Rate of Change

Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
Sat Jun 30 17:06:27 UTC 2001


----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabor Sandi" <g_sandi at hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 10:10 AM

[ moderator snip ]

> 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.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Maybe I should have touched upon other factors; I didn't mainly because the
initial discussion was about the correlation between socio-cultural and
linguistic change.

In pre-modern times, the factors I mentioned often, but not always, lead to
accelerated linguistic change. That depends also on other factors like whether
a given language is on the giving or the receiving end, its associated
culture's degree of self-centeredness or openness (involving among many other
things, the existence or absence of plurilinguism, of a common transcultural
geographical space like NW Europe, etc. or else: cultural-linguistic
pride/chauvinism), its place in the pecking order of cultures, and the like.

As I mentioned, breaking up of previous cultural or linguistic norms, usually
because of the breakdown of communications, is a potent factor in linguistic
change (actually: divergence), at least in the beginning. E.g. the breakup of
the Roman Empire.

In modern times we have the opposite: notwithstanding rapid cultural change, we
see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved communications and mass media,
which act as linguistic role models, much more than any Académie ever did.
Here in Flanders, e.g. we see the pretty fast breakdown of dialects, via a
stage of 'intermediate' language or seriously locally colored standard
language. In the Netherlands, by and large, this stage has already been passed.

When suddenly left to themselves after some upheaval (Normans in England,
breakdown of the Roman Empire...), languages initially tend to evolve rapidly
to a what might be called a more stable situation, and then evolve according to
their own internal idiosyncrasies. And this internally driven rate of change
seems to behave in an irregular way. It seems that there are periods of
relative stability between periods of rapid - mostly phonological - change, as
if certain points in linguistic evolution were unstable or were like
crossroads: a new path is 'chosen'.  It looks a lot like chaos theory.
Obviously, socio-cultural change can be a trigger in this context, but it is
not a necessary condition.

I believe it is important to distinguish internally and externally caused
linguistic change, even when the two may be (more or less) overlapping at
times, e.g. the Great Vowel Shift (internal) and the Norman-French influence in
English.

> 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?

[Ed]

Early French was a typical case of the breakdown of linguistic unity, after the
fall of the Roman Empire.

In the high Middle Ages, the Langue d'Oïl was at the core of what was
becoming the great nation-state of France, while the Langue d'Oc (Occitan, and
Catalan in the Roussillon) was the language of a region ('Aquitaine', in its
later stages and extent) that was on its way to becoming a backwater and a
virtual colony of the actual France (i.e. the north). Some people in the Midi
think that is still the case today, according to the slogans you see sometimes.

> 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.

[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.

French has change more, but that is nothing compared to the way English and
Dutch have changed. For the last 500 years or so, only the pronunciation has
changed moderately, disregarding the modest regeneration of the vocabulary and
the gradual loss (mainly in coloquial speech) of more complex conjugation forms
('l'eûsses-tu cru?') that are still normal in Castilian. Even Rabelais can
still be read without too much preparation. Villon is a bit more difficult.

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

But without such a dramatic intervention, Old Dutch is just as incomprehensible
to modern speakers. Middle Dutch and even 16-17th c. Dutch are noticeably
harder to understand than Shakespeare. But Flemish/Dutch culture has always
been very open and exposed to many influences, just like modern English, with
the British colonial past and all that.

> 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?

[Ed]

I think I explained that above: the key is normalization by mass media and
generalized literacy. That is: a totally 'abnormal' situation as compared to
the (remote) past.

> Just some thoughts for discussion...

> Best wishes,
> Gabor

[Ed]
I hope I have contributed to that (again).

Ed Selleslagh



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