Why Written & Spoken Language Is So Different

August 29, 2011

Interview with John McWhorter, author of the book What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be

________________

Mike Carruthers:
Language is more about speaking than it is about writing.

John McWhorter:
Because writing came along only about 55 hundred years ago whereas speech has probably existed for about 150 thousand years – so if language had only existed for 24 hours then writing came along at about 11:07pm.
 

Linguist John McWhorter, author of the book What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be

But this is the important thing, there’s 6 thousand languages in the world of them 5,800 are spoken only. There are only about 200 languages that are written in any real way.

And the written part of language is much slower to change than the spoken part.

Writing is an approximation of speech that you scratch onto stone, or papyrus, or paper, or now that we can type onto a computer screen, and as we’re all well aware of with just the nightmare of English spelling it’s just an approximation of the way we speak. For example we have the word “them” and we have the word “thum”. And “thum” is as much a word as “them”. “I’m going to go tell “thum”. If you say, “I’m going to go tell “them” you don’t sound natural. In writing we always just write “them”.

In fact when language consists of speaking and writing it can cause problems.

Because we’re always speaking in new ways, and not just words but how we pronounce things, how we run things together, and writing stays the way it is.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here