The long and short of it

We ponder an old textbook.

Our Gaelic-speaking consultant recently sat down with his textbook, wondering whether he should go back through it and refresh his command of the language.  He hasn’t worked on it seriously for years, mostly because there are few resources available hereabouts.  As our Russian-speaker noticed in a similar situation, he found he could understand most of it and even form the right responses most of the time, though he’d forgotten what the rules actually were.  But he also noticed that the social and cultural contexts had changed since it was written.  There was no mention, for instance, of smartphones, and even computers didn’t show up often.  In that sense, the language has changed within a part of his lifetime.

It’s not nearly as pronounced as, say, the evolution of English over the past two centuries, and pre-smartphone Gaelic is of course quite intelligible to modern speakers.  But prompted by this Celtic observation our Spanish-speaking consultant rummaged in his library, finding one basic textbook dated 1941 and one advanced one from 1967.  The language of the basic textbook is very similar to that of books published today, as one would expect.  However, it is clearly more formal, and contains a number of idioms no longer in common use.  He had been thinking of using the advanced book for a review, but found much of the material very dated.  No doubt most of the actual language is identical with currant usage, but he did notice areas where a half-century has changed details.  He’s not certain he wants to sound like someone’s great-grandfather.

(All this is aside from the effectiveness of the textbooks as teaching instruments.  The actual teaching of languages has made significant progress over the past several decades.  We’re pretty good at learning from books; but not everyone is.)

We carried out an informal review, and found that of the many dictionaries in our libraries, they sorted out clearly into those with an entry for “slide rule” and those with an entry for “internet.”  But it’s not a matter of words for new and old things that we’re dealing with here, nor of slang, which remakes itself every generation.  It’s more subtle.  A (grown) grandchild will sometimes choose to say something in a different way from a grandparent, even when both forms are grammatically correct and clear and carry the same connotations.

So perhaps old language textbooks and dictionaries are not as useful as we once thought.  However, we can think of two counterexamples.  Don Quijote de la Mancha was written some four centuries ago.  When our Spanish-speaker read it (cover to cover, something of which he’s particularly proud), he would have loved to have a dictionary of seventeenth-century Castilian.  And our consultant who dabbles in Old English doesn’t have to worry about language change at all.