Rate of Change

[Gabor Sandi]

>[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.

Reply:

I have a lot of sympathy for your point of view, Ed, since I also like to
draw a parallel between accelerated language change and changes in the
external environment of the speakers, whether characterized as historical or
social changes.

Yet I can't help wondering about the circularity of the argument: when we
see fast linguistic change, we look at society at the time of the change,
and fix on some aspect of it that is undergoing change - after all,
something is bound to be changing at any one period, given the fact that
human beings get bored easily.

Take periods of known "great change": the English vowel shift for example,
or French (Latin in Gaul?) between the end of the Western Roman empire (end
of 5th century AD) and the Strasbourg Oaths (mid 9th century). Did these
periods correspond to greater social change than earlier or later periods in
the same geographic area, or when compared with the same historical period
in other (but comparable) areas? I think that France in the high Middle Ages
is a good example: the area of the langue d'oeil underwent noticeably more
changes in both phonetics and morphology than did the arae of the langue
d'oc. Is this because of more social changes in the north than in the south?

Standard Italian has undergone practically no changes in its phonological or
morphological structure since Dante's time, yet standard English, French and
Spanish have all changed considerably since then. Has Italy been a
historical or social backwater in all this time? I hardly think so, what
with constant invasions, the Risorgimento, Mussolini and the rest.

And I haven't even broached the subject of contemporary life, probably the
fastest changing social (and technical) environment ever known to mankind.
Yet the phonological and morphological structures of contemporary languages
are not changing that fast, or are they?

Just some thoughts for discussion...

Best wishes,
Gabor