Enunciation has become passe
What evidently also has become
passé is people taking the time and effort to get their diacritics right!
Ô mœurs, ô temps !And I can't even get started on texting and what it has done to English and spelling.
Is that also true of Russian or any other language which is now texted continuously? Has a new "text Language" been born in every country and in every language like it has been born in English?
Yes, but in the case of Norwegian, at least, it's fast dying again, as people start to treat SMS more like regular notes (with built-in, typing-reducing spell check) instead of pay-per-character telegramms.
BTW try to read any medieval manuscript text, even the Bible, and you'll hardly be able to decipher it without a knowledge of all the abbrevations of the monkish 1337/leet-speak.
Of course one also has to ask whether the rise of electronic communication has had a pernicious effect on language (and not only Russian). The demise of the letter (apparently the post office is discussing eliminating first class mail) has eliminated a form of communication that has produced wonderful language that could not have helped but have a salutary effect on the spoken word.
Reading and writing tends to destroy the natural diversity among people (e.g. dialects.) and to encourage uniformity and confirmity.
Ok. who today can read AND understand this? (hint they are both in English!)
Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour,
That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne,
What with his wysdom and his chivalrie;
He conquered al the regne of Femenye,
That whilom was ycleped Scithia,
And weddede the queene Ypolita,
And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree,
With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,
And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.
Are you sure this is Chaucer? This is so easy to understand it's hard to believe it's from the 14th century!
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
....
The words and grammar are easy enough to understand, but I have no idea what and whom Shakespeare is talking about.
Good call, though, even English has been much changed since Elizabeth I.
Compared to many other languages, written English has changed very little since Elizabeth I. What has changed tremendously is the pronunciation. (i.e. the Great Vowel Shift). If you heard Elizabethans talk, you would probably not understand them, as they pronounced it quite differently than you do, even if you could understand what they wrote. E.g. they would pronounce "time" as "teem", archaïc speakers perhaps even as "teemeh". See
this great outline.Nobody who knows anything more about Russian? What about palatalisation? Did the pre-revolutionary acrolect differ from contemporary standard Russian in that regard?
I know there historically has been rather small dialectical differences within Russia, compared to other, smaller European speech communities, but surely they must have been more pronounced in Tsarist days, when most of the population couldn't read and write? And since the upper classes often learnt their Russian from village nurses, perhaps they sometimes picked up some dialectic Russian?
