Comment by xenadu02

> Korean is different. You have to convey relative social position in basically every sentence because without that you can't finish your main verb.

Sure, by the currently recorded official rules of the grammar.

If young Koreans just stop doing it then it will disappear within a decade or two - something only crusty old people bother with. Not that I have any say in such things.

I find the process fascinating though. I like to imagine what English was like when grammatical cases were being dropped from the language. Who decided to drop them and why? Kids being funny? People from different regions having difficulty understanding accents or vowel changes? What would someone at age 50, having used cases their entire life, think about everyone from London or everyone under 20 (or whatever cohort popularized it) when they just said all the words "wrong"? And when chided for speaking incorrectly just shrugged their shoulders and continued doing it?

On the other hand despite everyone agreeing that English spelling royally sucks... no one cares to make major changes to it. Even when writing informally in text messages or whatever. We all just keep going along with the system.

I also wonder how much computers are affecting us. Auto-correction may end up killing some forms of change to language over time. If GUIs and better input methods hadn't been invented so quickly would latin-based languages drop diacritics or consolidate some letter forms? Would languages like Japanese or Chinese have adopted Korean-like writing systems for convenience? Who knows. English dropped some letters because printing press letter sets came from Europe and didn't have those oddball letters. Who knows what technology might have triggered or prevented.