rate of language change

[Larry Trask]

On Thu, 8 Apr 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

> Languages change, but generally so slowly (on a human scale) that
> nobody's conscious of it in a time-span of less than generations.

Too cautious, I think.  My late mother, who had little education, was
keenly aware of some of the differences between her own speech and her
children's speech.  A former girlfriend of mine, a native speaker of
Kacchi, was highly aware of the differences between her own speech and
her parents' speech, which in fact appeared to be rather substantial,
and were regarded by her as substantial.  And there is a huge amount of
evidence showing that people are frequently aware of the same sorts of
differences, even if they sometimes choose to regard these as
"corruption" or "slovenliness" rather than as change.

> Ordinary linguistic change generally isn't going to make anything
> unintelligible in less than centuries.

Debatable, I think.  Some recent studies of certain Indonesian and
Pacific languages reveal dramatic changes in a very short time, and
there are hints of similarly rapid change elsewhere.  Jim Milroy has
observed that mutual comprehensibility between generations may sometimes
take a back seat to other social pressures.

Abraham Lincoln was born in Illinois.  How successful do you think he'd
be at understanding present-day Chicagoans?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk