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Roughly 6,000 natural human languages currently exist, with at least hundreds more having gone extinct during the course of human history. Is there a physical and/or intellectual limit to the number of languages that could ever possibly exist? Is there an infinite number of possible sounds and combinations of sounds that humans can make and put to use in an infinitely varying number of morphological and syntactic ways to create different languages? Assuming that God exists and is omniscient, can He make more sounds and combinations of sounds and more morphological and syntactic constructions than humans can? Infinitely more? If Eskimos have 50 different words for "snow", how many does God have? An infinite number? Are there lingustic limitations for humans that are not present for God? Do an infinite number of languages--languages which, presumably, humans will never develop or learn and which, presumably, He can only speak or think in to Himself--exist in the mind of God? Have the French, Spanish, and Italian languages, and all of their dialects, been in God's mind forever, long (to put it mildly) before their development from Latin, and before Latin's development from a Proto-Indo-European language, by humans? If an infinite number of languages do exist in the mind of God, does this fact imply that, actually, the number is, paradoxically, finite? Assuming that God knows all the languages that have ever been--or ever will be--employed by humans on this earth, does He have a language of choice or does He think in all languages simultaneously? Or does He not need a language to think? Is He just pure consciousness wherein thought is language-free and thought and action are one? Additionally, do all possible uses of all possible languages already exist in God's data base? Has he already imagined all possible pieces of prose and poetry in all langages and dialects? Does He already know all possible puns and figures of speech in all languages? Is he aware of all possible moron jokes, Polack jokes, and dumb-blonde jokes? (If so, has He placed them in a file marked "Politically Incorrect"?) Can any human use of language ever be original in the sense that God hasn't already imagined it? Did Shakespeare only write what God had previously conceived? Can God ever be surprised by language usage, or is there for Him literally nothing new linguistically under the billions of suns in this universe?
Are all languages equally good for enabling people to think and communicate? Can one spoken language--whether that of a primitive tribe or an industrial society--in any way be better than another? Setting vocabulary aside, are all languages equally capable of communicating whatever humans need or wish to communicate? Are the sounds and structures of any one language more difficult for an infant to make and master than another? Is there any evidence that the average age at which speaking competence is reached varies from language to language?
As globalization makes predominant the language of societies with large populations and strong economies, like the United States and China, should we be alarmed that 90% of the current 6,000 languages spoken on earth are expected to become extinct within the 21st century? It's nothing necessarily to cheer about, but how much does it matter if a language goes extinct? A language is utilitarian, and if all of its speakers die out, or if they elect to use the language of a more powerful society, doesn't that language no longer serve a purpose? We can write its grammar and store it on the Internet, but does it make any sense to keep it alive artificially? Actually, in what way do we even need it in the archives? Are we going to borrow from its word-stock? Are we going to adjust the structures of any of the surviving languages based on its model? Are the Pentagon and the CIA going to use elements of various extinct languages to create an indecipherable secret language, something like what the military did during World War II when it recruited Navajo "Code Talkers" to invent a new alphabet? Can we really learn anything about a defunct people and their culture just from studying their language? Hasn't the Edwin Sapir-Benjamin Whorf socio-linguistic hypothesis that the very structure of a language affects the cognition and behavior of its users been pretty well discredited? Centuries from now will linguists and anthropologists look back and say "Ah, those speakers of American English. Meaning in their language depended on word order--everything had to be in its place--so their language made them into a society of conformists. And they had at least 50 words for "money" (dough, do-re-mi, bread, dinero, folding stuff, funds, greenbacks, moolah, spondulicks, chinks, coins, gold, chips, wherewithal, silver, bucks, buckaroos, smackers, simoleons, long green, cabbage, lettuce, loot, lucre, swag, wad, wampum, scrip, legal tender, sterling, jack, banknote, C-note, G, large, benjamin, clams, cheddar, dead presidents), and these words made them into greedy capitalists?"
In the English language, what is the bare minimum of grammatical options that would enable us to communicate without losing anything essential? How much of our language evolved out of a sense of esthetics or a need to provide richness? In English, word order determines meaning (e.g., "The dog bit the man" means something different from "The man bit the dog," even though all the words are the same), and we need to follow that principle, but could we not ignore certain grammatical distinctions and still say, with equal clarity, exactly what we want to say? Granted, we need verb tenses ("He runs," "He will run," "He ran," "He was running," "He would have been running," and "He will have been running" all convey different meanings), but what could we jettison with no loss? I am as much a linguistic curmudgeon as the next guy (okay, a lot more than the next guy), but I don't mind asking: do we need the subjunctive mood, a verb mood used to express various states such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred? Don't the indicative "I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner" and "If only I wasan Oscar Meyer weiner" convey the state just as well as "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner" and "If only I were an Oscar Meyer weiner?" Do we need more than one pronoun case? Could we not simply let one pronoun suffice for nominative, objective, genitive, and reflexive purposes? Take these first-person singular examples: "I am going to make I a sandwich," "That is I loaf of bread," "The bread belongs to I." Speaking like this, we might at first sound like infants or non-native speakers, but aren't the meanings of the sentences clear enough and wouln't we quickly get used to not having "me," "my," or "myself"? Isn't it true that the distinction between "who" and "whom" is dying out? Isn't it observed only in written English and even then only by pedantic editors and English teachers, and don't even they frequently make mistakes? Didn't I recently read a published poem whose editors let this line slide by: "We'd huddle around whomever was chosen to be qb"? Shouldn't the "correct" term be "whoever" because that word serves as the subject of the passive-voice verb "was chosen" in the noun clause that forms the object of the preposition "around"? Didn't I also find this in a recent newspaper article: "Whomever made the ancient paint selected only the brightest of the reds"? Doesn't the structure here clearly demand the use of "whoever" to serve as the subject of the verb "made" in the noun clause "Whoever made the ancient paint" that functions as the subject of the entire sentence? Did early speakers of Old English--the tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who spoke Germanic languages and invaded Britain in the 5th century A.D.