The other day at lunch, a colleague in the Political Science department told me about this article on the BBC website. It’s a fascinating look at how languages change over time. (It was only after the 6th or 7th century A.D. that German and English acquired separate identities; Indo-European is their common ancestor.)
What I’m Reading Now
Valpo's on Spring Break (two weeks!), so I've had extra time to do some lovely reading. Last week I read some short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri--the last three were intertwined in a way that I really loved, with characters crossing over; I read In the Pond by Ha Jin; and I read Love and Summer by William Trevor, one of my favorite authors of all time. My husband just got done reading Roderick Hudson out loud to me--that's an early one by Henry James--and starting tonight we'll be moving on to Robinson Crusoe. I'm currently on a few different German books--Irrungen Wirrungen by Theodor Fontane and the Joseph novel by Thomas Mann, which I've been working away on for a while.
This is fascinating!
I am surprised that the word “bad” is predicted to be replaced, since it seems like a common word. What are the alternatives that will replace it? Words like “lousy” and “inadequate” and “mediocre” and “cruddy” are more nuanced.
I love seeing how languages change over time. In the classroom, Spanish has remained constant over the past decade that I’ve been paying close attention. But in the real world, on the street, in our homes, Spanish is in constant flux, especially here in the United States where English is a tremendous influence and where many people speak Spanglish at home. In our textbook, the words for technology terms change faster than the editors can produce new editions of the book. We invited a guest speaker (an ENL student) to visit class to give us a 10-minute update on technology words that are used now.
I would be fascinated to read about what changes are happening in other languages.