Why don't we still use stone-age tools (or do we)?

While binge-watching a drama set a few hundred years ago in one of the world's empires, I realized that there was something intriguing about the mix of technology in use, which I think was a reasonably accurate rendition of what actually was in use at that time and place. This wasn't a meticulously-researched historical drama, so I'd expect some anachronisms, but the showrunners were constrained by using actual locations and a well-known and well-documented society, so I wouldn't expect to see the equivalent of a Roman senator on an e-bike.

On the one hand, there were ships at sail, intricately woven fabrics, expansive, multistory buildings with carefully crafted architectural details, and a highly-developed administrative state which, among other things, required people across a wide geographical range to carry personal ID. There was an extensive system of roads and detailed maps to show you how to get around them. There were cannon, rifles telescopes, steel farm implements and deadly-sharp swords.

On the other hand, buildings, including heavy-duty structures like jails and military fortifications, were built mainly of wood -- very well built, to be sure, but of wood just the same. Most people lived in small wood-and-stone huts. Some lived in very small dwellings made of sticks. Ladders were made from small logs bound together with rope. The roads were generally traveled on foot or horseback, or in wooden horse-drawn carts. Fighting was mostly hand-to-hand and the main projectile weapon was the bow and arrow.

In other words, while there was quite a bit of technology that would have been state-of-the-art at the time, many if not most of the objects most people dealt with day-to-day could have been made a thousand years before the time of the story, or even five thousand. Consider, for example, a clay cooking pot. While an archeologist could probably tell from the details roughly when and where a particular pot was made, from a purely technical point of view "clay cooking pot" narrows the time and place down to ... "probably not Antarctica" and "probably the last 20,000 years".

Impressive as the more modern-looking items were, few of them seemed essential. An elaborately-embroidered ceremonial robe is not purely decorative. It serves as a signal that the wearer has the resources, including human labor, at their disposal to make such things. Nonetheless, it's far from the only way to keep the wearer warm, and it's actively in the way of the wearer moving around easily (again a feature, not a bug, in context).

Relatively few technological developments are groundbreaking. An aluminum extension ladder is a better general-purpose ladder than a log-and-rope ladder. It's easier to carry. It's probably more weather-resistant and durable though, not knowing any better, I wouldn't want to underestimate how well a well-made wooden ladder would hold up. Likewise, it can probably bear more weight. Because it's easy to change the length of an extension ladder, it can be used in a wider variety of places.

Nonetheless, an aluminum extension ladder is still a ladder, and ladders have probably been around about as long as cooking pots. It's hard to tell for sure since a non-metal ladder is less likely to survive the millennia than a ceramic pot, but there is at least one surviving depiction of a ladder from 10,000 years ago. On a clay pot, of course.

An aluminum extension ladder is also a lot harder to make. While aluminum compounds, particularly alums, have been known for millennia, actually extracting aluminum requires electricity, and quite a bit of it. Aluminum has only been available in commercial quantities for a little more than a century. While we may think of aluminum foil and beverage cans, not so long ago aluminum was rare and expensive. It's probably not true that Napoleon III had a special set of aluminum silverware, but the aluminium statue of Anteros in Piccadilly circus, made in 1893 was the first of its kind, and so kind of a big deal.

Now that we can make aluminum ladders cheaply, they're everywhere. I have a couple in my garage. If someone gave me a carefully crafted wooden ladder, I'd keep it, because cool, and maybe even use it if it happened to come in handy. Like most of us, though, I have absolutely no reason to go out of my way to get one, particularly since it would almost certainly be much more expensive.

As far as technological developments go, I think aluminum ladders are more the rule than the exception. A modern freeway is in most respects a better road than the Via Appia, though not necessarily in durability. A modern car can go much farther and faster than a horse-drawn cart. A coat with a zipper is easier to get in and out of than one with buttons. It's somewhat easier to pay with a card or phone than it is to count coins and notes.

In general, a new development has to offer at least some advantage in order to catch on. That advantage doesn't have to be groundbreaking or even particularly great, however, and it doesn't even have to make sense on a larger scale. Plastic bags have their uses, but whether a new and cheaper way to make plastic bags catches on has little to do with whether we need more plastic bags, as long as we want some plastic bags.

Coming back to the title, in some sense we do still use stone-age tools every day. Ladders are still a thing. You can still buy rope at a hardware store and put it to the same kinds of uses it's been put to for as long as there's been rope. But in most cases, you'll be buying a stone-age tool made with modern technology. The rope you buy at a hardware store was almost certainly made by machine and very likely from a material that didn't exist a hundred years ago, much less several thousand.

I do keep thinking of getting a clay tagine pot, though.

Things are more like they are now than they have ever been

I hadn't noticed until I looked at the list, but it looks like this is post 100 for this blog.  As with the other blog, I didn't start out with a goal of writing any particular number of posts, or even on any particular schedule.  I can clearly remember browsing through a couple dozen posts early on and feeling like a hundred would be a lot.  Maybe I'd get there some day or maybe I wouldn't.  In any case, it's a nice round number, in base 10 anyway, so I thought I'd take that as an excuse to go off in a different direction from some of the recent themes like math, cognition and language.