--have as much trouble with this distinction as we do? Isn't it fascinating to wonder how the "rules" of any given language developed , since there was no Academy establishing or authorizing them? Was language development truly a democratic, everybody-throw-something-at-the-wall-and-we'll-see-what-sticks process, kind of a forerunner of Wikipedia? Did some speakers of a language just instinctively feel the need to have, say, different pronoun cases and everybody else said "Hey, yeah, that makes sense"? Or did the speakers of the language follow the lead of the head of their clan or tribe in the way that today the preferred dialects (e.g., BBC English) are those spoken by people who have money, power, prestige? Shouldn't we just shake our heads and say "Forget it, people--trash 'whom' and 'whomever' along with yesterday's e-mail and simply say or write 'who' or 'whoever' from now on"? And if we do that, why not settle for a single pronoun case for each "person"? Why not have just the following:
Singular Plural
I we (no me, myself, mine, us, ourselves, ours)
you you (no yourself or yours, no plural you-all, youse, you-uns)
he/she/it they (no him, himself, his, them, themselves, theirs)
Don't we see today the dying out of gender and number distinctions in the use of the indefinite pronoun "one"? Aren't most people now saying "Does everyone have their book?" instead of "Does everyone have his/her book"? And isn't that a good thing? Didn't Old English used to have an elaborate system of inflections? Weren't nouns, adjectives, and even the definite article inflected for gender, case, and number? Those are gone now--good riddance, no? French distinguishes between the intimate "you" and the more formal "you" ("tu" and "vous")--aren't you glad that we don't have to do that in English? Can't we tell by context and tone whether we regard the person referred to as an intimate or not? French also has a masculine definite article ("le") and a feminine one ("la"), a masculine indefinite article ("un") and a feminine indefinite article ("une"), and a masculine adjective ("bon," say) and a feminine adjective ("belle"), as in "le bon jour" and "la belle nuit." Who wants that? Who needs something like that? And don't we see gender distinctions dying out in nouns that name people who do things? Aren't we now phasing out "waitress" and saying "waitperson" or just "waiter" for all such workers regardless of gender? And as women move into jobs or activities formerly reserved for men don't we absolutely feel no need to add the suffix "-ess"? Aren't we quite content to say "soldier" instead of "soldieress" and "pilot" instead of "pilotess"? What else can we English speakers divest ourselves of with no loss of meaning? Why do we need adverbs? Don't people often "misuse" "good" and "well"? Don't they often say "I feel well" when they "should" say "I feel good"? Wouldn't it do just as good to say "That is a good-made loaf of bread" as "That is a well-made loaf of bread" and "That was done beautiful" as well as "That was done beautifully"? How about irregular verb conjugations, such as in "go"? Why not keep the patterns consistent? Isn't "I go, you go, he goes/I goed, you goed, he goed" simpler, possibly even more elegant, than "I go, you go, he goes/I went, you went, he went"? There are historic reasons for the presence of irregular verbs in English, but they have nothing to do with clarity, so why not make some changes? There are historic reasons for English plurals, too, but if we have "one rabbit/two rabbits" why not change to "one mouse/two mouses," "one moose/two mooses," "one deer/two deers"? If we have "one shark/two sharks" why not have "one salmon/two salmons"?
Isn't our language, willy-nilly, becoming simpler anyway? Aren't we looking for catchy slogans and pithy sound bites, rather than expansive exposition? Aren't modern readers, who seldom look at Faulkner or Proust or Donne or other writers who go for Baroque, far less patient with convoluted sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses and qualifying phrases and parentheses and dashes--rococo constructions like the kind that I often make, as a matter of fact--and far more likely to prefer the increasing shorter (is that an oxymoron?) sentences in today's newspapers and novels? Can a sentence be too short? Not for most of the keyboardists operating today, hey? In e-mails, text-messages, and Facebook and Twitter posts, don't we often skip verbs, use acronyms and abbreviations ("LOL"), replace language with emoticons, simplify spelling ("your" or even "u r" equals "you're"--the apostrophe is an endangered species that nobody wants to see preserved because it serves no necessary function in English's [oops, I mean Englishs] ecosystem [do we need to write "There is Evans" and "That book is Evans's" and "There are the Evanses" and "That house is the Evanses'"? Why worry about how many "esses" to use and where to put the apostrophe?] and just go all alphanumeric ["u r gr8"] whenever we can? So isn't it time for me and my ilk to devolve from prolixity to parsimony, from hawing and hemming my way to Hemingway? Evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins say that evolution is progressive and that it leads to more and more complexity, but don't we all have the feeling that when it comes to language we're going the other way? We are constantly increasing our word-stock with coinages and with borrowings from other languages (and that's good, isn't it, enabling us to keep up with the simmering and boiling of life?) but don't we sense that the zeitgeist is pushing us to smooth out the irregularities and excrescences of our grammar and our orthography, the way wind and water erode the crags on mountaintops? Isn't simpler more elegant and esthetic? Moreover, isn't it more democratic and egalitarian to have fewer distinctions to learn and observe, thus reducing the chances for "mistakes" and the opportunities for those "in the know" to regard as inferior those who say "This is just between you and I" or "Him and I went fishing"? Should our linguistic ethos become "We are what we Tweet"? Should we start a grassroots campaign to "Occupy Sesame Street," just go ahead and hijack our own language, strip it to its essentials, and offer it as our lean legacy to future generations?
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