Most English speakers today learned it as a second language, so how will their habits, struggles, and primary languages change the English language? Prospero says it has already gotten simpler. It may continue down that path.
“For example, European Union bureaucrats are likely to use the English ‘control’ to mean ‘monitor’ or ‘verify’, because contrôler and kontrollieren have this meaning in French and German….
“What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on? An easy choice seems to be ‘whom’. English was once heavily inflected; all nouns carried a suffix showing whether they were subjects, direct objects, indirect objects or played some other role in a sentence. Today, only the pronouns are inflected. And while any competent speaker can use I, me, my and mine correctly, even the most fluent can find whom (the object form of who) slippery. So whom might disappear completely, or perhaps only survive as a stylistic option in formal writing.”
Ancient Greek was likewise a far more complex language than is Modern Greek. This is not a mark of progress.
Reminds me about how evolution proponents claim that species get more complex over time all by themselves while Newton’s laws observe that entropy deteriorates all of nature into simpler forms unless acted on by an outside intelligence.
Grim: Ancient Greek was likewise a far more complex language than is Modern Greek. This is not a mark of progress.
Ori: How is accomplishing the same goal of communication more easily not a mark of progress?
I think this is a matter of social change. Smaller societies tend to have more complex grammars than larger ones. That is the best explanation I could come up with for the fact we see grammar simplification in all languages for which we have a long track record, IIRC.
I wonder if the dumbing down of language is a result of the broadening of literacy. In the 19th century a smaller percent of the population was literate, but those who could read were expected to have a large vocabulary and be able to untangle complex sentences. My 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica is written at what today would be considered a college level of grammar and usage. Nowadays authors are warned to never write anything above an 8th grade level if they want any sort of readership.
I conclude therefore that as literacy has gained breadth we have lost depth.