Rate of Change

[Stanley Friesen]

At 06:34 PM 7/6/01 -0400, Thomas McFadden wrote:

>actually, sociolinguistic work of the last few decades, especially by Bill
>Labov and his students, has shown that this, which seems very plausible,
>isn't quite right.  in spite of increased literacy and mass media, local
>dialects are continuing to develop independtly and diverge from the
>standard in a number of places.  of course in many other places the
>dialects are disappearing or being brought closer to a standard language,
>but what seems to be crucial in causing this is not literacy and standard
>language media, but rather increased mobility of speakers.  in one study,
>two immediately adjacent neighborhoods in the philadelphia suburbs were
>examined,

These results are similar to ones seen in England, in this case comparing a
new town (post-WW II, I think) with an established town in the same
geographic area.  The new town had a homogeneous dialect, similar that
spoken on BBC.  Or at least that is what I remember, though I heard of it
some years ago. (I think the new town's dialect may even have had some
unique combination of features - but I do not remember clearly).

>> The biggest change in English, which makes Old English
>> incomprehensible, has of course been Norman French.

>the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive
>morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is
>a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been
>overstated.  vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the
>influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time.

I have seen several sources that claim that the main phonetic and general
grammatical changes had *already* taken place by the Norman invasion.  The
main reason this is not more obvious is that, as is often the case,
spelling remained conventional, and followed the old pronunciations.

In particular, post-tonic syllables were greatly reduced, with loss of most
distinctions.   Thus most inflectional endings were already reduced to
either /-e/ or -en/.  This loss of inflectional distinctions necessarily
made word order more important in establishing meaning.   This covers the
main differences between Old and Middle English.

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May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net