I was asked in anonymous comments to say something about the debate around the Royal Spanish Academy. This is an institution that exists to ensure the preservation of the Spanish language. It was created in the early 18th century and was one of the very first institutions of the Spanish nation-state. The RAE is the reason why we can read any text in Spanish from 250 years ago and understand it with ease.
Recently, however, RAE has been experiencing problems. Some of the people on its decision-making body have been infected by the fear of seeming elitist. They have pushed to make language more inclusive by normalizing stupid, uneducated things. Dumbing down instead of preservation started happening.
The people arguing against RAE’s tendency towards dumbing down are hobbled from making an honest argument by the same fear of looking elitist and not inclusive. So they speak vaguely about the dangers of social media, and this makes their argument hard to understand.
In short, this is another foundational institution of the nation-state that is falling apart under the pressure of globalizing forces. These forces have found out that name-calling is their best way to victory, and they are deploying it successfully here and everywhere else.
Clarissa's Blog 
Prof. Clarissa, I know this wasn’t exactly the point you were making, but this fascinates me from a linguistic point of view, and since you are a far more linguistically sophisticated person than even I am, I would be curious about your opinion of how it is that literary English has remained as stable as it has for such a long time when 1) we have no equivalent of L’Academie Francaise or RAE, and 2) English has been a global language of empire for a while, first under the British Empire, then under Pax Americana, and now under the decay of the latter, which would make me expect pidginization. It is rather remarkable to me to think that I can read Shakespeare and that Shakespeare would be able to read Pynchon. I wonder if we can expect literary English to remain so stable going forward, and for how long?
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“It is rather remarkable to me to think that I can read Shakespeare”
Nice for you…. I remember in school it seemed like a lot of gibberish… (the plays, the sonnets are a lot more understandable to modern audiences).
When they showed film excerpts it was a bit easier because it was backed up by action.
And, it should be noted, that I grew up in a house where books were all over the place, both parents had written professionally and an aunt had a book accepted for publication (though political events meant it never appeared). So it’s not like I came from a non-reading environment and I didn’t find it any more accessible than the kids of Joe Gas-station or Mary Supermarket….
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It’s true that Shakespeare is a lot harder to read for a regular native speaker of English than Cervantes is for a regular Spanish speaker.
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Never gave me much trouble, but… my eccentric dad had me memorizing passages from the KJV Ecclesiastes when I was three. Weirdly enough, that’s helpful for parsing Shakespeare.
-ethyl
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As I think about my own question, perhaps it is because modern English always has been a pidgin ever since the Norman conquest, highly open to absorbing foreign linguistic influences.
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Sorry, the “Anonymous” there was the same Bryan from the previous question.
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This is an excellent question, and I believe it has to do with English being a very weakly infected language. The English grammar is extremely primitive and, as always happens with such languages, it compensates for this with an extremely extensive vocabulary. In Spanish we use grammar to express what English does with vocabulary. This is, for example, why Google Translate is incapable of rendering the differences in meaning delivered by the Spanish past tenses of the preterite and the imperfect. It’s the grammar changes that are the deadliest to a language, and the biggest pressures on RAE have had to do with those. For example, RAE has had to issue strongly worded statements against the elimination of gendered adjectives in Spanish. The push to eliminate them came from the heavily anglicized academia (which is funded by external grants to a comical degree). The idea is that saying “queridos colegas” is not inclusive because it’s gendered. In English when you say “dear colleagues”, they can be male, female, or non-binary. In Spanish “queridos” is clearly masculine gender. This is considered to be less virtuous than the non-gendered Anglo version. For now, RAE has been able to side with the gendered usage but the pressure is intense.
Another issue on which RAE did cave was eliminating the distinction between sólo and solo. I’m still reeling from that one but the argument behind it was that the distinction is somehow undemocratic and elitist. Again, English doesn’t have these distinctions, so you don’t have the issue at all.
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” eliminating the distinction between sólo and solo”
I had forgotten about that one… though (under the influence of Latin Americans from a couple of different countries) I would be more likely to use ”no más” for the adverb.
“Estaba ahí un mes no más”
People in Spain understand but wince in pain when they hear it…
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That’s exactly what I do now. I use no más or solamente (in academiv writing) to avoid using the solo because I don’t want people to think I’m unaware of the difference as a non-native speaker.
