The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at AOL.COM writes:

>But the real question is what rate of change we see in Mycenaean.

-- we don't see any change in Mycenaean, because it was only written for a
century or two.

>Deals were made, jokes were told, treaties were made and lovers talked, all
>in spoken Latin.

-- official documents were written in it, and scholars sometimes 'talked' in
it.  It was a dead language, like liturgical Hebrew.  There were no Latin-
speakers in medieval Europe, only speakers of French, Italian, German and so
forth who acquired Latin as a second, learned language.  And not very many of
them, since it was an overwhelmingly illiterate rural society.

>Look what you are saying here.  If kids learn language from their parents,
>then that language changes.  All of creation disagrees with you.  Getting it
>passed on from your parents is supposed to be what passes it on unchanged.

-- all spoken languages undergo change in every generation.  Take a look at
English.  English spelling was highly phonetic when the orthography was
standardized. People actually pronounced "knight" as "k-ni-gcht", not "nite",
and so forth.

It's now wildly un-phonetic because of massive sound-shifts.  If you were
transported back to Elizabethan England, nobody would know what the hell you
were saying without elaborate repititions.

The existance of a standardized spelling has not, to put it mildly, stopped
this; and the changes continue and will continue.

>The distinction you are making isn't rational.

-- unfortunately for you, it's a distinction that can be found in any
elemenatary linguistics texbook.