Rate of Change

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 6:42 AM

> At 12:18 AM 6/8/01 -0400, Brian M. Scott wrote:

>> The basic point is probably sound enough, but you'd have a hard time
>> finding a medieval historian who would agree that 'during the Middle
>> Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years'.  Pick any 100-
>> year period you like during the MA, and you'll find significant social
>> changes.

> Quite so, even based on my amateur studies of post-Norman England I cannot
> name any 100 year period without any social change.  Sometimes change was
> even fast by modern standards.  The changes after the end of Stephen's
> reign were extremely rapid, as Henry didn't tolerate much guff.

[Ed Selleslagh]

I made a clear exception for "periods of upheaval, relatively sudden migrations
etc.". I guess the Norman invasion in England was a major upheaval with long
lasting after-effects.

During the early Middle Ages on the continent, there were lots of limited wars
and countries changed hands many times, but the cultural evolution was
generally pretty slow up to the 13-14th century, when the cities became more
independant and created a new type of civil society.

Anyway, my focus was more on Antiquity, and my remark about the M.A. may not
have been so relevant or convincing.

But it is a fact that some societies evolve very slowly at times, sometimes
over a 1000 year period, cf. Ancient Egypt, China, arctic peoples, etc.

Quick change is almost always related to migration/separation,
invasion/conquest, major changes in the environment, import of new technology,
etc. These are discrete, non-continuous phenomena in most cases, at least in
pre-industrial times. Languages are part of culture, and the single most
important tool for communication within a society, so they tend to follow the
socio-cultural changes. The conditions for quick change mentioned above are
also favorable to linguistic change (physical separation, exposure to other
languages, cultures, technology, etc); conversely, their absence causes a
fall-back to a kind of slow base-rate of linguistic change (e.g. phonetics)
implicit in the transmission from one generation to the next one, a bit like
genetic evolution.

This my own view of course. Anyone is free to disagree.

Ed.