LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.19 (04) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 19 October 2009 - Volume 04
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From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.18 (01) [EN]

Dear Sandy Fleming

Subject: LL-L "Language varieties"

>Uh? You must get some sort of compensation?

Compensation? For your neighbour finding diamonds on his spread! Dream on.
It passes for an act of God hereabouts, even if the mine pipes out all the
ground-water for miles around & sink-holes swallow houses into their depths.

>That's what I was originally saying, I think?
    Re my note on the cyclic travel of language between the grammatical &
the analytic. I will not differ with you. I thought I was filling in a query
posted by the other Mark.

>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?
    I would insist they do but I couldn't motivate it. Iceland is an example
of linguistic isolation these last thousand or so years (not long, but
covering one of our more familiar Indo-Germanic languages), only we aught to
bear in mind they started with Norse colonists on the bounce from other less
profitable enterprises, many if not most, so I hear, ex colonists of
Ireland, & most with a fair labour-force of Irish slaves. This heritage
survives, I think, in their Icelandic alphabet & script.
    Trish, the daughter of a family friend, worked there for a number of
years (before the crash) & inevitably learned Icelandic. She says the
Icelanders can all read the old sagas, but as they point out one doesn't
speak exactly that way today.
    As I see it children learn to speak by trial & error. If an error turns
out to be useful they retain it. Isn't that the case with slang & jargon?
The latter will develop with the development of new technologies, & the
former will change in every generation since speech as used is as much a
tool of association as it is of communication (who's in & who's out of the
group, & how will you show it? 'U' & non-'U' speech, of course). Both these
will apply even in total absence of contact with another language.

>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'm with you there, But I really have no contribution to make myself.

•

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