Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 August 7

= August 7 =

Why did people historically use so many fancy vocabulary terms and long sentences?
Were there any colloquialisms and curse words in their speech? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 13:41, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm uncertain what you mean. Why dialect?  What time period?  In what context are the interlocutors conversing?  What is fancy?  -- Jayron 32 13:54, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
 * The Scarlet Letter. Pride and Prejudice. Emma. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 13:57, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
 * They wouldn't have thought it was as fancy then. The upper classes regarded "proper" or "educated" speech both as a sign of one's own worth and by extension as a sort of gift toward others. Ian.thomson (talk) 14:09, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Can someone provide me an example of lower class speech with curse words? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 14:29, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Since you seem to be interested in Victorian literature (all of your examples are Victorian literature) This book will likely be good for you to read and help you along the way with your research. -- Jayron 32 16:38, 7 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Jane Austen was not Victorian! She was influenced by the traditions of Augustan prose and Samuel Johnson's writings, though sometimes she subtly made fun of some of those conventions.
 * 140.254.70.33 -- If you want "non-fancy", look at the speech of servants and lower-class characters in some of the novels by the same authors. AnonMoos (talk) 18:09, 7 August 2017 (UTC)


 * indeed Jane Austen died before Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent and Strathearn was born. —Tamfang (talk) 20:24, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry about that. Mea culpa.  I have struck my answer as incorrect. -- Jayron 32 22:34, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Georgian is the usual epithet for Austen's era (or maybe Napoleonic if she had focused more on military or political matters). Alansplodge (talk) 08:19, 11 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Why use "fancy" words:


 * A) To be precise. Often there's a slightly different shade of meaning and you may pick the specific word that fits the situation best.


 * B) To try to impress people with your knowledge. This can turn into a spectacular "fail" if the person attempting to impress you with their vocab doesn't actually know how to use the words properly.


 * For example, let's compare the terms "long words" with "polysyllabic words". "Long" isn't very precise (although better than "big", which could refer to font size), but usually is sufficient to get the meaning across.  However, there are somewhat long words which aren't polysyllabic, like schnapps.  So, one could make a case for the more specific term, but most people would find it needlessly complex and think that anyone using that term was trying to impress.  An exception would be a linguist, who would be expected to be precise about matters in their field.  In some fields this problem gets even worse, with lawyers and doctors using difficult to understand jargon, such as Latin and Greek terms, rather than common English terms (such as "pro bono" instead of "free" and "periorbital hematoma" instead of "black eye").  StuRat (talk) 17:08, 7 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Both of those could apply at any time in history, including today. They don't seem to address the OP's question about "historical" times.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:12, 7 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Only if you assume that people's motivations were different in historical times than they are today. I made no such assumption.  StuRat (talk) 02:06, 8 August 2017 (UTC)


 * That's a classic non sequitur. Can you explain what you mean?  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  02:27, 8 August 2017 (UTC)


 * They are indeed reasons why people use fancy words today. But your assumption that this means they can't also be reasons why they used fancy words historically would require that people historically had different motivations for using fancy words than they do now.  I see no reason to assume that. StuRat (talk) 19:51, 8 August 2017 (UTC)


 * You're attributing to me an assumption I have never made. I said that your two points could apply at any time, from the start of the universe right through to the present day.  The OP was asking about the "fancy vocabulary terms and long sentences" used by people in "historical times", i.e. language forms that were once used but are no longer used.  It is easily verifiable that people of the 17th and 18th centuries, for example, tended to use language, at least in literary contexts, in a more florid way that often used many more words, and longer words, than we would today consider necessary or appropriate. Your points go no way to addressing this question.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:14, 8 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Let's see a source that supports your claim that people "used many more words, and longer words, than we would today consider necessary or appropriate". StuRat (talk) 01:10, 9 August 2017 (UTC)


 * --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  05:02, 9 August 2017 (UTC)


 * The intro doesn't mention your claim, it's about position of the parts of a letter versus social class. Do you have a specific section that supports your claim ? StuRat (talk) 05:06, 9 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Really, I'm just supporting the OP's premise, so we both have the same impression. I'm surprised this has been so google-resistant. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:47, 12 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Inasmuch as the OP claimed that people used to use more "fancy vocabulary terms and long sentences", I'm not sure that they are correct, keeping in mind that we have a biased view in that only a small portion of speech from that period has been preserved, and there's no reason to assume that this portion is a representative sample. StuRat (talk) 21:21, 12 August 2017 (UTC)