The other day, a colleague pointed me at Josh Bloch's A Brief, Opinionated History of the API (disclaimer: Josh Bloch worked at Google for several years, and while he was no longer at Google when he made the video, it does support Google's position on the Google v. Oracle suit).  What jumped out at me, probably because Bloch spends a good portion of the talk on it, was just how much the developers of EDSAC, generally considered "the second electronic digital stored-program computer to go into regular service", anticipated, in 1949.

Bloch argues that its subroutine library -- literally a file cabinet full of punched paper tapes containing instructions for performing various common tasks -- could be considered the first API (Application Program Interface), but the team involved also developed several other building blocks of computing, including a form of mnemonic assembler (a notation for machine instructions designed for people to read and write without having to deal with raw numbers) and a boot loader (a small program whose purpose is to load larger programs into the computer memory).  For many years, their book on the subject, Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers, was required reading for anyone working with computers.

This isn't the first "Wow, they really thought of everything" moment I've had in my field of computing.  Another favorite is Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (which I really thought I'd already blogged about, but apparently not), generally considered the first fully-developed example of a graphical user interface.  It also laid foundations for object-oriented programming and offers an early example of constraint-solving as a way of interacting with computers.  Sutherland wrote it in 1963 as part of his PhD work.

These two pioneering achievements lie either side of the 1950s, a time that Americans often tend to regard as a period of rigid conformity and cold-war paranoia in the aftermath of World War II (as always, I can't speak for the rest of the world, and even when it comes to my own part, my perspective is limited). Nonetheless, it was also a decade of great innovation, both technically and culturally.  The Lincoln X-2 computer that Sketchpad ran on, released in 1958, had over 200 times the memory EDSAC had in 1949 (it must also have run considerably faster, but I haven't found the precise numbers).  This development happened in the midst of a major burst of progress throughout computing.  To pick a few milestones:

• In 1950, Alan Turing wrote the paper that described the Imitation Game, now generally referred to as the Turing test.
• In 1951, Remington Rand released the UNIVAC-I, the first general-purpose production computer in the US.  The transition from one-offs to full production is a key development in any technology.
• In 1951, the solid-state transistor was developed.
• In 1952, Grace Hopper published her first paper on compilers. The terminology of the time is confusing, but she was specifically talking about translating human-readable notation, at a higher level than just mnemonics for machine instructions, into machine code, exactly what the compilers I use on a daily basis do.  Her first compiler implementation was also in 1952.
• In 1953, the University of Machester prototyped its Transistor Computer, the world's first transistorized computer, beginning a line of development that includes all commercial computers running today (as of this writing; I'm counting current quantum computers as experimental).
• In 1956, IBM prototyped the first hard drive, a technology still in use (though it's on the way out now that SSDs are widely available).
• In 1957, the first FORTRAN compiler appeared.  In college, we loved to trash FORTRAN (in fact "FORTRASH" was the preferred name), but FORTRAN played a huge role in the development of scientific computing, and is still in use to this day.
• In 1957, the first COMIT compiler appeared, developed by Victor Yngve et. al..  While the language itself is quite obscure, it begins a line of development in natural-language processing, one branch of which eventually led to everyone's favorite write-only language, Perl.
• In 1958, John McCarthy developed the first LISP implementation.  LISP is based on Alonzo Church's lambda calculus, a computing model equivalent in power to the Turing/Von Neumann model that CPU designs are based on, but much more amenable to mathematical reasoning.  LISP was the workhorse of much early research in AI and its fundamental constructs, particularly lists, trees and closures, are still in wide use today (Java officially introduced lambda expressions in 2014).  Its explicit treatment of programs as data is foundational to computer language research.  Its automatic memory management, colloquially known as garbage collection, came along a bit later, but is a key feature of several currently popular languages (and explicitly not a key feature of some others). For my money, LISP is one of the two most influential programming languages, ever.
• Also in 1958, the ZMMD group gave the name ALGOL to the programming language they were working on.  The 1958 version included "block statements", which supported what at the time was known as structured programming and is now so ubiquitous no one even notices there's anything special about it.  The shift from "do this action, now do this calculation and go to this step in the instructions if the result is zero (or negative, etc.)" to "do these things as long as this condition is true" was a major step in moving from a notation for what the computer was doing to a notation specifically designed to help humans to work with algorithms.  Two years later, Algol 60 codified several more significant developments from the late 50s, resulting in a language famously described as "an improvement on its predecessors and many of its successors".  Most if not all widely-used languages -- for example Java, C/C++/C#, Python, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Ruby ... can trace their control structures and various other features directly back to Algol, making it, for my money, the other of the two most influential programming languages, ever.
• In 1959, the CODASYL committee published the specification for COBOL, based on Hopper's work on FLOW-MATIC from 1950-1959.  As with FORTRAN, COBOL is now the target of widespread derision, and its PICTURE clauses turned out to be a major issue in the notorious Y2K panic.  Nonetheless, it has been hugely influential in business and government computing and until not too long ago more lines of code were written in COBOL than anything else (partly because COBOL infamously requires more lines of code than most languages to do the same thing)
• In 1959, Tony Hoare wrote Quicksort, still one of the fastest ways to sort a list of items, the subject of much deep analysis and arguably one of the most widely-implemented and influential algorithms ever written.

