Why does writing from 200 years ago seem so formal and archaic

>>2256487
Because language has devolved

>>2256495
>Language is a linear process of progress

Fuck off and speak Proto-Indo-European then

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>>2256487
Because generally, the writing from those periods which has survived is all the shit which nobles and other educated people wrote. The average Joe's hastily-scrawled letters to his relatives across the county weren't preserved because they didn't care about preserving them. It's the same thing with music: other eras had their own versions of pop trash, but only the Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners were preserved because they were the cool shit.

Just look at the 4Chan-level graffiti scrawled on the walls of Pompeii--there's always been high and low levels of discourse. The only question is whether it gets preserved or not.

>>2256527
>language is more shit now than it was 200 years ago = language progresses linearly
wew

Also, it's probably because Greek and Latin education used to be a big thing

>>2256535
>implying joe was literate

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>>2256542

That, too.

>>2256535
We actually have a decent number of such letters, especially from the ACW. It's still impressively formal and well written by todays standards.

The reason is because changes in format create different styles of writing (which 4chan proves). I'm gonna use 4chan as an example in fact: 4chan is designed for shitposting. You can respond immediately, but your response gets deleted in a few hours or days anyway. So no one puts a lot of thought into their posts and we rely on images to help convey information, further diminishing what we put into text.

Comparatively back then, people had to actually write letters, which could take weeks to go back and forth. If you're going to have to wait weeks, you can at least put some time into the composition of your ideas rather then

>>2256495
>>2256527

But it wasn't just time spent on each individual letter. People today write a few long form compositions in high school and college and that's usually it, for their entire lives. Most people in the 21st century can't remember the last time their wrote something where they took several pages to get to their point. Modern prose is built around short, direct efficient conveyance of information, with follow ups for clarification, as opposed to long form compositions designed to capture nuance and inner feeling. This obviously produces a change in the kind of words and grammar used in this writing as well.

>>2256495
What did he mean by this?

>>2256585
Do you think people from 200 years ago would think we are machines or idiots, if they only had our written communication to judge us?

Human culture is a pendulum.

>>2256535
Would actually be more like the average John or average George. The reference to Joe as a meme came from predominantly Catholic Countries immigranting to America later 1800's - early 1900's.

>>2257750
Not him, but I imagine most people would consider us a bunch of foul mouthed perverts and morons, which wouldn't be far from the truth.

>>2256487
Basically this >>2256535 but now it's much easier to preserve things plus a lot of our art has become more naturalistic meaning it portrays the way people really speak as opposed to stuff like Shakespeare or most Victorian literature, which has everyone talk pretty, so unless civilization completely shits the bed and we lose everything there'll be many examples of people from our time speaking informally preserved for future centuries.

>>2256487
>Why does writing from 200 years ago seem so formal and archaic to us?
Because is it.

>Will our language appear formal to people 200 years from now?
Yes.

>>2257750
They'd probably react the same way most people ignorant of linguistics react to AAVE, i.e. they'd think we're idiots.

'Who did you ask'? Sounds completely acceptable today but it's the equivalent of saying 'I asked he'.

Passive forms like 'he got hit by a bus' didn't exist yet, they'd probably think it sounds stupid and ungrammatical.

But the jokes on them their speech would be just as offensive to people 200 years earlier.

>>2256535
>The average Joe's hastily-scrawled letters to his relatives across the county weren't preserved because they didn't care about preserving them

No. There are a great deal of letters from normal people which survive in the historical record. Nobody bothers to read them because they aren't really that interesting unless you are studying the day to day life of a farmhouse in whatever period it was they were living.

Most of these are simple family heirlooms, some find their way into museums but there is certainly no shortage of them.

>>2258652
AAVE is actually bad language though. It's full of ambiguities and can't express complex stuff. Shit got lost in the dumbing down.
Modern English is merely streamlined. It would probably look ugly and soulless to the dead folk, and maybe simple, because of how concise it is, but you can say anything you can say in 200 years old speech in it, and more.

>>2257750
Probably. Same as people from the ancient and medieval world can seem very stiff and machinelike and alien, if you go by their writing. It's not their/our primary mode of communication.

But consider we're the first generation that's going to leave behind mass audio/visual media, not just newsreel recordings. It's entirely possible thatwe'll seem like the first 'real' generation to our grandchildren the way colorization plays for our generation.

>>2256539
Or, it's because everything we read from 'back then' was from a clique of aristocrats hailing from the highest rung of society, the average grunt was barely literate while the average grunt now can stupidpost like you on 4chan

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>>2258652

>Shilling for Nigger talk

>>2256495
Idiot, go read some linguistics or shut up if you don't know what you are talking of

>>2260127

>the average grunt was barely literate

>most men in colonial America could read and write

What did he mean by this

This topic is a mess

>>2256487
Technology and capitalism have trimmed language a lot. Everything has to be faster and more efficient, this evidently extends to writing as well.

>>2256487
It does?
I never understood what people meant when they said this.
In high school, ages past, when we got to the Early Modern English shit (Shakespeare...I was Cassius) everyone constantly and ceaselessly bitched that it was "another language". I never had an issue.

People gripe the same way about Crowley too, but I can barely, if ever, tell a difference between AC in Magick in Theory and Practice or any academic text on mysticism.

>>2260277
Crowley is young adult tier in complexity

Old English is another language that requires a good deal of context to make heads or tails of an unknown word, or god forbid, a string of them.

You forgot to turn off your tripcode btw

>>2260304
>Crowley is young adult tier in complexity
What text are we talking about? MWT or Wakeworld? Probably. Berashith? Gospel of St. Bernard Shaw? Not so much.

>Old English is another language
You mean Early and Middle English? Absolutely. The Bard only needed a scattering of short footnotes to clear confusion. I truly do not understand why people grapple with it to the extent they do.

>You forgot to turn off your tripcode btw
Nope, sure didn't.

>>2260277
crowley is word salad. im interested though and have a few books i just can't understand it. need to buy the decoder ring.

>>2260038
>AAVE is actually bad language though. It's full of ambiguities and can't express complex stuff. Shit got lost in the dumbing down
AAVE isn't really dumbed down, it's just divergent, and has innovated some complexities of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English#Tense_and_aspect

>Modern English is merely streamlined. It would probably look ugly and soulless to the dead folk, and maybe simple
Modern English isn't really streamlined, sure it's lost some grammatical forms, like the objective case of who, but it's also gained new ones, like the perfect passive example in my previous post. The passive progressive e.g. 'the house is being built' is also quite new and was considered bad language in the 19th century.

>tfw in Law School and a case from the 1800s comes up
It's like judges back then were trying to write in the most confusing way possible instead of just stating what they fucking mean.

Though I think a part of that is that some accepted legal rules that now seem obvious today had to be explained back then but like... bruv.

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>mfw Hegel
To be fair though, also mfw Foucault.

>>2256495
Came to say this but it's de-evolved*
It has also devolved in the sense of handing a higher power down to a lower power, now that literacy is accessible and the proles can participate, the level of discourse has been lowered substantially, especially in the times of mass and social media
>>2256527
You're confused devo isn't actually about evolution, it's about an adaptation that turns itself into a maladaptaion.
>>2256588
See^
>>2260205
Traits from languages social origin like its dispersal method have caused the level and diversity of discourse to lower in todays homogenized world, it's emergent newspeak.

>>2261751
It's like they have a sentence limit and try to put at much info in a given sentence with commas. I've seen a single sentence that ran for one and a half page.

>>2260038
No language is 'bad', that's just ludicrous. Languages are neither good nor bad, they can't be judged or ranked. They do things in different ways and have different quirks.

prescriptivism baka.