Language has been around for around perhaps 100,000 years and film for around 120 years. Since the invention of photography and the moving picture there has been a steady move away from the primacy print towards the visual.
So as written language fades and the newer visual languages become predominent will they evolve their own grammar? There are already dozens of books on the grammar of film but they are largely a naming of parts rather than the prescriptive advice given in grammar books for the written word.
I find it hard to imagine anyone writing anything in a couple of hundred years time, if language continues to develop in the same way. Even today there seems little point in writing when you can use sound or image. I only write because the technology has not yet reached the stage where talking is easier than writing. I prefer a podcast to a blog but it is much more work to make one.
So it is likely new rules, a new grammar, will be found to regulate the new language and I think we are already seeing the start of this; books and articles on the grammar of film aside. As film may be seen as three dimensional compared with print will the grammar be far more complex. Certainly the grammar of spoken language is a part of most films, a language within a language that allows dual meaning in the conflict between word and image.
But that is all beside the point. What I find interesting; this comes after reading more of John Humphreys' book and watching a clever short film of runners talking as they ran; is the process by which the rules are born. The shells are soft when the eggs are first laid then the shells harden over time.
So as written language fades and the newer visual languages become predominent will they evolve their own grammar? There are already dozens of books on the grammar of film but they are largely a naming of parts rather than the prescriptive advice given in grammar books for the written word.
I find it hard to imagine anyone writing anything in a couple of hundred years time, if language continues to develop in the same way. Even today there seems little point in writing when you can use sound or image. I only write because the technology has not yet reached the stage where talking is easier than writing. I prefer a podcast to a blog but it is much more work to make one.
So it is likely new rules, a new grammar, will be found to regulate the new language and I think we are already seeing the start of this; books and articles on the grammar of film aside. As film may be seen as three dimensional compared with print will the grammar be far more complex. Certainly the grammar of spoken language is a part of most films, a language within a language that allows dual meaning in the conflict between word and image.
But that is all beside the point. What I find interesting; this comes after reading more of John Humphreys' book and watching a clever short film of runners talking as they ran; is the process by which the rules are born. The shells are soft when the eggs are first laid then the shells harden over time.