Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[Steve Gustafson]

JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:

>> Similarly, contemporary English speakers may be able to follow familiar
>> texts read from the Declaration of Independence or the King James Bible;
>> but new texts in similar styles may be much harder for them to grasp.

> -- are we talking about contemporary written English, or documents from
> 500 years ago?  These are separate questions.  Both the spoken and written
> forms of English have changed a good deal in the past five centuries.  The
> written less than the spoken, because of the early date at which the
> conventional spelling was fixed, of course.

Some writers --- lawyers and academics are the usual suspects --- are
accused of cultivating deliberately archaic forms of written English whose
syntax and vocabulary are reportedly beyond the comprehension of large
numbers of otherwise literate people.  At least in the law, this is a
deliberate preservation of archaism.

Indiana lawyers almost invariably introduce their deeds with a long
introductory clause framed by the words "This indenture. . . . witnesseth:"
hardly any of them could give an account of why they call the deed an
indenture, or why it witnesseth anything.  In seventeenth century
conveyances these words meant something, and were used intelligently.  They
are no more.

The preservation of this strange syntax, archaic verb forms, and odd
vocabulary in documents allegedly in "English" muddies the water, at least
for me, of the -difference- between written Latin and spoken Romance during
the period of more than six hundred years when anything worth writing
throughout the Western Empire was written in Latin.   I suspect that the
decision to abandon "Latin" as a written representation of speech was made
more or less consciously and intelligently, at some time between the time of
Charlemagne and that of Dante.

It seems clear that for Gregory of Tours (539-594), he was writing
essentially a learned version of his speech; he tried to serve unfamiliar
grammatical and spelling norms, and gives a glimpse of what was actually
happening when he failed.  Paul the Deacon (ca. 785) contains far fewer
revealing solecisms in his spelling and grammar; for him, it seems Latin was
becoming a foreign language, as it always had been for Bede and Alcuin.  (He
may also have had a classicising editor.)  On the other hand, Gregory's
usages that prefigure Romance are still alive in Richer of St. Remy (ca.
998).  And, part of the problem seems to have been that Latin pedagogy
was -improving-; classical norms were being rediscovered and followed.
These changes, made in an attempt to improve the standards of Latin usage,
widened the gulf between speech and writing.

>> I know that when I sit down to watch Shakespeare performed, it takes me
>> about fifteen minutes or so before I am able to follow what is being said.
>> Before I have readjusted my set, spoken Shakespeare sounds like gibberish.

> -- that's odd; I've never had any problem with it.

> The current film "Shakeseare In Love" uses large chunks of text taken
> straight from "Romeo and Juliet", and the audiences -- few of them familiar
> with Shakespeare in these degenerate days -- don't have any problem with it
> either.

Part of the difficulty may be the stage-British dialect in which Shakespeare
is conventionally spoken and recorded.  With its dropped r's and vowel
changes, it levels a number of phonemic distinctions in majority English.
Shakespeare himself, of course, spoke perfectly good American.

--
Glande accelerata velocior; machina tractore viae ferreae
potentior; alta aedificia uno saltu insilire valens.