Nae wrote:Zoris wrote:Standards. While language may change in one region in a certain way, it helps facilitate communication to other regions. If Americans and British were to both write in a more phonemically correct way than we currently do, for example, American kids would have to learn two writing systems just to read their Harry Potter.
No they wouldn't, they'd just read a translated version. Especially considering that 1) English to American often goes through a localisation process already (Sorcerer's Stone, anyone?), and 2) A "translation" in this case would be quite trivial compared to real translation, and could be done by an automated process.
And that they do localization for such books is
really annoying, honestly. I do not need a goddamn localization, much the less
translation, to read literary British English, thank you.
Nae wrote:This one of my biggest peeves with people going "oh but then they won't be able to read [old stuff]!": I have great news to you! They aren't reading them NOW either! All of that Shakespeare and Chaucer? No kid is reading that stuff. You almost need a college education for Shakespeare (and a dirty 16th century sense of humour), and you certainly do need some sort of extra language education for Chaucer.
At my high school, we actually covered much of Shakespeare's work and parts of Canterbury Tales, and it was all untranslated. Yes, they were with a good few footnotes, but particularly in the case of Shakespeare we were expected to be able to (and were actually able to) understand it without reference to something else explaining it all. Only did we actually use translations of Anglic varieties when we covered Beowulf, as practically no one who is not very familiar with old Germanic languages can read Old English directly today.
Nae wrote:Do you know what happens to texts in old archaic languages that no one knows how to read anymore? They get translated by university people into the colloquial, if anyone bothers (because no one is reading that stuff in any case).
I think you underestimate the significance of Shakespeare in the English literature canon and even in present-day popular culture here. And while people
do translate Shakespeare, actually using translations thereof is often quite looked down upon.
Nae wrote:And certainly, with something like Harry Potter a translation from Brenglish to American is quite likely, because that shit be popular. SO DON'T WORRY. There will be enough Harry Potter for the whole world!
I for one rather favor maintaining literary English effectively as a classical literary language, rather than attempting to modernize or localize it. Far too much is written in it and it already has so much of a value as a
lingua franca that all doing so would do is make much of what is already written in English inaccessible to future generations, make people speaking different Anglic varieties less able to communicate with one another, and greatly reduce the value of literary English as a
lingua franca.
The matter is that Anglic varieties
are not converging overall, even though in some areas there is significant dialect loss taking place, but oftentimes that is the replacement of rural dialects with
regional ones rather than standard varieties, and the standard varieties of English themselves are by no means converging. Any signs of the opposite tend to actually be effects of
increased understanding of other Anglic varieties through hearing them more often rather than actual convergence; for instance, my parents speak closer to Received Pronunciation than I do, having much more General American-type pronunciation than myself, yet I
understand English English varieties much better than they do simply through more exposure to them at a younger age.
Hence there will be in the future significant value to maintaining a (largely) unified literary English, so that future speakers of Anglic varieties can still both communicate with each other and read things already written even if their
speech is no longer crossintelligible or they can no longer understand how people who wrote things in the past would have actually spoken. Of course, maintaining a unified literary English as a classical literary language requires
resisting attempts to modernize or localize it and maintaining the use of forms that are still productive in writing but are already losing productivity or becoming archaic in speech.
(I think a good goal for maintaining literary English as a classical language is to write with the goal that educated individuals a thousand years from now ought to be able to understand what one writes without translation, even though they would most likely not understand how one actually speaks. Yes, that sounds like an ambitious goal, but consider the time frame between the founding of the Roman Empire and when Romance vernaculars just started to be written.)
