[CHOMAT]

Originally Posted by Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim

There are many issues on the agenda here:
1. In my linguistic predictions I wrote about information density and speed in communication. Maybe one day our natural languages will be too slow for future communication. We might need a different tool. Academic English for example makes nouns superior to verbs. Hopefully brain research can help us understand more. Still you should know I am only speculating or making predictions here based on my personal observation.

2. Maybe the number of adverbs that end in -ly will become smaller and smaller or as in German there won't any difference between adjectives and adverbs at least in form. Spoken English is doing it.

3. As far as BE and HAVE are concerned you might be interested in E-Prime or in an article I wrote about these two central verbs.

4. You may have noticed the number of irregular verbs has been declining (why do we have - BE- dreamt and - AmE- dreamed? Certain tenses like past perfect are not so often used as they used to be. Maybe the more complex our vocabulary becomes the simpler grammar will be. I mean the two areas in language behave like two powers struggling. Accuracy is becoming less important than fluency as long as communication is successful. In addition, I believe grammar is complicated and time consuming for our future needs.
Best
Jamshid

I agree on many points and I should thank you for the relevance of your remarks.Fluency comes to the fore to the detriment of accuracy. Is this phenomenon mainly true in the field of trade where fluency and efficiency are paramount ? Of course,English ,at least American English , is the language of trade but is this point true in other fields of communication ? in dialects?; The principle of economy rules over language as well. However, I'm prone to look into other languages to see whether :
tenses are also altered by this phenomenon : How could we explain, for instance, that the French' passé composé' which structure is akin to present perfect,does have an edge on passé simple and even on imparfait which is far more 'energy-saving '?This is true in the realm of spoken and written French as well
French can't be compared to English as an international language of communication. ... What about German and Perfekt ?
Moreover, How should we behave as teachers and even as speakers ? Should we stand against this trend and swim against the tide by putting the stress on academic structures ? That's another subject...
It may also be instructive to pay a close attention to the striking similarity between English and latin diachronically speaking. Latin split over the Western world into many dialectal forms and then waned.. How did latin change in structure as years went by ? I 'd be grateful if you could give me an answer .
Alain