This is just scratching the surface of developments in computing during the 1950s, and I've left off one of the great and needless tragedies of the field: Alan Turing's suicide in 1954.

On a different note, in 1958, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and disbanded its pool of computers, that is, people who performed computations, and Katherine Johnson began her career in aerospace technology in earnest.

It wasn't just a productive decade in computing.  Originally, I tried to list some of the major developments elsewhere in the sciences, and in art and culture in general in 1950s America, but I eventually realized that there was no way to do it without sounding like one of those news-TV specials and also leaving out significant people and accomplishments through sheer ignorance.  Even in the list above, in a field I know something about, I'm sure I've left out a lot, and someone else might come up with a completely different list of significant developments.

As I was thinking through this, though, I realized that I could write much the same post about any of a number of times and places.  The 1940s and 1960s were hardly quiet.  The 1930s saw huge economic upheaval in much of the world.  The Victorian era, also often portrayed as a period of stifling conformity, not to mention one of the starkest examples of rampant imperialism, was also a time of great technical innovation and cultural change.  The idea of the Dark Ages, where supposedly nothing of note happened between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, has largely been debunked, and so on and on.

All of the above is heavily tilted toward "Western" history, not because it has a monopoly on innovation, but simply because I'm slightly less ignorant of it.  My default assumption now is that there has pretty much always been major innovation affecting large portions of the world's population, often in several places at once, and the main distinction is how well we're aware of it.

While Bloch's lecture was the jumping-off point for this post, I didn't take too long for me to realize that the real driver was one of the recurring themes from the other blog: not-so-disruptive technology.  That in turn comes from my nearly instinctive tendency to push back against "it's all different now" narratives and particularly the sort of breathless hype that, for better or worse, the Valley has excelled in for generations.

It may seem odd for someone to be both a technologist by trade and a skeptical pourer-of-cold-water by nature, but in my experience it's actually not that rare.  I know geeks who are eager first adopters of new shiny things, but I think there are at least as many who make a point of never getting version 1.0 of anything.  I may or may not be more behind-the-times than most, but the principle is widely understood: Version 1.0 is almost always the buggiest and generally harder to use than what will come along once the team has had a chance to catch a breath and respond to feedback from early adopters.  Don't get me wrong: if there weren't early adopters, hardly anything would get released at all.  It's just not in my nature to be one.

There are good reasons to put out a version 1.0 that doesn't do everything you'd want it to and doesn't run as reliably as you'd like.  The whole "launch and iterate" philosophy is based on the idea that you're not actually that good at predicting what people will like or dislike, so you shouldn't waste a lot of time building something based on your speculation.  Just get the basic idea out and be ready to run with whatever aspect of it people respond to.

Equally, a startup, or a new team within an established company, will typically only command a certain amount of resources (giving a new team or company carte blanche often doesn't end well).  At some point you have to get more resources in, either from paying customers or from whoever you can convince that yes, this is really a thing.  Having a shippable if imperfect product makes that case much more effectively than having a bunch of nice-looking presentations and well-polished sales pitches.  Especially when dealing with paying customers.

But there's probably another reason to put things out in a hurry.  Everyone knows that tech, and software in general, moves fast (whether or not it also breaks stuff).  In other words, there's a built-in cultural bias toward doing things quickly whether it makes sense or not, and then loudly proclaiming how fast you're moving and, therefore, how innovative and influential you must be.  I think this is the part I tend to react to.  It's easy to confuse activity with progress, and after seeing the same avoidable mistakes made a few times in the name of velocity, the eye can become somewhat jaundiced.

As much as I may tend toward that sort of reaction, I don't particularly enjoy it.  A different angle is to go back and study, appreciate, even celebrate, the accomplishments of people who came before.  The developments I mentioned above are all significant advances.  They didn't appear fully-formed out of a vacuum.  Each of them builds on previous developments, many just as significant but not always as widely known.

Looking back and focusing on achievements, one doesn't see the many false starts and oversold inventions that went nowhere, just the good bits, the same way that we remember and cherish great music from previous eras and leave aside the much larger volume of unremarkable or outright bad.

Years from now, people will most likely look back on the present era in much the same way and pick out the developments that really mattered, leaving aside much of the commotion surrounding it.  It's not that the breathless hype is all wrong, much less that everything important has already happened, just that from the middle of it all it's harder to pick out what's what.  Not that there's a lack of opinions on the matter.

The quote in the tile has been attributed to several people, but no one seems to know who really said it first.

There's extinct, and then there's extinct

As a little follow-up to the previous post:

Both Manx and Old English have been extinct (I'll explain the careful phrasing in a bit).  We know exactly when Manx went extinct: with the death of Ned Maddrell on December 27th, 1974.   We can't say when Old English went extinct, and not only because it would have happened hundreds of years ago.

"When did Old English go extinct?" is the same sort of question as "When did Middle English arise?", though it's not the exact same question.  If we were to define some set of speakers as "the first speakers of Middle English" and some other as "the last speakers of Old English", then there was, pretty much necessarily, a period of time where both were alive.  Middle English was alive, by such a reckoning, but Old English wasn't dead yet.

