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Comment by kebman | Hacker News Reader

Back when I worked in sales, there was a guy on my sales team that would have the entire Norwegian Top 40 billboard memorized since its inception in the 50's, complete with producers and writers of lyrics. While a bit socially awkward, he still did alright at sales by following the script. So by that token he was regarded by my collegues as a bit of a savant.

"Lest you suspect," also makes for quite unusual language in the article, btw. Haven't seen that in many modern news articles, at least. But strangely this rather archaic phrase seems to be more common in modern American litterature than in British literature. Together with the verbal addition of "I would think" at the end of that quote in the start, the article takes on a rather rustic feel.

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> But strangely this rather archaic phrase seems to be more common in modern American litterature than in British literature.

There is an interesting phenomenon I've read about where distant colonies, kept isolated from where their language originated, end up sounding more archaic than their home territory. The act of crossing an ocean can serve as a linguistic time capsule and changes made in the homeland don't always propagate.

I've heard this claimed about a few languages:

* Quebec French vs. France. (true to the form of TFA I do not speak French, so I cannot assess this claim.)

* Judaeo-Spanish spoken by expelled Jewish communities vs. Spain. (from what I recall of recordings of the former it did seem like it lacks some phonetic changes that Spain had around the 15th-16th centuries, like [ʒ] and [ʃ] moving to [x], loss of initial /f/ in words like hijo, hablar ... and consequently generally has this almost Portuguese-sounding feel to it. Interestingly these same phonetic changes made it across to Latin American colonies but not to expelled Spanish Jews in Europe)

* American English vs. England. (I've heard this claimed variously, as if to say that Shakespeare spoke with one of today's American accents, and frankly that sounds kind of dubious. But there may be bits and pieces of American English that sound old fashioned across the pond.)

> as if to say that Shakespeare spoke with one of today's American accents, and frankly that sounds kind of dubious

To suggest that Shakespeare spoke with an American accent would be silly, but it is true that the non-rhotic "r" didn't become widespread until after Shakespeare's time, starting as a marker of prestige among the British upper classes in the mid-1700s (and spreading to the wannabe-aristocracy in the colonies, hence the stereotypical accent of the American Southern plantation owner). If the pronunciation of words like "car" is how one distinguishes British from American, then I suppose yes, Shakespeare would sound a bit less British than you might expect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English

Sure, but for non rhotic accents you have outliers in the States such as New York or Boston or parts of the South.

There are youtube videos of attempted reconstructed Shakespearean accents. To my (american) ear it kind of sounds more like rhotic England.

To complicate things a little, the non-rhotic accents of the eastern seaboard of North America aren't generally considered posh: Southie, Mainer, Brooklyn. Newfoundland is the region of North American longest settled by English speakers, I believe. Google "Newfie accent" to hear true Shakespearean English.

Newfanese is pretty much crystallized Hiberno-English, at least if we're talking the language of the bay wops rather than townies. It has a surprising amount of commonality with African-American vernacular, likely due to transportation and indenture (which is why AAVE, while distinct, barely edges into typical creole patterns).

The English of Shakespeare's time, or at least of his plays, has been largely reconstructed by linguist David Crystal, whose son, the actor and director Ben Crystal, is probably the best-known practitioner. There are a number of videos on YouTube of Ben doing Shakespeare in OP. A good starting point is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s - and if one had to tie it closely to a modern regional variant, it would be West Country. But that would just be something it would remind you of rather than a template.

It was a joke.

I have another great example of this: Dutch versus South African. These were the same language and used the same dictionary and spelling rules as recent as 150 years ago. And now, while many words look similar, many words are different (and words for modern inventions are completely different in both languages).

This results in that when I met a group of south african ppl living in The Netherlands some time ago, we would speak English, because our native languages drifted so much apart.

I think the time of divergence in spoken language is much longer than that, maybe 300 years (and with lots of second-language speakers, which speeds it up). And starting I believe from dialects closer to Flemish.

The formal written language was indeed standard Dutch, but was not widely understood. For example (IIRC) around 1900 the dutch reformed church in the Cape partly switched to English, on the grounds that at least this was a real European language, in which people might actually understand the sermon! After that Afrikaans got formalised, e.g. the first official bible translation was 1933.

> * Quebec French vs. France. (true to the form of TFA I do not speak French, so I cannot assess this claim.)

For those who want to research that further:

1) France French uses slang based on puns, like mec (dude):

https://www.thoughtco.com/un-mec-vocabulary-1372268

2) Quebec has more English loan words because of proximity to Ontario and USA.

