Thursday, January 02, 2003 :::
I've been thinking a bit more — after the recent note to Kate — about the English language; it occurs to me that if you knew nothing about English or French, but were told that the United States spoke one language, the French another, and that one was simply a natural, dynamic language to which neologisms were added on the fly and words and terms accepted or filtered out by the individual decisions of millions of people, while the other had a centralized organization to decide whether a particular word was worthy of inclusion, you would probably guess correctly which was spoken where.
This is the problem, incidentally, that I have with English only laws — they require that the government either define what is English, or not define it, either of which I'm somewhat wary. (On the whole, incidentally, I support the notion, but I hope it can be done in such a way as not to rob the language of its liberal nature and vitality.)
::: posted by dWj at 11:19 AM
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