In fact, it's plausible that some number of people could have been said to speak both, depending perhaps on the company and occasion.  As I argued before, what's really going on here is that there is really no clear line to be drawn in cases of continuous change.

On the other hand, when the number of speakers of a language dwindles, it's reasonable to speak of the language going extinct: when the last speaker speaks no more.

The situation may become somewhat better-defined if we consider features of languages.  It's plausible that there was a last time that someone used urum for "our" with a plural noun (in the appropriate grammatical case, etc.), or a first time (probably some time earlier and/or in some other place) that someone said oure in the like situation.

This at least clarifies some of the difficulties of the exercise.  First, features do not arise or disappear everywhere at once.  At some point, there would have been some people who said urum or oure, as the case may be and some who didn't.  At some later point there were fewer who said urum and more who said oure, and eventually, no one was saying urum anymore.  And even that may be an oversimplification.

Second, what set of features we call "Old English" and what set we call "Middle English" is largely arbitrary.  More realistically, as time went on, there were more people speaking English with what we would now regard as Middle English features and fewer speaking with what we would regard as Old English features.

Except that we still retain some features of Old English, for example, the words is, on, to and he from Ælfric of Eynsham in the previous post.  When we try to draw a line between Old and Middle English, we're really looking for features unique to each.  We could plausibly say that when there are, say, no longer any people who speak with more of Old English's unique features than Middle English's, Middle English has taken over.  When no one is using that particular set of features at all, we could say that Old English is extinct ... but then we should be careful not to choose any features for that set that do survive.

If this has a sort of unsatisfying feel to it, it's because the whole exercise is of limited use.  At the bottom of all this careful definition is a distinction without a difference.  The real story is that features come and go, with enough differences eventually accumulating that we start to feel that two different sets of features denote different languages.


Now, why did I say "have been extinct" above?  Manx is, it turns out, no longer dead.  There aren't many speakers, and perhaps none who speak exclusively Manx, or few that could be said to speak Manx as their first language, but people are speaking Manx again, with pride.  This is thanks not only to modern Manx speakers, but in part to recordings of Ned Maddrell and others, and to the efforts of the linguists who made those recordings and otherwise worked to preserve a record of the language.

Xeno and the history of English

Kids these days.  They don't talk like we did when I was a kid.  I'd give some examples, but they're probably already out of date.  You know what I mean, though.  It's one of the constants of life, the next generation doing things a bit differently from the last.  O tempora o mores.

When trying to make sense of the world's languages, dialects, accents, jargons and such, it's natural to look at differences among speakers, or among groups of speakers.  French speakers speak a different language from Italians.  New Yorkers, for the most part, speak differently from people in Clinch County, Georgia, or County Derry, Ireland.  It's easy, though, to neglect differences in a particular language over time, even though they can be just as significant.

Changes over time are in some ways similar to differences among contemporaries.  If someone were to start speaking, say, the English of Beowulf to a group of modern English speakers, they would likely hear it as just another foreign language.  At that level of remove, there's little chance that a modern speaker would think "That person sounds like they're trying to sound like someone from pre-Norman times, but they're definitely speaking English."

There is, however, one salient property of changes over time: Unlike differences between languages at any given time, they have to be small.  Even if a parent and child speak differently, they still need to understand each other.  Granted, this is generally more important to the older generation.  Kids throughout history have always been quick to invent their own vocabularies and otherwise make themselves more easily understood by each other than by their elders.  Even so, from a linguistic point of view they are speaking essentially the same language.

It takes quite a while for that gradual change to amount to what we would call a new language.  For example, here's a bit of a poem (They flee from me) that I studied in college.  I've modernized the spelling, but otherwise the words are the same

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand

This was written by Thomas Wyatt in 1535, almost 30 years before Shakespeare was born, but that wouldn't necessarily be your first guess, would it?

As we go back further, change becomes more apparent, but again gradually.  Here's a bit of Chaucer (The Former Age), again with modern spelling, from the late 1300s

No man yet knew the furrows of his land,
No man the fire out of the flint yet found,
Unkorven and ungrobbed lay the vine;
No man yet in the mortar spices ground

OK, a couple of unfamiliar words (unkorven may be translated as "unpruned" and ungrobbed as uncultivated), but then what do bodkin and fardels mean in Hamlet's soliloquy, written about 200 years later?  The word order is a bit weird, but just how do you parse the first lines of The Star-Spangled Banner, written about 400 years later?  Maybe that's just poetry for you.

I'm cheating a bit here by focusing on the written word, because there's ample reason to believe that English was pronounced considerably differently in the 1300s.  But then, contemporary speakers, depending on their dialect, will pronounce the same written words differently as well.  In the case of Chaucer, I'm also cherry-picking a bit.  Some passages of Chaucer sound considerably less familiar, and some contemporaries of Chaucer in other parts of England would be less familiar still.

Continuing our journey back in time, here's a passage from The Peterborough Chronicle, written in 1140:

Tha was England suythe todeled: some helden mid the king.  Some helden mid the empress.  For tha the king was in prison, tha wenden the earls to rich men that he never more should come out, sahtleden mid the empress, brought her into Oxford, iauen her the burgh.

