Written Task Influencing Language

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Written task 1 Does the government influence our language? Some people are convinced that governments willingly alter languages to influence their citizens. How would that work? And is it actually possible, influencing languages? One man who thinks this is David-Wynn Miller, who invented his own language as counterpart for the manipulated English language. His Quantum Language would be a neutral and correct language. Sentences in this language usually start with the preposition for, are at least 13 words in length, contain a lot of nouns, and are filled with punctuation. This sentence, for example, is a simple extract from a Quantum Language dictionary: ‘FOR THIS CLAIM OF THIS WORD: AUTOGRAPH IS WITH THIS CLAIM OF THIS AUTHENTIC AND AUTHORIZATION WITH THIS SCRIPT AND PRINT BY THIS CLAIM.’ this line gives the definition of the word autograph. Miller, amongst others, says that words are deliberately left out of dictionaries, because that would be advantageous to ‘certain people’. And that’s about as clear as they get. What they forget though is that we learn words from conversations, reading books and articles. Dictionaries are just for back referencing. And as vague as people who make a stand for this are, they do imply quite something. Because when you forcefully want to alter a language, there has to be something like a predefined language or set of grammar rules. And besides that, there has to be a way to alter that from the outside. And both of those are not the case. Language evolves itself. Language changes slowly because we alter the way we say things. It doesn’t change abruptly because some politician or other influential person tells us that what we say is incorrect. A study at Harvard university showed that it takes about 800 years for the least used words to be replaced in a language. Let alone more often used words. Yet, language is thought to

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