Myth 1: The meaning of words should not be allowed to vary or change

• Changes in languages are normal, even though some people think that they are unfortunate
• Grammatical structures change as well (old: Saw you my son? New: Did you see my son?)
• Words do not mean what we as individuals might wish them to mean, but what speakers of the languages in general want them to mean. Meanings change daily and people shouldn’t try to stop these changes.

 

Opinion: I agree that is good that some words are simplified through the years, but personally I am quite annoyed by people who, for example, say hun instead of zij in Dutch. My Dutch-teacher in secondary school told us that in a few years everybody will say hun instead of zij and I find that weird, because it sounds so wrong, but I guess that’s the way language develops. I just think that old-fashioned words sound more nice and sophisticated.

 

Myth 2: Some languages are just not good enough

• In New Zealand there are a lot of people that care about the Maori language, but only a handful of people speak it. So even if people want to use is, the language is just not capable of being used in everyday life.
• Used languages are based on the opinions of people whether or not they are good to use or not (by sound, grammar etc.).
• You can’t discuss certain things (maths) in certain languages and that’s why those languages “are not good enough”.

 

Opinion: I believe that there are certain languages that can’t be used everywhere. In the Netherlands we have Frisian, which is used in Friesland but other parts of the country sometimes don’t see it as a real language, more as an accent. This doesn’t mean that Frisian isn’t good enough, it just means that not enough people see the value of the language to accept is as their main speech.

 

Myth 3: The media are ruining English

• Media have always been mocking the English language (it goes way back to the late-eighteenth century!) .
• Media are linguistic mirrors, they reflect/use the newest sort of language and sometimes even extend it.
• Journalists are taught to form short sentences from simple words.

 

Opinion: Personally, I don’t mind the language used in the media. If they used a lot of difficult terms and phrases, people wouldn’t be interested (as explained in the book). It wouldn’t be good for the media and it wouldn’t be good for the people because if they didn’t want to be informed anymore, the journalists wouldn’t have a job and the other people wouldn’t be properly informed about worldwide matters.

 

Myth 5: English spelling is kattastroffik.

• There are too many ways to pronounce a simple letters (again, loves s=z).
• There are a lot of homophones (words that are pronounced the same but that have different meanings).
• There are vowels that sounds like other vowels (a sounds like the schwa in about)

 

Opinion: I wouldn’t call the English language catastrophic, but it sure has its problems. I agree that it can be very confusing to distinguish different sounds (for example, on a phonetics-test), but on the other hand; every language has difficult aspects. People who aren’t native Dutch speakers find it for example hard to make the ‘g’ sound in words such as “goed”.

 

Myth 8: Children can’t speak or write properly anymore.

• Children these days aren’t worse at speaking or writing, in fact they are probably better at it then children from previous generations.
• People have been complaining about declining speaking and writing skills ever since the 18^th

 

Opinion: You see it a lot these days: babyboomers who complain that no-one can spell correctly anymore, or they complain that this generation (millennials – gen Z) doesn’t read books. This isn’t true at all. The babyboomers just focus on all the bad things that they hear on the news or read in the newspapers. The generations before them said the same things to them as well, so maybe they are just bitter about it and feel like it is finally their turn to be the one complaining instead of being the one that is complained about.