One claim I read was that Quebecois profanity was often religious in nature, and this is not the case in France.

Also: Polish spoken in Poland vs the one by Poles in Siberia. About a million was exiled by Soviets to Siberia alone, not counting other remote parts of Soviet Union.

Also: Czech spoken by settlers in Romanian Banat, where a few thousand Czechs moved in the 1800s. Delightfully old-timey.

Interestingly, the people there are much more religious than contemporary Czechs, who are mostly atheist. As if they lived in a time capsule.

Some of the English words and phrases used in India for official use or even by some old people have either disappeared or decreased in usage in the UK and it has been only 70 years.

I would love to read some examples of this please!

"Do the needful at the earliest" is the poster-child, but I'm struggling to find a great list to link.

The effective divergence time is much longer than since 1947 -- I believe that around 1900 people in England thought their cousins in India a generation behind in dress & everyday speech. And formal bureaucratic terms were already ossified, another classic is "out of station" (as in, out of town, away from the office) which IIRC is from east-india company days.

Few words/phrases I can think of

- Hill station (Hill town)

- Out of station (Out of town - other commenter mentioned this too)

- Tiffin (breakfast food or snack)

- Supper (for dinner)

- redress (resolve)

- revert (respond)

- Ta ta (Bye)

- Yours faithfully/respectfully when signing off letters

- Sir/Madam (widely used for elders and people of higher status or generally to everyone as a way of respect)

- Mentioning Honourable etc. before names of judges, bureaucrats etc.

I’m sure there are plenty more but can’t immediately recall. If I read an official letter from a government agency, I could quote more.

This is interesting! Take Norwegian for instance, which is originally of West Norse origin. During the viking age, settlers (many of whom were outlaws in Norway lol) sailed to the then newly discovered Iceland. These people all spoke West Norse, which was the language spoken in Norway at the time. The settlers in Iceland largely kept the West Norse language through the centuries, while mainland Norwegian was more and more influenced by their East Norse neighbours of Sweden and Denmark. So today, Icelandic and Norwegian are just about as different as Norwegian and German. While Norwegians will recognize a few words from Icelandic, most of it remains mutually unintelligible. Meanwhile, Icelandic people can readily understand the historic and archaic Old Norse texts without much translation—or certainly far more easily than a Norwegian would—where a Norwegian would struggle to understand most of it today.

> Meanwhile, Icelandic people can readily understand the historic and archaic Old Norse texts without much translation—or certainly far more easily than a Norwegian would—where a Norwegian would struggle to understand most of it today.

This is not actually due to Icelandic being as conservative as you think. It is due to Icelandic intellectuals in the 19th century successfully pushing for the restoration of many old words that had gone out of use in the intervening centuries. Before the 19th-century language movement, Icelandic had lost a lot of that old vocabulary and had replaced them with borrowings from Danish.

> This is not actually due to Icelandic being as conservative as you think.

Many would say that is exactly proof of their conservationist nature! While there is some truth to your claim of the language not evolving in a fully dynamic or "natural" fashion (i.e. rather evolving with input from culturally conservative experts and intellectuals, which is how literally all Nordic languages evolve today as far as they're able to control it), Icelandic hadn't really lost that much of the original Norse, and certainly not as much as Norwegian did in the same amount of time.

This is due mainly to a few factors. First of all, Norway became "danified" much quicker because the Black Death wiped out most of our nobility, leading Danish to become much more prominent much quicker over here. As such, Iceland had more of a choice in the matter. Second, Norway is in very close proximity to both Sweden and Denmark, leading to constant influence due to trade and even families migrating back and forth. On the other hand, it takes much more effort to get to Iceland, since you need to undertake a pretty long journey over the ocean to reach it.

Like Norway, who was also under Danish rule, Iceland also went into a phase of revival and romanticism around the Napoleonic wars, leading both peoples to search for their roots. In Norway this struggle lead to the invention of Nynorsk (New Norwegian), which uses a lot of older dialect words—especially from West Norwegian dialects—compared to the almost completely Danish Bokmål (Book Language). These two written languages are still pretty similar, though, and thus pretty much unintelligible with Old Norse.

Additionally, if you listen to Faroese, you'll find that it is also much closer to Old Norse than both Danish and Norwegain, despite the language arguably being much longer under Danish influence than both Norwegian and Icelandic.

> Icelandic hadn't really lost that much of the original Norse.

I would say that it did. Besides that loss of vocabulary which I mentioned, the phonological system of Icelandic has drastically shifted since the Old Norse era. Yes, on paper the language might seem conservative, but that is just the result of a conservative orthography. The actual sound of the Icelandic (and Faroese) language today bears little resemblance to Old Norse.

