Tuesday, October 22, 2019

I asked Google ¿Is the Pluperfect disappearing from modern spoken English?

And I got a lot of puzzled and puzzling answers. I was glad I had not asked about the Imperfect Subjunctive, or ¿Why does it seem that no one knows how to write (confidently) a plural possessive "s'"? Our language is being made for us by Baboos and Mandarin-speaking Geeks--any old how. Not unlike what happened to Attic Greek in its respective time.

Understand: I do not say this in a dismissive or disapproving sense. Pure Attic Greek survived, flourishing nicely, it seems to me, through Lucian and subsequent Byzantine history, right up to the mid 15th century and the fall of Constantinople, as a scholarly, canonic and standard form of Greek.

Even so will standard English survive, for so long as there will be readers willing to master its absurd traditionalist orthography.  Yet I hope and believe that someone soon will do something about the present utterly chaotic state of spelling and phonetic representation of the English language--something maybe, hopefully, as elegant and graceful as the medieval Byzantine diacritics and orthography of Greek that one sees pictures of, written in silver ink on purple vellum, to represent the minute gradations of stress, and unstress, accent in spoken standard American English. 

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