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Postings from April 2001
>Dunno--the older a language is, the more regular it seems to be. (The rough >edges get worn off, I assume) While Latin had a reasonably complex set of >rules, it was more regular than English. Japanese feels the same, though >I'll grant I've little enough experience with it that my impression might >be wrong or incomplete. > >Irregularity seems to come in with the new, and gets beaten down a bit with >long usage. > It's also worth recognising the extent to which English has absorbed elements of other languages inc Latin and French. At the same time, sometimes the desire to communicate (driven by political change, for example) outstrips the process of codification of a language. At the moment I'm working with a historian who is trying to process and analyse a huge pile of 17th C documents -political pamplets, army documents etc - from the period of the English Civil war - which use english, latin, french (from legal system, mainly) but in some cases are written entirely phonetically ... and even inconsistently within the same document. Ick. Coming soon! Lingua::parse17thcenturyenglish .....