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Originally Posted by Amber
Things like 'woddya' for 'what do you' are the result of lack of education, no educated person would merge an interrogative pronoun with an auxiliary verb and a personal pronoun because that makes absolutely no grammatical sense. Words with different grammatical functions have to remain seperate for a sentence to keep its grammatical coherence, you can't go merging things anyway you want just because in speech it sounds that way, people who do that were never taught proper grammar.
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Isn't that just speculation, though? How do you know what the reason was for this and other changes? From our point of view it's all relative. It makes no grammatical sense in common british english, but wouldn't you say vulgaric latin had some traits that would be completely innapropriate for classical latin? Lets not even talk about comparison of descendants of vulgaric latin in comparison with classical version - I'd pretty much figure a Roman citized from 100AD would be absolutely horrified listening to Italian or Romanian. He'd probably think he's hearing totally butchered latin. Or lets go even further back for that matter... which one of it's derivatives today would still make any grammatical sense in proto indo-european? I guess the closest thing you'd get to it's original form are the Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian). So by that reasoning... were Baltic people the most educated of teh bunch to retain most ancient grammatical structure of the original language?
Given a natural development (which in this day and age is impossible, since languages are pretty much cemented in their formal form, due to modern advances) dialects and even slang would develop into a proper language of it's own in a few centuries, given the right conditions (political, geographic, social). A language with it's own grammar rules and nothing would seem odd anymore.