All very well up to a point, but complaining about the language standards of others has its dangers.

For example, one notes that the putative oldenne dayes statement in paragraph 3 includes two errors of conjugation: "Forsooth; I carest not what thou think; begone!"

This should, of course, have read: "Forsooth; I care not what thou thinkest; begone!"

Tom Clark, good onya, mate!

I enjoyed your article very much, however I do not aspire to your level of written English. In particular, you used the possessive 'my' when stating, "This led to my observing...." I have very seldom read nor heard this very correct use of the word. Most would have used 'me' which annoys me greatly. Thank you for the whole article as it served to brighten my day.

After reading this article it's clear that the author doesn't know whether the point is about written English or spoken English. They're certainly not the same thing, but I want to talk about spoken language particularly.

I assume by "rules of speech" he means the stress, rhythm and intonation a person uses to modulate the literal meaning of the words in the structures they speak. Or does he mean the clear articulation of consonant and vowel sounds in speech? He suggests that awareness of homonyms and structure are necessary to understand a sentence and gives an example where the pronunciation of different instances of words written as "bow" and "tie" would be clearly distinct.

He uses the example of News Speak, specifically: stressing prepositions instead of nouns, to warn more generally that incorrectness will promulgate through the media because “monkey-hear monkey-say”. Does he want to put the blame to parents too, because this is how children acquire the language they hear spoken around them?

When he says that "correct speech is what is correct for an occasion", is he quoting Humpty Dumpty? Spoken English is often grammatically incorrect because spoken language, although a significant part, is not all there is to the communication of meaning between people. "Grammatically" correct speech is a misnomer anyway because grammar was invented for written language not spoken language. It's like "writing" an English grammar using Latin grammatical conventions: doomed to become entangled in its own underwear.

Language is organic in the sense that it changes over time. A language that does not change over time is a dead language. Language change is an indicator of social change in a community. The correctness of English usage can’t be described by a set of rules because language and social change is ongoing and arbitrarily complex and, while the language that rules seek to impose order on changes underneath them, rules remain both static and the domain of wishful thinkers wistfully ruing imagined, better days.

English is too precious to become the "world language". It would be spoilt, desecrated, don't let foreigners (i'm one of them) ruin it.

Your article helped me to forgive myself (just a little) for my ineptitude. "Our Spoken Language", by A. Lloyd James, also expounds the beauty of the English language, and its considerable difficulties. "It's easy to speak english bad", i have often heard.

To protect English from possible deterioration at the mouths of those learning it as a second language, you could advocate the use, for international communication, of a neutral tongue, perhaps Esperanto whose study - like that of its big brother Latin - is very effective as a propaedeutic help to improve one's knowledge of English.
May i suggest for your consideration a short talk by Mr. Claude Piron
http://www.dotsub.com/films/thelanguage/index.php?autostart=true&language_setting=sk_1683

The author failed to make any mention of the oft used, technically ungrammatical habit of many, in everyday conversation, of not ending a sentence. We start off and then at some point, we assume that the other person has got the gist of what we are saying, so we stop and let them take over.

For examples of incorrect usage of the language, one only has to listen to interviews with most of our sporting personalities. Not only is the grammar poor, but the pronunciation is often terrible. The latter is undoubtedly due to their inability to spell the words correctly in the first place.

David