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Article: Whither English? Language shifts with cultural changes.(LIFE - SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY)
- Article from:
- The Washington Times (Washington, DC)
- Article date:
- September 16, 2004
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Washington Times LLC. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Jen Waters, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The English of today may not be the English of tomorrow.
The nature of language is that it's always changing, says Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University.
"If today you go to a play of Shakespeare, there is a chunk of vocabulary and grammar you're not going to understand, but you can sort of make your way through it," she says. "You ignore the things you don't understand. It's what we do when we're trying to understand language."
The English language is a progressively altered form of the languages spoken in previous generations, all the way back to the origin of language ...