This still seems something like English, but it's getting harder to decide what to clean up as just a matter of spelling, and what's just different.  For example, with is now mid, in line with the other Germanic languages.  Verbs have the -en ending when the subject is plural (as they do in Chaucer as well, though not in the passage I chose).  I could just as well have papered that over and written held instead of helden and, stretching a bit more, went instead of wenden.

That funny word iauen is really just gave: the letters u and v were not distinguished until later, and quite likely the i at the beginning is like the y in yellow, corresponding to an initial g in other dialects, so we get gaven, or plain gave when you lop off the -en.  That tha seems a bit like then and a bit like when, not unlike modern dialects that use what where others would use that.

It's worth noting that this was written with the Norman conquest of 1066 still in living memory, though only just.  Given that, I'm actually a bit surprised there aren't more French borrowings.  The only ones that stick out are prison and empress.

Go back not too much further, before the conquest, and we have something not too much different from the Peterborough Chronicle, but different enough from modern English that trying to smooth over the differences is a lost cause.  Here is Ælfric of Eynsham discussing the reflection in grammar of Christian theology.  First a straight transliteration (but with modern punctuation):

Oft ys seo halige þrinnys geswutelod on þisre bec, swa swa ys on þam worde þe God cwæð: 'Uton wyrcean mannan to ure anlicnisse'.  Mid þam þe he cwæð 'Uton wyrcean' is seo þrinnys gebicnod; mid þam þe he cwæð 'to ure anlicnisse' ys seo soðe annis geswutelod: he ne cwæð na menfealdlice, 'to urum anlicnissum', ac anfealdlice, 'to ure anlicnisse'.

Here's an attempt to smooth over the spelling differences and such, taking a few more liberties than in the last example:

Oft is the holy threeness geswutelod on this book, so so as the words that God quoth, 'Uton work man to our (an)likeness'.  With þam þe he quoth 'Uton work' is  the threeness gebicnod; with þam þe he quoth 'to our (an)likeness' is the sooth oneness geswutelod: he ne quoth na manifoldly (many-fold-ly) 'to our (an)likenesses', but one-fold-ly, 'to our (an)likeness'.

(That's sooth, as in soothsayer, meaning 'true', not the modern verb soothe).  And finally, glossing the words that don't seem directly related to modern ones, and updating a few that are,

Often is the holy trinity revealed in this book, just as the words that God said, "Let us make man to our likeness."  With that he said 'Let us make' is the trinity indicated.  With that he said 'to our likeness' is the true unity revealed: he neither said nor plural, 'to our likenesses', but singular, 'to our likeness'.

Even with the words glossed, the word order is a little funky, that "with that" is only approximate and doesn't parse easily, and the ne ... ne ... construct, still used by Chaucer and with traces here and there in Shakespeare, is gone now, the closest remnant being neither ... nor.  The forms of words have changed significantly (halige vs. holy, annis vs. oneness etc.).  There is more and different inflection in the original, both in nouns and pronouns (ure anlicnisse vs. urum anlicnissum, worde as the plural of word) and verbs (ge- ... -od for the past participle instead of just -ed today).

All in all, this is more a translation than a modernization.  Only after a third round of adjustments would Ælfric's English really look like modern English.

Even though the Peterborough Chronicle is in an East Midland dialect that is not a direct ancestor of Chaucer's, and Ælfric spoke a Wessex (West-Saxon) dialect which is, and the writers are writing in considerably different forms, it's not hard to see that these are examples of the same language, but a language which is, overall, changing gradually over time.

Thus even though we can point at plenty of texts and say "This is Middle English", or "This is Old English", there is no time in history we can point at and say "Middle English started here" or "Modern English started here".  As far as anyone at the time was concerned, they were speaking English.  No "Old" or "Middle" or "Modern" about it.

Even if you did pick some set of speakers and say, "the parents spoke Middle English, but the children spoke Modern English", you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two.   There would be much more difference between our Modern English and theirs than between the parents and the children.

Gradual does not mean imperceptible, however.  We can trace the origins of newer words like blog or semiconductor with a fair degree of certainty.  We can remember words and constructions that people don't say much any more (at least in most places), like To whom did she give the book? instead of Who did she give the book to?  Going further back to old written sources, we can get a reasonable idea of when people stopped using -en as a regular plural marker for nouns, though of course that didn't happen all at once.  We can see individual changes happening, it's just that there are so many parts to a language that it takes quite a few -- many more than typically happen in a lifetime -- before we decide to call the result a new language.

Drawing a precise line between an older form of a language and a later form is largely arbitrary, like trying to pick a boundary between green and blue.  You can do it, but wherever you pick, there will be a reasonable argument for picking some slightly different boundary.  Even so, the language has changed and continues to.  You can quite rightly say "no one saw Modern English arise from Middle English," and yet it did.

This is all reminiscent of Xeno's arrow paradox: If an object in a definite place is at rest, and at any given moment a flying arrow is in a definite place, then, it would seem, a flying arrow must always be at rest, so how can it move at all?  Untangling this sort of thing rigorously is the wellspring of the mathematical field of analysis, but for most purposes it's enough to know that the arrow moves anyway, somehow unaware that it's not supposed to be able to do that.

