Quote: Lin Lee Liu, Tuesday, 23 Mar 2010 03:31Being understood by one another, does not make them articulate. Yes, it does.
You don't speak Swahili, right? Just because you don't spend your days among speakers of Swahili does not mean that those Swahilis are not perfectly articulate.
Any lack of comprehension, in both cases, resides in the hearer.
Onto why this may be the case? Because there has never been a greater difference between generations as the difference between current parents and their teens.
We unwisely stick a whole bunch of 14 year olds together in the one room, and so the inherent characteristics of being 14 are magnified. They sound more and more like each other, less and less like their elders.
Even at the dinner table, they're texting their mates. After dinner, they're onto Skype. By nine o'clock the next morning, there they are again, spending all day with their peers.
No wonder their own language has developed a life of its own.
Your Swahili example doesn't answer it. Yes kids can communicate, but through virtually non-lingual means (hence my cicadias comment). They are not quite down there in the language abyss yet, but give it a couple more generations at the current rate of degradation of linguistic expression...
There has already been a significant change, whereby negotiation in language has been elbowed out by posture and facing down through the tone kids use. The aim being to present a facade of inviolability. A sort of verbal bludgeoning. Read the plays of David Mamet to find their best representation in art (though he was writing about adults, but now more universally acquired among the young).
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