 * It's only a small step to interpret the OP's question as referring only to that "small portion of speech from that period [that] has been preserved". After all, this is all we ever know about the speech of any past civilization, but that inherent bias has never stopped us from analysing or commenting on it.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  07:24, 13 August 2017 (UTC)


 * C) Vocabulary in general usage evolves. Archaic words might seem "fancy" to some people. — 2606:A000:4C0C:E200:4176:1674:84F8:476B (talk) 18:17, 7 August 2017 (UTC)


 * This could be a case of Selection bias: historically, a greater proportion of authors would have been from the middle/upper class{fact}. So older writing probably looks "fancy" because they record how "fancy" people spoke rather than how the majority did. Iapetus (talk) 15:55, 8 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I think the OP is asking why language from the period sounds fancy today (as opposed of plain and ugly, that is.) I don't know why old language invariably sounds fancy and conversely language change is always perceived as corruption, never as "purification." Perhaps humans are genetically predisposed to hate entropy or something (or maybe we do live in degenerate times.) (I can say it has nothing to do with class, U/non-U etc, as this effect is not limited to English and besides the speech of supposedly lower class characters sounds fancy, too.) As to the long sentences, that's a feature of written language and people's ideas what constitutes proper style. Indeed some linguists say that when a language first becomes written, people "don't know how to write yet" and sources from that time have a distinct colloquial, discursive sound to them. It's only later that a certain literary style develops and written language begins to feature participles and other adornments and subclauses that go on for two pages (i.e. the opposite of how people speak IRL.) These things are also apparently subject to trends and fashions, here's for example a table with average sentence lengths in German from 1770 to 1960. 78.53.24.155 (talk) 19:47, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Minor specification, but the table in the article 78.53.24 linked to shows the average lengths of clauses (not sentences, an important distinction, particularly in German). ---Sluzzelin talk  20:34, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
 * English (culture or language) is not unique in having different classes. When you say "the speech of supposedly lower class characters sounds fancy, too", are you talking about things written by "lower class" people, or dialogue written for lower-class characters?  Because I fend the latter tends to one of two extremes: all the characters use the same style and register as the author (example: in the original Conan the Barbarian stories, Conan's speach is just as prone to using purple prose as the author).  Or the author massively exagerates the difference in speach between classes (example: the original Dracula, where the (upper-middle class) protagonists, even when hunting/being hunted by vampires, all find the time write their diaries and letters in perfect, formal English, while any working-class dialogue is full of exagerated phonetic accents, colloquialisms, and Apologetic apostrophes. Iapetus (talk) 07:13, 9 August 2017 (UTC)


 * yes, the dialogue. in old novels, even servants sound fancy, what with their antiquated forms of address when talking to other characters, etc. Unless, as you said, the author tries hard to make them not to, through liberal use of eye dialect... 78.53.24.155 (talk) 14:53, 9 August 2017 (UTC)


 * The problem here is that writers tended to be upper-class, so we only heard their voices and their stereotypes of what commoners might sound like. Actual commoners, if they could write, would not be likely to get published then. And before audio recording technology, there were few other ways to record how people speak.  One possible place to look is court records, where written statements were recorded from people of all classes.  Of course, it's still possible that these have been filtered, by whoever wrote them down (even if by the person giving the statement), to be more "proper".  This is similar to the issue with photographs, where early photos show people looking stern, and later photos show people smiling. It's not that people were all unhappy then, it just wasn't the custom to smile for photos. StuRat (talk) 15:32, 9 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Charles Dickens was decidedly not upper class in any way; at best his family lived on the edge of the middle class and working class. His father was a very low-level clerk, and he worked in a factory before taking up writing.  Thomas Hardy was neither upper class; his father was a stonemason.  Many respected authors came from humble beginnings.  -- Jayron 32 18:15, 10 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I didn't claim that all authors were from the upper classes. For those who weren't, many may have found it necessary to emulate upper-class writing styles in order to get published. StuRat (talk) 05:43, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Some of Dickens' working-class characters use pretentiously flowery language, but use the wrong grammar or pronunciation to comic effect. Alansplodge (talk) 08:26, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Dickens' was an astute observer of British society, and such a phenomenon has been well studied by sociologists looking at British society. They even have terms for it: U and non-U English (WHAAOE).  In Britain, there is a tendency of middle-class speakers to use what they perceive as higher class words as a pretense.  Actual upper-class speech, however, is much more straightforwardly English.  Authors like Dickens played that up for effect.  -- Jayron 32 17:46, 11 August 2017 (UTC)