h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My prediction is that grammar in language, especially in english, will get looser and looser () since more and more people will use it from different backgrouds and levels of mastery. Therefore the amount of people who actually take the time to correct tiny errors in grammar will shrink, as will the amount of people who can actually tell the difference between right or wrong grammar. The uncorrected tiny errors will grow, and the awareness will diminish.

After an bit, noone care shit aboot what happening be any more wit inglis langidge. It become eezier and eesher. in end, everione, speek inglis, bud noone regognise no mnore. Heppi!

Posseeblee...
Listen, I'm not english myself, but how about this:

You will have to re-arrange the words you use, you know, switch first-letters in every word, so that the people listening to you (youngsters..?) will have to really pay attention and think hard about what you're actually trying to say...An example or two:

Let a gife!

Smop stoking!

Det off grugs!

Prite woetry!

or something...

Misten lan, yif our ganna moke un fof pry medictions,
ploose dea so in our yown time. Sor omething.

Caal moon!

Ko ay! Trust hying jo telp...

No, that's just what they want you to think!

As long as Microsoft Word has a grammar checker built in, the world is safe from poor sentence costruction.

Course, if you be turning it off, isn't no way nobody know what happen.

Before long we'll see the demise of tricky bits of punctuation like semi-colons, colons and apostrophes. How many people really understand what they're supposed to do with them all? It's a pet hate of mine to see how many people think "'s" is a plural form rather than an indicator of possession or abbreviation. (Just walk down any High Street in England to find examples.) We're passing through a phase of over-correction with punctuation marks sprinkled liberally and inappropriately throughout any piece of prose. Give it another 20 years and they'll all have disappeared.

Oh dear. That might appear to the casual reader as though I'm complaining about people making standard English plurals by adding an "s" to things. There is (honest) an apostrophe in there too and I was trying to comment on the confusion about its real purpose.
Not to worry, it will probably be banished from the language altogether before too long.

Yes but, punctuation, is something that really can be, derived drom simple logic in pronouncing a, sentence. Read this out, loud and you,
will, find that it sounds f****d, up!

So as long as English remains a living spoken language, people will use punctuation (though more than just commas I know) in more or less an understandible way. But what can keep you from spelling mor an mor fenetikly? Nothing but agreements in education, really. Same with grammar. Doing it the touchy-feely way is a lot easier and it's happening as we speak. And not just in English, mind you... just especially in English because it spoken so abundantly.

And regarding the spell checker: that is the worst thing that ever happened to any language integrity conservation movement. There is nothing worse for a set of rules than to have them simply applied, applied without questioning becasue the why of the rules is no longer important. You don't know why a conjugation is so and so, becasue the program knows that it is. Even the program knows not why, it just knows.

I see letters come by with huge errors in them, and then I know that the errors were not caused by the writer, but by Word doing a rigourous application of its built-in rules, and the writer not questioning their correctness. Word applies the rule "If is plural, then is spelt wrongly" more often wrongly than right...

You're right, language is organic and evolving. As an Old Git, I had spelling and grammar hammered into me at school (hell, I even knew what a synecdoche was, which I sure don't anymore!). So it's people like me and you, Pres, who get uptight because we know the rules and see people breaking them. But (he said, starting a sentence with a preposition, or something...), most people, far from not knowing the rules, don't even know they're breaking them, or their breaking them or even there breaking tem, take you're choice (ouch!). We will be swept aside, and if we came back in 100 years, I doubt if we would know what anyone was talking about. It won't mean they can't communicate, however.

Ah, but SPINY you seem to think I mourn the perishing of what you and I were chastised about in our prep days. No.
Indeed language is an organic, ever-changing thing and to want to preserve one stage of lingual evolution is to fight time itself.

So I don't object to change. That you and I were brought up with a firm grasp of lingual rules simply means that in places where it is still valued, we can move without embarassment. Yet those circles are suckers for tradition, and though they can get you places, they are always conservative and outdated.

I just predict that lingual evolution, especially in english, will accelerate in the near future because of more frequent and more geographically diverse use. The traditionalists will rage and sputter, the teachers will strike with bloodred ink, but eventually, the newest editions of dictionaries will prove them wrong again and again.