Rate of Change: A Closer Look

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin]

[[Steve Long wrote:]]

How do you propose to measure the rate of change in modern preliterate
languages?  How do they measure up against written languages?  Do they give
any evidence that rate is affected by the acquisition of writing?

[[I respond:]]

I'm not going to attempt to address your entire point, but I recently had an
article published that illustrates what can be done with preliterate
languages.

John E. McLaughlin.  2000.  "Language Boundaries and Phonological Borrowing
in the Central Numic Languages," _Uto-Aztecan:  Structural, Temporal, and
Geographic Perspectives_.  Ed. Eugene H. Casad and Thomas L. Willet.
Hermosillo, Mexico:  Universidad de Sonora.  Pp. 293-303.

Basically, it all depends on how well the language has been documented
during its history of contact with literate languages.  In the case of
Comanche, we know that the pre-Comanche physically moved away from their
Shoshoni ancestors in the first decade of the 18th century.  The earliest
record of the language is from 1786 and it is clear that Shoshoni and
Comanche were still very, very close at that time, if not still virtually
identical in phonological and morphological structure.  Today, there are
five main phonological changes that separate Shoshoni from Comanche and make
the two mutually incomprehensible without extensive practice.
(Impressionistically, the same magnitude of difference as between American
English and Scots.)  The next documentation in 1828 shows a language in
transition with most of the 5 phonological changes in full process of taking
charge.  The next major documentation in 1861 shows that all five of the
phonological changes have finished the job of restructuring the language.

During this entire period, Comanche society was preliterate and still
nomadic, having been forced onto the reservation only in 1872.  So, during
this 75-year span, 5 fairly important sound changes occurred.  The extensive
records made of Comanche in the late 1940s and 1950s by the first
professional linguists to visit them show that virtually no sound changes
occurred during the following 75-year span.  This measurement, of course,
only deals with phonological changes and not the morphological and syntactic
changes which also occurred in the three centuries between the physical
split with Shoshoni and the present day.  (The 18th and 19th century
documents are exclusively word lists.)  So we wind up with 75 years of
extensive phonological change and then 75 years of very little phonological
change in the same preliterate language.  BTW, none of the five changes are
due to the influence of English or Spanish.  Only one of them was due to
influence from a neighboring language--the loss of nasals in nasal-stop
clusters from the Southern Ute dialect of Colorado River Numic (most of you
may know this language as "Southern Paiute").

I can't really tell you how this stacks up against figures for literate
societies because I'm not an Indo-European expert, but I do seem to recall
from my general reading in historical linguistics that this seems to be the
general pattern found in all language change, whether the language is
written or not.  The true Indo-Europeanists can undoubtedly provide detailed
information to verify or correct this impression.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, English
Utah State University

Program Director
USU On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (FAX)
mclasutt at brigham.net