Time merely altereth all

Reading a piece about Cory Doctorow, I was struck by the following:

“My first two languages are English and Yiddish, languages that don’t have language academies, where dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, where words change meaning.” (Of course, that should be “prescriptive” but I’ll let it stand.)

Doctorow makes sweeping statement that’s true not only of English, but of all languages. Words change meaning through time: sometimes across generations and sometimes within generations.

For example, many Anglophones think that we can understand Shakespeare “from cold” “when we get used to it.” We hear familiar words and think that we understand them, but we are often mistaken. Their meaning has changed. For example, when he wrote:

- brave - it meant handsome

- to want - to lack something

- fond - foolish, naive

- conceit - a clever idea

- merely - completely, utterly

- generous - of noble birth

In a sense, language is like landscape - which makes linguistics akin to geology, and me a geologist by analogy. Language and landscape change constantly under the pressure of mostly invisible natural forces.

Geologists can look at a landscape and see traces of vanished mountains, ancient seas, and gradual accretions. Etymologists and historical linguists do something similar. Ordinary words can be traced to their constituent parts that have been subject to erosion, drift, accretion and metamorphism through time . The past is still present, often buried in plain sight.

Hence do I offer the conceit: Time merely altereth all.