Rate of Change

Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
Sat Jul 7 20:09:03 UTC 2001


----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabor Sandi" <g_sandi at hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 11:42 AM

>> To: Ed Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be>
>> Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:06:27 +0200

> [ moderator snip ]

>> [Ed]

>> Italy had a very prestigious culture that exported ideas, art forms, etc.
>> rather than receiving them. It was - and still is largely - in the period of
>> stability that followed the rapid change after the collapse of the Roman
>> Empire (Maybe it didn't change that much, as it is based very much on Tuscan
>> regional speech that may be a lot older). The Risorgimento and Mussolini
>> caused mainly self-affirmation and glorification, not change.

>> Spanish (actually: Castilian) is possibly even more conservative than
>> Italian:  you can still read Cervantes without any study of older forms of
>> Castilian.  Its style is very old-fashioned, with very long Latin-style
>> sentences, with a lot of verbosity etc. but basically he uses modern
>> Castilian. And even older Castilian is not much different.

> I don't think that we have any real disagreement, Ed. Rates of linguistic
> change vary greatly, and social changes are no doubt an important
> contributing factor. The problem that I see is that what I see as roughly
> the same level of social upheaval may be associated with different rates of
> linguistic change, so that the predictive power of social change ->
> linguistic change is rather limited. The War of Roses may well be related to
> the Grat Vowel Shift in English, but did the Thirty Years' War, say, have
> the same effect on Standard German? Much of the German countryside was
> depopulated by the latter war, if I recall my history correctly.

[Ed]

Yes. What I said in this message (in the part left out by the moderator) is
that there are more factors that influence (rate of) change, sometimes
cancelling out or reinforcing social-political upheaval: various inputs, one
output (=rate of change), to speak in terms of system dynamics.

[ Moderator's note:
  My apologies if trimming of massive quoting did violence to anyone's position
  on the argument.  Too often, entire messages are quoted for a single comment
  on one paragraph, so the editorial hand is heavy on such postings.
  --rma ]

> As for Italian vs. Spanish, I was specifically thinking of phonetic change.
> I think that the phonology and phonetics of Standard Italian, based on but
> certainly not identical to, the dialect of Florence, have remained virtually
> unchanged since the Middle Ages. This is not true of Spanish: you may well
> be able to read Cervantes in the original, but the following changes have
> taken place since the late Middle Ages (which was my baseline): loss of
> voiced fricatives (v > b, z > s, Z > S, dz > ts > T (Latin American and
> Andalusian s)), followed by retraction of shibillants (S > x). In
> morphology, the pluperfect (cantara) has lost its original function (still
> there in literary Portuguese) and has acquired the same function as the
> imperfect subjunctive (cantase). Has anything equalling these changes taken
> place in standard Italian?

[Ed]

You're right of course about the evolution of Spanish pronunciation, but that
didn't seriously affect the language nor its intelligibility to people from
different times or places. And there is a lot of regional variation, as I
mentioned in another message: e.g. in some contexts a somewhat bilabial v is
still used (My Peruvian wife says 'Avraham Lincoln' while she finds it
difficult to pronounce v in isolation), in Latin America written letter z/c is
pronounced exactly the same as written s, etc... The Spanish pluperfect /
imperfect subjunctive matter is a bit more complicated: in certain (many) cases
they are indeed interchangeable, but in others not: e.g. you can say 'Quisiera
una Coca Cola' but not 'Quisiese...'. Some people consider 'cantase' more
"past" than 'cantara' e.g. in conditional or subordinate clauses 'Si lo hubiese
sabido, no te lo hubiera/habría dicho' vs. 'si lo supiera, no te lo diría'
, or 'le dije que no cantara' vs. 'le había dicho que no cantase', but uses
vary and many do not make this distinction (I don't know what the Real Academia
says, or used to say before they nominated South Americans like Vargas Llosa).

I'm much less knowledgeable in Italian, but as an outside observer I see a much
less complex use of perfect subjunctives etc., not as much 'simplification' as
in French though, where this has become very archaic ('si je l'eûs su...') or
fallen in disuse except in standard expressions ('ne fût-ce que...' = if it
were only...). I guess Italian will become more like French in maybe 100 years
or so. Who knows...

Thanks for your comments.

Ed. Selleslagh



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