The one big archaism modern Icelandic has going for it is its morphology, but this shouldn’t get more hype than it deserves.

Except Icelandic people can read Old Norse, and that's all the hype you need. It's a bit more difficult for Faroese. It's even more difficult for Norwegians and Danes who will only be able to pick out a word or two. That's the continuum. Equally, a Norwegian can read Danish, but it takes from one beer to a wedding reception to get used to their strange laryngeal pronounciation, at which point the Norwegian probably is so drunk that he speaks perfect Danish. That's hardly drastic, although it might look like it is on paper. What's drastic is the day after. (Swedes don't count, and Norwegians are more than happy to explain it to them... in their own language.) Skål!

> Except Icelandic people can read Old Norse, and that's all the hype you need.

Yes, but again, that is due to 1) the 19th-century language reform, and 2) a conservative orthography where the spelling remains the same even though modern Icelandic pronunciation is nothing like Old Norse.

When it comes to languages being conservative or innovative, linguists examine the language itself over time, not just the present literary standard or the orthography used to write the language. So, yes, Icelandic has converged back towards Old Norse in certain ways due to artificial 19th-century efforts, but in the intervening centuries there were such massive innovations that praising Icelandic as conservative is disingenuous. Linguists tire of having to explain this (and some similar cases like Romanian versus the rest of Romance) to laymen.

And Danish pronounciation is nothing like Norwegian. What's your point? It's still two very similar languages, with almost the same heritage, except for pronounciation. Are you even Scandinavian? Because you're plainly mistaken in that Icelandic is "nothing like Norse." Even such a statement is wholly preposterous as it's clearly related and evolved from it! Danish is also "nothing like" the Danish before laryngealization, but its genealogy is unquestionable. Norwegian has changed even from the 30's and to the 60's, and from the 60's and to the 2000's, but—guess what—it's still Norwegian! Where would you draw the line? You'll find similar changes for the English language as well, that becomes apparent simply by listening to old news reels. It's an audible constant. Further more, the Icelandic language has changed, evolved and reformed several times through-out history, and not just in the 19th century. Another big shift was during the 16th century, for example. So your claim that policy is unnatural is about as logical as claiming that there was no rule in Europe during the Middle Ages. Obviously there was. And they also protected and ruled their languages as a matter of national security. Thus it can be argued that while some parts of the language will evolve naturally and dynamically as a constant, there are always forces at play who will attempt to control it in order to gain national cohesion. Another great example is French, where most dialects have been eradicated. And this is a constant whether linguists find proof of it or not. So it's spesifically not disingenuous to praise Icelandic as conservative. It is in fact disingenuous to do the opposite. Not doing so is in actually rather disrespectful to the proud Icelandic people, who's been so great at conserving their language and national heritage, while others have not. This is of course made more easy because the language is insular and remote, but it's an achievement none the less. Thus your argumentum ad verecundiam has no power here, because only Erasmus Montanus would argue otherwise. But then I suspect a large part of these so-called academics want nothing more than to disintegrate nations entirely, because a large part of the relativist marxist do indeed come from linguistics. For that reason alone it should be obvious that language is highly political. In fact some might say that the rather small differenceses between East Norse and West Norse prove it. Many of the differences between Nordic languages are far more due to political differences and interest groups rather than for purely lingiuistical reasons. Through many times in history it has of course been of national importance to emphasise such differences, especially with the power struggles between the Nordic countries, for instance around romantic revival surrounding the Napoleonic wars.

What I like about "lest" is that it demonstrates that the present subjunctive as a grammatical category is not quite dead yet in English. A native speaker of English knows that "lest it seem" is right and "lest it seems" is wrong, generally without ever having been taught this or knowing what to call this distinction.

The so-called past subjunctive is more easily found, though it's losing its distinctive form (there's only one). People say "if I was" instead of "if I am" when they're describing a present contrary-to-fact state -- "If I was rich, I'd buy a Tesla". You can see that this is a past subjunctive, not a simple past, because it isn't past at all but present and contrary to fact.

So English still retains the subjunctive! Yay!

As an American, I'd say "If I were rich" rather than "If I was rich."

Though in the Southern accents I've been around for much of my life, "If I was" was more common.

Perhaps it's because I'm old, or because I'm Canadian, but I would expect "if I were".

That's the single distinctive past subjunctive form I alluded to. I say "if I were rich" myself, but I'm used to hearing the other.

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