Real imitation Old Modern English

Just in time for the NFL playoffs, GEICO ran an ad based on the gag that there is, in fact, an "oldest trick in the book".  The trick?  Two sort of Medieval/Renaissance-looking guys are sitting in some sort of library/scriptorium-looking place.  Quoth the elder, pointing: "Looketh over there!", and when the younger does, "Haha!  Madeth thou look!"

OK, it's a GEICO commercial, not King Lear.  We don't expect linguistic accuracy.   We expect them to get the gag over, which they do just fine, by pasting -eth onto every verb in sight.  Old-looking costumes, old-sounding language ... got it.  Now back to the game in progress.  As the voice-over says "So endeth the trick."

Ironically, that last line is actually proper Elizabethan English.

Before I get back to the whatever larger point I may have, and largely because I just can't help myself, here's a brief rundown of the history of English.  If you're ever having too much fun at a party and would like to recast yourself as a fun-puncturing pedant and so be left in peace, take careful note.

English is generally divided into three forms

• Old English, spoken from somewhere around the 400s to somewhere around the 1100s.  It's basically a Germanic dialect, and if you weren't familiar with it you likely wouldn't think of it as English at all.  It sounds more like German or Icelandic and has a grammar more similar to classical Latin, with gender and case distinctions and other inflections all over the place, than English as we know it.  The best-known Old English work, Beowulf, doesn't even take place in England, but in what is now Scandinavia.  It looks like this, and starts off "Hwæt! Wē Gār‐Dena in geār‐dagum þēod‐cyninga þrym gefrūnon, hū þā æðelingas ellen fremedon" (except without the modern niceties like punctuation). This, of course, means, in Seamus Heaney's fairly loose translation, "So.  The Spear-Danes in days gone by, and the kings who ruled them, had courage and greatness."  (to be fair, English of that period can also look a bit more familiar, like this)
• Middle English, spoken from somewhere around the 1100s to the 1400s.  It looks a lot more like English as we know it (to be fair, it can also look like this), but still has some grammatical differences.  For example, I sleep, They sleep and I have slept become I slepe, They slepen and I have yslept.  More noticeably, Middle English was pronounced much differently from Modern English, not having been through the Great Vowel Shift.  Before then, English vowels had approximately the same values as in many other European languages, so the phrases above would be pronounced more like Ee slaypeh, Thay slaypen and Ee hahv eeslept.  Note that the silent e at the end of words isn't silent (or at least not always).  Middle English uses -eth as a verb ending where we would use -s, so she singeth instead of she sings, and it uses thou with -est as a verb ending, so thou comest instead of you come (see this post for a lot more on thou and you).   The best-known work of Middle English, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, looks like this and starts off "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote ...".  If you heard it recited, you might not catch much, but in print you might well believe it meant "When April, with its sweet showers, has pierced March's drought to the root ..."
• Modern English, which includes the Early Modern English of Shakespeare's Elizabethan times, spoken from the 1400s or so to the present.  Naturally the language has changed a bit over the past few centuries, but older forms such as Elizabethan English seem like our English with a few odd changes, not like a different language.  Apart from vocabulary, the most noticeable changes to our ears are probably that Early Modern English still uses thou and endings like -eth and -est.

There's a lot more to it, of course, but that seems more than enough for now.

Well, actually ... while I'm still in full-on killjoy mode: The actual rules of thou, -eth and -est are really not that hard:

• Use thou for the subject and thee for the object (but again, see the other post for details):  Thou art tall;  I bid thee good night.
• Put -est on the end of the verb if thou is the subject, with a couple of special cases like art for are and hast for have:  Thou knowest not what thou sayest.
• Change -s on the end of verbs (and only verbs) to -eth: The ice man cometh; So endeth the trick.

That covereth not all the bases, of course, but it will give thee reasonably accurate "old-sounding" English without too much trouble.  For the GEICO ad, we get "Look over there!" and "Made thee look", though perhaps "Look thou yonder!" and "I made thee to look" might be more likely.  I would suspect that the first version, at least, just doesn't sound "old enough" to pass muster for the ad.

Now that I've got that out of my system, what was my actual topic?  Ah yes.  It's not surprising or particularly interesting that modern speakers would get Elizabethan English wrong.  Why wouldn't we?  We don't speak it, and we only hear or read it on special occasions.  The more interesting question is how we get it wrong.  How is it that we come up with the particular pastiche of Elizabethan English that we do?

At a guess, since -eth and -est sound more or less alike and seem to be attached to a lot of verbs, it's not hard to boil real Elizabethan usage down to "use thou a lot and put -eth at the end of verbs" and even to "use thou a lot and put -eth on the end of a lot of random words."

That's so straightforward and obvious that it's easy to forget that there are plenty of other minor differences between our English and Elizabethan English that we don't tend to imitate.  Here and elsewhere, I'll take "our English" to mean "English as spoken by newscasters in major US outlets" or such.  Even in this day and age there is significant variation among dialects.  Please don't take it amiss if I say "We don't say ___" when you've heard people around you say just that -- but do feel free to leave a comment.

