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Comment by yew | Hacker News Reader

I consider loss of specificity (which is what is happening in the latter case) to be devolution, and do not find descriptivism a convincing (or even meaningful) argument against that position. Other arguments might prove more successful, of course. As for futility - well, we'll see, won't we?

As you say, though, this is wildly off topic.

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There are two contradictory forces shaping a language: effectiveness and clarity. Languages walk the narrow path between those two. Sometimes languages move in one direction, sometimes in the other direction. A loss of specificity (like the disappearing distinction between “it’s” and “its”) increases effectiveness (for the writer) at the cost of clarity.

I’m not sure with what justification you can call that devolution. It’s a change that affects clarity only minimally: There aren’t many situations where using “it’s” instead of “its” is confusing and doesn’t communicate what the writer wants to communicate.

It just makes sense that every flourish in a language that adds rarely needed specificity will be ground away with time.

Stylistically you are certainly within your rights to call it a devolution (I also don’t like it aesthetically), but that’s very subjective. I don’t think that pointing at specificity is the way to go here, though.

One of the fascinating general trends in that respect, which I don't think the reasons for are fully settled yet, is the tendency of languages to simplify grammar over time. Ancient Greek and Latin had more complex grammatical features than modern Greek and Italian do, for example, and similarly with Sanskrit and its descendants. Of course, it can't be a universal trend, because the complexity must have arisen at some point as well.

English dropped grammatical gender some centuries ago. Despite being 'less specific' in some ways, I'm not sure too many would argue that this was a step backward.

Complexity comes from languages that arise in isolation. Basically, the fewer people speak a language, the less chance its natural complexity will degrade. Invasions and other interlinguistic contact create simplifications, most visibly pidgins and creoles. Check out Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by Ian McWhorter, which shows how English underwent this very process. What we speak today is a hilarious pidgin of Old English and Norman French, which are themselves mashups.

I wonder what will win: practically no new natural languages are being created, so simplification is running amok, but invasions are now rare, and we use computers almost exclusively in our own native tongues. Maybe we end up suffering global economic collapse and reverting to the natural language wars.

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