I do, and I couldn't help but think of how rigid that is when I was proofreading business proposals for clients earlier this week. Things truly have become more ironclad than they used to be, though I didn't realize how much until I got into Old English many years prior.
In preterite days, as aforementioned, not so much. Writers were free to, and often did, change spelling or use of letters to spice up a piece or keep it from being repetitive. Similar to how we swap synonyms for the same purpose. They could do all of the above.
Consider too how many synonyms we lose. Standardization has certainly hewn that number down, with archaic/obsolete words being deemed pretentious to use, and thus not suitable in business in addition to being frowned upon informally, once they fall out of common parlance they tend to stay there. It may interest you to know that in the developing world, mostly the former colonies, a lot of archaic expressions still exist.
Expect to see a lot of words like: Henceforth, herewith, thereupon, thence, whence. The much maligned needful is actually a real piece of English as well; despite being known primarily from scammers and scoundrels, do the needful actually is correct English.
One may have noticed I used a lot of these terms myself, and I have all my life well before coming into contact with the sorts stated prior. From a wealth of old literature in my formative years, I suppose.
Herein one sees the loss of flexibility. Others have built for us a standard and expect us to conform to it, regardless of our local tradition and personal thoughts. I suppose that is the nature of society in general, but now amplified as globalization steams ahead at rapid pace.
What baffles me the most about this is how we lost words such as overmorrow and ereyesterday, the day after tomorrow and the day before yesterday respectively. Both are easier to read and say than the phrase that replaced them, so it's not as if we are moving towards a point of purer efficiency in this gradual process.
Yet, I cannot help but think about what we have lost. So many words and ways to express ideas, redundant or not, in a trend that is unlikely to end anytime soon. How one writes is how he or she thinks and feels, and I cannot help but feel it criminal how we whittle it down and force compliance to a broad social standard. If language is the structure of the mind, is there no clearer example of the Heideggerian They-self in active use than in curtailing our speech and literature around the standard aforesaid, upon which we were given no choice as to the implementation thereof?
An example of this trend can be found in the various Simple English projects [2], and although mainly intended for use as a linguistic aid for learners, what do you suppose will happen when the people with this redacted lexicon begin regular interaction with natives? Math teaches us that momentum increases as mass does, and the internet brings into the mix many more such people than ever before. Recall again that social prevalence has an impact upon vocabulary, and from this one can divine the inevitable outcome of this collision.
I shan't say they do not exist, but I have never heard of any attempts to simplify a language so formally as Simple English - excepting of course Simplified Chinese. I'm sure anyone foolish enough to try and make a Simple French would bring upon themself the mockery of the entire Francophone world if they dared attempt it.
Yet, I do want to underline that this isn't a purely English phenomenon, just the one closest to my heart for reasons that ought be obvious. A German colleague of mine remarked to me recently that in Germany, there has began a greater push to use loan words rather than native ones, and to prefer English-sounding words over more common yet foreign ones. His example was killen versus töten, and done for the same reasons purported as the raison d'être of Simple English. The latter I understand, but I cannot grasp the logic of the former when one can already create pretty much any composite word they want in that language - one would expect it to have little need for foreign adoptions.
It is certainly a situation worth thinking about. More so since while things are fast to move forwards, they are significantly slower in retrograde. The other takeaway is how comparatively recent this process is, beginning only in truth after English had settled into its modern form. After which point, it has done a far more efficient job of culling itself than ever before. While some linguistic compression is expected and inevitable, the rate is much more expedient than ever before and far more of a cause rather than an effect.