<div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">===========================================<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 16 October 2009 - Volume 03<br></font><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#999999"><a href="mailto:lowlands@lowlands-l.net">lowlands@lowlands-l.net</a> - <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/">http://lowlands-l.net/</a><br>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">From: Mark Dreyer <</font><a href="mailto:mrdreyer@lantic.net"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">mrdreyer@lantic.net</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">><br>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.15 (01) [EN]</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Dear Mark, Ron & Co:<br>Â <br>Subject: LL-L "Language varieties"<br>Â <br>What a fine string:<br>Â <br>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.</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Mark, you think we could say then that generally languages in contact tend to simplify. <br>Â <br>However, at issue is what rates as simplification for the speaker, & he has other priorities than anyone else.<br>
 <br>This is a pet subject of mine. I believe either of two tendencies come into play, depending on whether the languages are closely or distantly related.<br> <br>If they are comparatively close, then the core dialect common to both is preserved & reinforced, the peculiarities of each fall away. This leaves a simpler language preserving the most archaic survivals of the relevant mother tongues. I call this ablation.<br>
 <br>If they are comparatively distant, then the socially dominant language acquires the working lexicon of the other. I call this agglommaration.<br> <br>I cite for agglommaration the example of Kiswahili, an Eastern-Coastal Bantu languages on a largely Arabic grammatical matrix.<br>
 <br>For ablation I cite Fanagolo, a blending of closely related Bantu languages of Southern East-Coasta origin.<br> <br>Afrikaans is ablative. So is Modern English where it applies to Old English & Old Norse dialects. However English is agglommarative where it applies to Early Middle English, Church Latin & Norman-French. There English acquired the habit of 'borrowing' terminology from any other language it can lay its hands on.<br>
 <br>Simplification occurs in both, & in both cases the trend seems to lean towards a more analytic grammar<br> <br>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.<br>
 <br>While we're on this subject I can just recall a letter sent by a friend (an Afrikaner) who immigrated to New Zealand a few years ago. The letter was in Afrikaans but it was not an easy read. Practically every word he used was what we here call an 'Angalisisme' - a re-working of an English term by Afrikaans pronunciation & orthography into something an Afrikaner can read & pronounce, & presumably understand. This is not a well-liked phenomenon.<br>
 <br>Piqued by a notion I re-wrote it in English & found it much less unpleasant to follow. This, though I took care not to preserve it, epitomises agglommaration in language. Consider if a whole community or a whole subject people were to do this, & their children to learn to talk that way!<br>
 <br>For an experiment I hauled out my Sweet & took it to the same letter, replacing every Romance word with one in Old English. on the strength of this I am easily persuaded that a Fleming of John of Gaunt's time would consider English as merely another dialect of his own tongue, itself so fecund of dialect.<br>
 <br>Ah, the English (as Kipling said), the English are a race apart!<br> <br>Yrs,<br>Mark</font></div>
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