The interesting thing about this sort of position is that you can trace ongoing changes that reveal a state of consistent lamentation which goes to show language actually was never elegant in a sense like the way they professed, in any sort of real sense, but completely synthesised and programmed by the culture and experiences of the people of the times. The people 50-100 years ago would have said 50 years earlier was when everyone spoke more correctly and language is 'going to the dogs'. Even before them, these great writers of 150 years ago had nothing but admiration for the language of 200 years ago, and so on and so on. It's really interesting to read written articles in a timeline where people show this ideal and it just completely ridicules the logic of it consequently.Looking at the arguments on this thread, it occurs to me that I could put up an equally good argument for reverting to the English of pre AD 1945/50. Reading literature from 60 to 100 years ago reveals a much more elegant use of language, often with simpler words, that we use now. Yet many who have been brought up alongside the language of computers, mobile phone texts, hip-hop-speak and sound-bites would protest that there is no need because they have a perfectly good modern language that enables them to communicate.
The sort of language we're talking about here, email communication and other types of language will probably seen as a throwback to a better time of more linguistic competence by speakers of English who aren't going to be born for another 30/40 years. It's a natural trend and completely human in nature, but subjective and not inherent to the actual linguistic forms, but geared by a culture of rejecting contemporary change 'of-the-day', because therein lies the nature of change and opinion on linguistic issues, the novelties present in the formation of a speaker's native language rejects novelties and often naturally finds themselves at odds with them because of their unfamiliarity, and tends to follow the ideal that language of their time and before was therefore more majestic, elegant and in all senses of the word, better.
I think it'd be amazing to be able to look at every speaker's parents and get a clip of them speaking, going so far back as they sound Victorian, then like from the Middle Ages, then the early settlers (/invaders), and then you've got no distinction with Dutch/German, completely different languages, Proto-Indo-European and its ancestor that we sadly don't know anything about. It all goes to show that change happens on a generational level and human beings, with our nature like it is, has a constant urge to complain about what's unfamiliar to us and rejecting change. I think writing has a big part to play, holding back change and reinforcing the idea that we have something that should be immutable, which is a wrong assumption to take from its existence.
This is why, in this thread, the change has external factors but it's still something that would have happened in one way or another, so I also sort of reject the idea of an Anglish revolution because we're trying to head backwards to something that has naturally run a course, we need to be looking at the present day and in the future, not reinforcing the idea that we have this leech-like decay sucking all the beauty out of the way we speak, and as a result we have to revert to a 'better time'.