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Fascinating! The hypothesis of weak inflection makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know Mandarin Chinese, but I have read that the simplicity of its grammar is eerily similar to that of modern English, which is interesting to me since both are languages of empire shared among numerous ethnic groups. I used to hypothesize that the most strongly inflected languages and complex grammars would occur among the most isolated peoples, and the simplest grammars within the official languages of empires. Icelandic was what gave me that idea, but Latin and Greek are rather obvious counterexamples.
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It’s also fascinating to think about how languages with a rigid word order create a very different imperial structure than languages with a fluid one. This is fascinating stuff.
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Bryan again writing as Anonymous… sorry, I’m having some technical issues identifying myself.
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Btw, Cliff, your point about Shakespeare is well taken. Perhaps it is not that English really is all that stable but that we learn how to roll with it. When an old Gen Xer like me listens to Gen Z slang, I hope that some genius Gen Zer will give us a new Finnegans Wake.
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“It’s also fascinating to think about how languages with a rigid word order create a very different imperial structure than languages with a fluid one.” That is an angle I had not thought of. Please elaborate, Prof.
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The simplest example: English has an ironclad word order to make sure that the weakly infected language is comprehensible. It creates an extremely rigid imperial structure with unbreakable racial and class structures. Contrast this with the Spanish empire where the very fluid racial and class categories mimic the fluid word order in a sentence. A coincidence? Maybe. But maybe language does organize our thinking in ways we don’t always realize. The Spanish end up creating mixed-race societies everywhere they go while the Anglos still can’t let go of their need to police the boundaries of racial categories.
Could we say that language is destiny? As a multilingual person, I very much think so.
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Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that one… I feel slightly skeptical because the hypothesis reminds me of what happened to post WWII music with figures like Pierre Boulez arguing that tonality was hierarchical and therefore fascist (cf. the Nazi taste for Beethoven, although I’m not entirely sure that was even true in the first place; real history that I have read doesn’t really give me the impression that real Nazis were the lovers of high Germanic culture that they were made out to be), and that all music should be serialist and atonal from now on, which resulted in one of the most elite and mandarin art forms ever conceived: 20th century classical music. The truth ended up being almost exactly the opposite: the most democratic and populist music being the most simple and formulaic.
To be contrary, Professor, might that not also be true of simple, rigid grammars? On the other hand, your point about Hispanic racial mixing intrigues me. I have often been curious about why Spanish elites deliberately set about to replicate their Spanish culture exactly (and succeeded) while deliberately engaging in a program of Spanish/Indigenous mixing, when North American colonists were more concerned with ethnic purity. Just to throw out a random thought, might this be more of a Protestant/Catholic thing than linguistic?
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I don’t know enough about Protestantism to say either way. Wouldn’t Protestants be against hierarchies while Catholics are in favor? Again, I’m not knowledgeable about the specifics of Protestantism at all except to say that I find it very hard to comprehend in many of its manifestations.
Judging by results, the Spanish way of doing things ended up being probably inferior to the Anglo way. It sounds great but in practice it’s…. what we are all seeing. Nobody is risking their lives in the Darien Pass to move to the Hispanic world from the Anglo world.
Great points about Germans and music. I agree that this kind of argument can lead down insane paths but we are just talking here in secret from the world and not bringing our thoughts into the mainstream precisely because of how perverted the result can be.
Please come by more often. I’m loving your insight.
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“Wouldn’t Protestants be against hierarchies while Catholics are in favor?”
Well, as ethyl has pointed out a few times protestants economically self-segregate (by denomination and to some extent within denominations).
Catholics are much more universal so you’ll find different classes (and different ethnic and racial groups) in the same church.
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You are quite correct to object that Protestantism is anti-hierarchical, but here the same reversal applies as in classical music. I personally was born in, live in, and probably will die in Texas, baptized fundamentalist Southern Baptist, the Southern Baptist Church being the equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church of the southern United States. That church, although technically “Evangelical” rather than “Protestant,” also emphasizes the authority of the Inner Light, the personal influence of the Holy Spirit, and your personal relationship with the Lord Jesus. For that reason it is highly schismatic and anxiety-ridden about who is saved vs all those lost souls in the heretical Baptist church up the road. Every soul an anxious Talmudic lawyer to oneself. By contrast, if you can outsource the theological parsing to The Papa and his Cardinals, then the church can be more universal, and surprisingly, less elite.
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