Introduction

I love to study languages. I know, I know: I'm a nerd. Anyway, my consolation is that I hate learning them. Anyway, my studies have led to this basic fact: all languages evolve and devolve.
Languages don't just appear and disappear, with one notable exception, of course. Language is constantly changing in order to serve the people who speak it. This generally means that a language is constantly creating new words while existing ones are being altered.
We can see this in the English language. The word 'e-mail' is now in the dictionary. It describes something that had not existed in the past. Yet the word 'because' is now often pronounced 'cuz' in order to facilitate a quicker speaking pace. Looking further into history, the word 'four' used to be pronounced 'FAY-oh-wer.' It has devolved from three syllables to one for obvious reasons.
In my next post, I'll discuss some words that were created in the English language to describe something that had previously not existed: Christianity.