Had an interesting discussion with my teenage daughter yesterday about language (she's just started A-Level English) We were talking about how language changes and how words I used regularly as a teenager she simply wouldn't understand, like the examples above. Of course this works the other way around too, she often uses words like "peak", "sick" and "slack" and even though I know the traditional definitions of these words the modern slang meanings were a complete mystery to me (until I looked them up on urban-dictionary!) It's a funny old thing is language, very analogous to genetic drift in living organisms, isolated populations, selection pressure and randomness all seem to have an impact. I wonder if the number of distinct languages has an optimum value for a given global population of if the path to homogeny is unavoidable?
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