LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.18 (01) [EN]

[Lowlands-L List]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 18 October 2009 - Volume 01
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.16 (03) [EN]

> From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
 > Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.15 (01) [EN]
>
> Dear Mark, Ron & Co:
>
> Subject: LL-L "Language varieties"
>
> What a fine string:
>
> But let me explain my absence: In a surprise development (Thank God my
> father did not live to know it), some misbegotten son-of-a-geologist
> determined that the slough of blue marle-clay that bedevilled access
> across to the farm these last hundred & more years is the crown of a
> pipe of kimberlite - diamond-bearing. It is not on our farm but
> next-door. Koos Engelbrecht's eyes have turned into dollar-signs, but
> the rest of us know that any hope of continuing actually farming
> anywhere around, game or anything else, has gone for a ball of pawpaw.
> The farm has been sold & we have been packing & moving.

Uh? You must get some sort of compensation?

>
> Mark, you think we could say then that generally languages in contact
> tend to simplify.
>
> Moderately off the subject I recall reading in 'The Loom of Language'
> how the author rejected the notion of language evolving in any
> direction away from grammatical or towards the analytical, or to any
> degree of simplification. Rather, he explained, it is a cyclic
> process, in which analytic features blend into neighbouring words &
> become indivisible constructions of a grammatical form, that gradually
> fall away as other analytic devices are brought into use to be
> absorbed & suffer modification, loss & replacement in their turn. He
> referred to examples in the Indic languages with a Sanskrit base,
> arguing (I don't know) that dialects could be picked out showing
> different points in this cyclic process between grammatical & analytic
> in repeated cycles.

That's what I was originally saying, I think?

Anyway, a question that I'm interested in seems to be going unanswered
here, and that is, do languages change even if there isn't contact with
other languages? A small island with only a few dialects of one language
and no outside contact would be hard to find these days, but such was
less unusual in the past, so would these languages still have kept
changing, and in what ways?

Even if it's impossible now to find languages that aren't in some sort
of contact with others, the question is still interesting because even a
language in contact might be changing in accordance with these internal
(or possibly non-linguistic) forces as well as whatever changes may
occur due to language contacts.

I think this can certainly be seen in sign languages, though it's not so
clear to me if the same principles apply to spoken languages as the sort
of internal changes that go on in sign languages involve the classifier
system.

All natural (Deaf) sign languages have a classifier system, yet despite
the efforts of linguists it's very hard to find anything similar in any
oral language.

A sign language classifier system is a bit like having a Flash plug-in
for your language: instead of stringing out sentences from lexemes you
can actually _show_ what's happening in your narrative using a somewhat
augmented grammar and phonology. There is something like this in oral
languages, in that when you use your hands to explain directions to
people, or when you use your hands to talk about throwing things away,
lifting heavy objects, a chattering mouth and so on, but this is vague
and there's no way of connecting it with the oral language.

In sign languages, however, the classifier system feeds some vocabulary
into the language, as the more successful classifier expressions become
widely recognised and then gradually become more and more like lexical
signs.

Take, for example, an elephant: when something like this is a new idea
it tends to get fully described in a sign language: the way of walking,
the tusks, the ears, the trunk. If it becomes well used, then some of
this is dropped and you may find the classifier expression for the trunk
alone being used to sign "elephant". Lexical signs tend to be of the
form hold-movement-hold and be signed in a restricted space, so if the
"trunk" classifier is more complex than this then it tends to get
simplified until it becomes a structurally well-behaved sign.

In this way the classifier system acts as a conduit for transforming
real-world objects and actions into lexicalised nouns and verbs, so the
language changes not due to contact or borrowing from other languages
(although sign languages do that as well), but due to linguistic
principles driving internal change.

Sign languages and classifier systems aside, I'd be interested in
learning if there are internal forces that drive language change in oral
languages. For example, is onomatopoiea responsible for significant
changes in oral languages or do some sounds tend to merge (eg wh > w)
and is this sort of thing never-ending?

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/ (apology accepted, Sir Tim Berners-Lee :)

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Sandy,

The case of Polynesian seems to show that some change does take place in
relative isolation.  However, Polynesian migration to the far reaches of the
Pacific Ocean took place relatively "recently." Among these language
varieties, Hawaiian has undergone the most extreme sound changes
(simplification), but otherwise it is still quite closely related at the
very least to other geographically widely scattered East Polynesian
languages, such as Maori and Rapa Nui at the western and eastern points of
the Polynesian Triangle in which Hawaiian occupies to northern point. (We
are talking about enormous distances here.) Notable lexical changes only
started happening fairly recently, namely due to contacts with English,
French and Spanish, on the Hawaiian Islands also with Portuguese, Chinese,
Japanese, and Filipino languages.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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