People have been crying about language change in all languages since the dawn of speaking. You can look back to relatively recently with the Romans, they’d always complain about non-standard dialectal and colloquial speech and how the youth are ruining our language, or people from X geographical area are butchering Latin rather than using the standard dialect (Classical Latin).
It’s no different today. People (upon political/cultural motivation) complain about using “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, saying it’s confusing (even though we’ve used it as a singular pronoun for those of unknown gender since “they” was borrowed into English), but don’t bat an eye at “you” which was first a plural only (as opposed to singular “thou”) and then gradually shifted to a formal singular pronoun, then to just the only second person pronoun for both numbers. People also complain about pronunciations of words like nuclear, asks, comfortable, etc.
The myth of mispronunciation is a plague upon human language.
Literally (ha) all linguists would disagree with you there. The word “literally” here has gone through the same evolution that EVERY WORD GOES THROUGH. EVERY WORD YOU SPEAK went through the same thing where you would call it “less clear” or “useless” or whatever.
Language is always unclear. You do not have the same perception of words as someone else does. If we arbitrarily assigned some word uses as “useless” based on someone’s personal idea of what’s useful, we wouldn’t have language. A lot of people would call articles useless (words like “the” or “a/an”), a lot of people would call pronouns useless (I/you/they/etc.), a lot of people would call marked tense useless (no more past tense or future tense!). A lot of languages don’t have these features. English speakers might think grammatical case is useless. Why do you get to decide what’s useless or not? Why is using “literally” as something for emphasis useless to you, and why do you think it’s so objective that you should have the authority to remove that from the language?
Of languages that don’t have articles? Russian, Japanese, pretty sure Arabic, a majority of synthetic languages have no articles.
Japanese has no pronouns depending on what you consider a pronoun, pro-drop languages like Spanish or Italian don’t use subject pronouns except for emphasis.
Chinese languages have no tense. Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese have no tense. Pirahã has only future tense. Japanese only has 2 tenses, one is past and one is combined present and future.
Pirahã is also debated to have no number system and no names for colors.
There’s plenty of features that people who speak a language think is necessary that plenty of other languages just don’t have. Languages are extraordinarily different and fluid. Word meanings shifting over time, in the case of “literally” where it starts meaning something very different is one of the most common, and gives you the words like “black” in English (which came from the same word that “white” in other languages like French or Spanish came from).
Singular they rule (pawb.social)
ALT TEXT:...