Thoughts on Who Knows What

Gonna be honest, this class was a slower one. There is a statement that stood out to me however, Professor O’Malley told us to think about how ugly English would be without the letter “U”. That in its self isn’t a super interesting thought, but it did lead me to think about those tests you used to get emailed back in middle school where they’d challenge you to read a paragraph with missing or mixed up letters. He then went on to point out how redundant and unnecessary certain letters are, so why do we have them? They just take up room and provide no substance, right? I couldn’t help but explore that thought. At first I agreed, it seemed language had evolved to that point we didn’t need all of our letters. Then I thought about why we had gotten to that point, and its because we see some words so often we recognize them even when they’re jumbled and there is connotation to every word that you can piece together from context. So what would happen if we completely changed the way we write, omitting “QU” and using just “Q”? What if we got rid of vowels all together? At first, I doubt anyone would struggle. People would still be able to communicate and write and speak. It’s just texting lingo after all. But over time, I imagine that would change. The repetition is the reason we understand jumbled and incorrect words, eventually that repetition would no longer exist. At that point one of two things would happen, either language would evolve to become some new version of old (almost like Shakespeare if you want to think of it that way) or people would become illiterate and mute.

That having been said, language is evolving all the time. Think of all the new language parents yell at their kids for using, lit, shook, bet, fam – the list goes on but I’ll stop for fear of sounding cringy. Our modern tongue would be unintelligible gibberish to someone from the Elizabethan era.