Cainntear wrote:tarvos wrote:I dunno. I would see this as natural language change, I don't have a problem with it.
I have no problem with
internal change, but I do think it's a problem when the change is driven from outside the speaker base.
Exactly.
As a native, I have a problem with this. It is driven just by a very powerful foreign company who doesn't care (why should they). And the influence of English on Czech natives is in some cases horrible already.
Don't get me wrong, the language is likely to evolve and lose some parts, such as some of the cases, and the influence of other languages will be very noticeable in the process. It is gonna take time. But right now, such influences combined with lower popularity of reading books and lower regard for the importance of speaking and writing well have a horrible consequence. People are getting worse at spoken and writen communication in Czech. And since most of them are monolingual, just with intermediate English skills (and many not even that), it is a problem. We are not seeing a language evolve or get replaced. We are seeing people getting functionally dumber and dumber, just because we don't care enough. It is sometimes problem even with people with a university degree. Precise and nuanced communication is highly important, and very hard (sometimes impossible) with tons of grammar mistakes.
The first things people mess up tend to be the interpunctions (which are based on sentence analysis and very logical in Czech). The second is the agreement of the subject and the verb (and that is already making reading harder. And no, I am not talking about the regional differences in endings). Then the ortograph "challenges" like s/z, mě/mně, ě/je, which are really not hard to pay attention to and annoying to encounter while reading. If wrong use of cases gets added to this mix, it's gonna be a disaster for the language.
In such a case, I'm all for finally officially getting rid of Czech. No alternative will serve worse than this mutilated thing