A Few Words on Words

Language is conventional and arbitrary.  My Greek professor used to say this all the time.  Basically any group of sounds can come to have any meaning people want.  That’s another thing, language is a living thing.  It changes over time and geography, just look at the difference between British English and American English.  We do speak the same language don’t we?  Just think about how different Shakespeare sounds compared to how we speak today.  Did people then really talk like that?  Considering that Shakespeare was writing for the popular theater (it only became great literature hundreds of years later), I can only assume yes, people did speak like that.  If you go farther back, to Chaucer and beyond, English begins to look like a very different animal indeed until you get to the point that the language spoken wasn’t even English at all.  Imagine how a language that has been around a really long time like Chinese has changed over the millennia. more »