Sociological Linguistics

[Nicholas Widdows]

JoatSimeon said:
>> Middle English is not one iota more "effective" at communication than Old
>> English.  It's just different.  Languages change because they do.

Patrick Ryan replied:

> Everything in life of which we have knowledge shows a development from the
> simple to the complex.

> My own studies and common sense decree that, at some point after the onset
> of linguistic communication, languages were simpler than they are now; and
> hence, less explicitly expressive.

But it's not wet and huggy sociology, like saying all cultural practices or
all belief systems are equally defensible. Human languages are all equal the
way human beings are all equal. There are no primitive humans, and no
primitive languages. There were once, but as all modern languages are
non-primitive, they got that way either by universal diffusion
(proto-Nostratic inventions like pronouns were carried by canoe to
Tasmanians and Yahgans some short time before European contact) or
exceptionless independent innovation or common descent from a non-primitive
ancestor about 70 000 years ago in Africa who [snip rest of well-known
theory supported by common sense].

Yes, there's a difference of sorts between vervet monkey hoots and the
collected works of Derrida, but snakes have no legs, humans have no tails or
penis bones, viruses probably came from bacteria sloughing off unnecessary
bits, pidgins typically lose the inflexions of their ancestors, modern
Chinese has no case, English has no dual. The modern kind of language
developed once, or at least once, from some precursor of _Homo sapiens
sapiens_ communication, but there's nothing in biology or language or
culture to say it has to continually measurably improve.

> As just the simplest example, a language which is unable to designate the
> plural form of a noun, is bound to introduce an *ambiguity* into a statement
> that a language which can does not exhibit.

Sei Shonagon is renowned for the limpidity of her style, not for the
impossibility of working out how many cherry trees she viewed or empresses
she served. CERN haven't yet had to resort to publishing in Bislama so they
can specify whether it was <mitupela> or <yunmitripela> who observed hadron
collisions.

Now Martina Navratilova can run faster than me, and there's no way I'm
getting in a boxing ring with Alain Prost. Likewise English is in some ways
a vastly richer and more expressive language than Guugu-Yimidhirr or
Hixkaryana, partly because _we've_ got words for helicopter and
zoopharmacology, fouette' and grande jete'e, Dasein and Abschattung,
moccasin and teepee, andante and dal segno, mana and tiki, and they haven't.
But there's no reason in principle why the Hixkaryana Academy couldn't lay a
few weeks aside to devise native equivalents of all of these. There's
nothing cognitive or phonological or grammatical to hinder them.

They're just different.  Languages change because they do.

Nicholas Widdows