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Message: [QUOTE="Sifaka, post: 5314049, member: 8516"] To me, that is a painfully wrong view of what's going on with English. It presupposes that there was some point in the past when English reached its apotheosis and that any changes since then have been, shall we say, decay. That's bunk! Languages evolve. They change, some more rapidly than others. The changes occur at the level of individual word meanings, tenses and modes going out of fashion, new slang becoming accepted as standard, etc. Colonial languages like American English tend to be a bit more conservative, holding onto forms that drop out of use in [I]the Mother country. [/I]We still use the subjunctive, if only a little. Sometimes they are also sources of vast quantities of new words, as with Brazilian Portuguese. Among the Romance languages, Portuguese still uses such archaic forms as the infinitive tense and, hold onto your hats, the future subjunctive! Spanish and other offshoots of Vulgar Latin abandoned those hundreds of years ago. So it goes with “dying languages”? Prescriptive grammarians (I am not accusing you of being one of those) seem to prefer some past, unevolved form of a language, and their proscriptive brethren wag fingers at even minor changes. Descriptive grammar accepts the organic changes, and tries to accurately describe a moving target. I wonder what Longfellow, Irving and Twain would think of the comment quoted above. Where, on a continuum from alive to dead, would they place their own writings, so far removed from Addison and Pope. </rant] [/QUOTE]

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