말의 강: 언어는 왜 멈추지 않는가

A River, Not a Statue

Every language that people speak today is quietly changing, even though most speakers never notice the shift. The English of Shakespeare, written barely four centuries ago, already sounds strange and occasionally unreadable to us. If we could travel back a thousand years, the "English" we heard would seem like a foreign tongue entirely. Language, in other words, behaves less like a marble statue than like a river that never stops moving.

Consider a single common word, and you can watch this slow drift with your very own eyes. The word "nice" once meant foolish or ignorant, yet today it signals warmth and approval. Nobody ever signed an official order to reverse its meaning; the change simply happened through ordinary use. Such quiet reversals reveal a truth that surprises most people who assume their language is fixed.