I've taken the examples below from Much Ado About Nothing partly because it's reasonably representative, but mostly because it's so much fun to read.

• The vocabulary has changed noticeably.  For example, we no longer distinguish whither (to where) and whence (from where) from plain where.  We may still recognize words like yonder and betwixt, but we don't tend to use them.  Some words, like meet (suitable, fit) or an (if) have meanings we no longer use, and some, like baldrick or fardel are entirely unfamiliar.
• Elizabethan English uses word orders and constructions that sound odd to our ears.  Here's a nice illustration:
  Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is, for the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor.
  Every word there is a perfectly familiar contemporary English word, but the way they're strung together makes me feel a bit like I just got off a ship and haven't got my land legs yet. Your mileage may vary.
• Cultural references have shifted, understandably.  Shakespeare's works, and other literary works of the time, are full of classical allusions that his audience would have had no trouble with, but are as opaque to us as a modern pop-culture reference would have been to Shakespeare (though I suspect he would have been a quick study). Things like or do you play the flouting Jack, to tell us Cupid is a good hare-finder and Vulcan a rare carpenter?
• Re-reading the opening of Much Ado, I found that large chunks of it flow almost like today's English, without major twistiness like the speech above, but with lots of little idioms that are just a bit different: he wears his faith but as [like] the fashion of his hat ...Don Pedro is approached [here] ...I wonder [am surprised] that you will still be [are still] talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks [notices] you ...I would [wish] I could find in my heart that I had not [didn't have] a hard heart.

What we have here, as one might expect, is several layers of changes, none of them very big by themselves, but taken together enough to produce something that's clearly still English, but a significantly different kind of English.

When we try to imitate this language, there are a couple of major constraints:  It can't be too hard to come up with, and it can't be too hard to understand, but it does have to sound more or less like the examples we've heard.  We need a superficial imitation, while a realistic one would just get in the way.  I think that explains why we don't see obsolete words, strange word orders or classical references in the usual "Olde Englissh", but we do see features like thou and -eth.  Since we're going for impression, not accuracy, it's not so important exactly how we apply those features, just that they're there.

On this theory, the little idiomatic changes like I had not or is approached might find their way into a more careful imitation, at least more easily than the other items on the list above.  I can't be bothered to find evidence for or against that idea, but hey, it seems plausible enough.

You

Change is a part of language.  Of all the ways to justify a pedantic claim that one's pet usage is "correct" and Kids These Days are borderline illiterate, the appeal to history is one of the weakest.  OK, so originally decimate (or rather, decimare) referred to a randomly selected tenth of an insubordinate legion.  That meaning hasn't been current in English for decades or centuries, if indeed it ever was.  In today's English, decimate means "destroy almost totally", because that's how people use and understand the word.

(Not that I don't inwardly cringe when I see the growing use of the possessive marker 's for the plural marker, as for example "Employee's only")

One change that appears to be gaining acceptance is the use of they as a gender-neutral substitute for he or she, handily filling a gap that seems to have grown more noticeable over time.  It has the advantage of being a real word, as opposed to any of several newly-minted words that have been proposed for the purpose, so people already know how to pronounce it and what verb form to use with it.  Of course, everyone knows that they is actually plural, and so using it as a singular is incorrect and thus liable to lead upcoming generations horribly astray if not destroy their verbal capacity entirely.

But of course, everyone is forgetting about you.

Just like they, you is syntactically plural.  In particular it takes the plural form of its verb, as in you are.  Nonetheless, it is used for both singular and plural.

English is unusual in this respect, at least as far as European languages go.  Most European languages use separate forms for singular and plural in the second person, as indeed English used to.  The singular form is almost always tu (as in the Romance languages) or some variant (e.g., German du).  There is more variation in the plural form, though in the Romance languages it's consistently a derivative of Latin vos.

So why would English not distinguish, but instead use the plural form for both singular and plural? Well ...

European languages don't just distinguish singular you from plural.  They generally also distinguish familiar from formal.  For example, in Dutch, a shopkeeper or bank teller will generally address a new customer as U, but two friends or family members will address each other as jij (pronounced "yiy" to rhyme with "sigh", or "yuh", depending on whether it's stressed).  There are two main patterns for this:

1. The formal comes from the third person, as with German Sie or Spanish Usted (from Vuestra merced, literally "your mercy", more loosely "your grace").
2. The formal comes from the plural, as with French vous.

European languages also tend to distinguish case, as English still does with I vs. me, he vs. him and she vs. her.  English has lost almost all of its other case distinctions and seems intent on losing the rest.  The who vs. whom distinction is essentially gone, and even he/she vs. him/her only seems to matter in simpler contexts.  In my own experience, most people will say either me and him, if they think no one's looking, or he and I if they think they need to use "proper grammar", regardless of the actual case involved.

What does all this have to do with you?

English used to use a perfectly ordinary European system: singular thou (cognate with tu) and plural ye, with the plural for the formal.  In the accusative case (direct object of a sentence), the forms are thee and you.  So

• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
• Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
• (I had to go back to Chaucer for clear examples of you as opposed to ye):  But first I pray you, of your courtesy/That ye narrate it not my villainy

I don't know the actual order of the first two events, but over time

• The ye/you case distinction was lost in favor of you
• The you form became the (singular and plural) formal as well as the plural familiar
• The familiar/formal distinction was lost, again in favor of you (to the extent that to modern ears the familiar thou tends to sound "formal")

So, behind that simple word you, one-size-fits-all-numbers-and-cases, lurks an elaborate structure of case, number and familiar/formal distinctions, most of which is now long forgotten.

