>Dunno--the older a language is, the more regular it
seems to be. (The rough
>edges get worn off, I assume) While Latin had a
reasonably complex set of
>rules, it was more regular than English. Japanese feels
the same, though
>I'll grant I've little enough experience with it that my
impression might
>be wrong or incomplete.
>
>Irregularity seems to come in with the new, and gets
beaten down a bit with
>long usage.
>
It's also worth recognising the extent to which English
has absorbed elements of other languages inc Latin
and French.
At the same time, sometimes the desire to
communicate (driven by political change, for example)
outstrips the process of codification of a language.
At the moment I'm working with a historian who is trying
to process and analyse a huge pile of 17th C
documents -political pamplets, army documents etc -
from the period of the English Civil war - which use
english, latin, french (from legal system, mainly) but in
some cases are written entirely phonetically ... and even
inconsistently within the same document. Ick.
Coming soon! Lingua::parse17thcenturyenglish .....
