Realitybites said:
For those of us fluent in the English language, it is obvious that a lot of tinkering is going on. Aside from the sort motivated by politics (attempting to make the language gender neutral by universally applying terms like actor), and illiteracy causing the revision of verb conjugation, a variety of new terms and slang get deployed.
My question for those who are fluent in other languages is does this happen within them as well? I'd be interested in knowing about gendered western languages such as German and Spanish that use the Latin alphabet but more so about eastern languages such as Greek, Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi, and Malay.
It does in Italian. The gender neutral thing is a little different there since pretty much every noun is masculine or feminine and masculine adjectives and articles have to be used with them (e.g. beer is a feminine word and wine is masculine). Even more complicated than the Spanish version of gendered nouns. There is also the designation of professions that is going closer to gender neutral. In the past you might have referred to a male lawyer as an avvocato and a female as an avvocatessa. Avvocatessa is rarely used these days and if you do it sort of comes across as referring to the opponent on the other side as "a lady lawyer," a term I that used to hear 40+ years ago in Texas but would be really pejorative now. These days you can use "avvocata" (the feminine noun form) or you can call both men and women attorneys by the male/generic "avvocato." There is some movement toward calling all actors "attore" instead of "attore" and "attrice" and you see it with other professions too.
As for the illiteracy causing revision of verb conjugation, it's absolutely the case. Italian verb conjugation is highly complex and Italians historically have taken pride in doing it well. With the current generation, that pride seems to have gone by the wayside. It's very common now to use standard imperfect conjugation instead of imperfect subjective. (An English example would be saying, "If I was you" instead of "If I were you...") There are 13 tenses and moods to conjugate and it's easier for folks if you can ignore a few of them. This is only an issue with the average guy on the street. Academics, broadcasters, writers, etc. still do it correctly. I'm not a native speaker but with 32 hours of university Italian under my belt, proper grammar was instilled in me, so I speak correctly. My Sicilian friends tell me that my grammar is better than most locals. My lawyer, my accountant, and my engineer, as well as my cousins that are physicians, all speak correctly. All the rest of my friends there are builders, carpenters, restaurant owners, etc., and they don't.
Lots of new terms come along with technology and modern times. Slang is always changing, and you can really date yourself using 10-year-old slang. Weirdly, a lot of new words/terms in Italian are in English but aren't English terms. My favorite example is working from home, which here we call it just that, or maybe telecommuting. Not in Italian. Covid brought working from home to Italy where the term for that (new with Covid) is "smart working." That's not translated to English, but actual Italian term for it. It's two English words, but never in my life have I heard an English-speaker use the term, but it's the every-day term for it in Italian.
A little into the weeds with all this, but you asked...