And if only it were that simple.  There are plenty of wrinkles in the basic pattern of "tu, some plural form, either plural or third person for formal (both singular and plural)":

• German uses third-person (Sie) while its close cousin English used the plural (you)
• Dutch (about as close as you can get to both German and English) uses different forms (jij and U) both cognate with the English plural you (and German accusative plural euch), for the singular familiar and formal respectively.
• Spanish uses a third-person formal, but the Vuestra in Vuestra merced implies that it had previously used the plural vos.
• Spanish distinguishes between formal singular and plural (Usted and Ustedes -- Vuestras mercedes), while most European languages only distinguish singular and plural in the familiar form
• French uses the plural vous for the formal -- actually, French is relatively straightforward in that respect.
• Italian has both (Lei, a third-person form, is more widely used, but some dialects retain the older voi).
• English has several unofficial plural forms (y'all, you guys, youse, you-uns etc.), which leave the once-plural you as a purely singular form

On the nature of change in science

Hmm ... wonder if anyone's ever tackled this subject before ...

These days, schools across the nation teach a scientific theory that has been known for decades to be fundamentally wrong, while the much more accurate theories that supplanted it are generally only mentioned briefly outside advanced courses aimed at specialists.  How can this scandal go on?

I'm speaking, of course, of Newtonian mechanics, with its tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest and an equal and opposite reaction for every action.  The crowning achievements of 20th-century physics, namely relativity and quantum mechanics (QM), arose from discoveries that the predictions of Newtonian mechanics simply don't hold under certain conditions (now if only they could be made to play nicely with each other).

Granted, the conditions in question are extreme.  Quantum effects generally don't matter outside submicroscopic scales, and relativistic effects are only easily noticeable at extremely high speeds or in extremely strong gravitational fields.  Nonetheless, the effects are of more than purely scientific interest.  The GPS system, for example, could not have been built without knowledge of quantum effects (for the chips in the satellites and receivers for example) and relativistic effects (which cause the highly accurate clocks, needed in order to pinpoint location, to run slightly faster in orbit than on the ground).

So why do we cling to this outmoded theory?  Simple.  It gives the right answers in the kind of cases most people will encounter.  How fast would that car have to have been going to have skidded for the distance it did?  Newton can handle that one.  What are the stresses on the deck of that bridge?  Newton can deal with it.  Why do the daily tides rise and fall?  Newton himself did the numbers on that one.  Why does the orbit of Mercury precess just a wee bit more than it ought?  Um, actually you need general relativity for that one.

For a new theory to take hold, it has to be more than new.  However much its mechanisms may differ from those of the old theory -- and QM and relativity differ radically from Newton in that respect -- it must still explain the same facts that the old theory explained.  Thus the correspondence principle of QM, which states that QM and classical (Newtonian) mechanics give essentially the same results when large enough numbers are involved.  Given that there are stupefyingly many atoms in anything we can actually see or touch, it's not hard to encounter numbers large enough for the correspondence to hold.  In fact, it generally takes work to narrow things to the point that QM comes to the fore.

A new theory also has to explain some things better than the old theory.  For example, QM explains why subatomic particles don't behave completely like ideal Newtonian particles and relativity explains why planets don't quite exactly follow the paths that classical mechanics predicts.

New theories typically keep most of the concepts of the theories they replace, but often generalize them or interpret them in the new ways.  For example, the conservation laws concerning quantities such as energy, momentum and angular momentum, which were derived from Newton's laws as classical physics developed, play a central role in QM.  Newton's idea that bodies travel in straight lines in the absence of outside forces becomes Einstein's idea that a body in orbit, for example, is traveling in a path that is (locally) straight, but in curved space-time.

Many concepts make it through unchanged, for example the concept of things having mass, or charge, or being able to move.  In fact, most concepts will have to remain unchanged.  The whole field of physics assumes that there is a physical world with space and time, that it's possible to conduct experiments and get reproducible results, and so forth.  These might seem too trivial to mention, but given the sort of things that QM and relativity do revisit, for example to what extent things can have a definite location or whether it's possible to say two things happened at the same time, no concept seems to trivial to count.

Even at its most radical, science is fundamentally conservative.  An established theory, even one with known problems, is assumed to hold until there is compelling reason to adopt a new one, and even in that case the old theory may well remain useful.  I've used physics here as a running example, but the same holds true in any scientific field.

So why do we continually hear about revolutionary advances and theories being overturned?  There are probably several reasons:

• The press needs good, dramatic story lines because that's what we its audience want.
• It's natural to focus on what's changed as opposed to what's still the same.  Even an incremental change at the margins is a dramatic change if you only focus on the margins.
• There's a lot of science going on at any moment.
• Every once in a while something big really does come along.

All of this seems mostly harmless, so long as it doesn't give the impression that the world at large is liable to change drastically overnight.