Austen and language change

[Laurence Horn]

So I'm listening to _Persuasion_ (1818) as a
talking book and realizing that for me this is a
better way to notice unusual usage than in actual
reading.  Some lexical items that are older than
I thought--I was struck, for example, by a
reference to an "unmodernized" house.  Sounded a
bit...modern to me, and it sort of is; turns out
the OED has one cite for "unmodernized" before
1883, and it's this very one from _Persuasion_.
Then there's the occasional syntactic archaism,
of course; one that struck my ear was the tag in
"they called here afterward, did not they?" where
we'd have either "did they not?" or "didn't
they".  But the one that really seemed odd is a
pragmatic shift that we may or may not have
discussed here: when any one of the three Eliot
sisters is speaking to one or both of the other
two, she refers to their progenitor as "my
father", with no implication that the referent
isn't also "your father".  I'm pretty sure this
usage must have disappeared by the Victorian age
in favor of "Father" or "our father", or in
informal usage "Pa", "Papa", "Dad", "our dad",
etc., but I don't know when.  (I assume the same
was true for "my mother", "my sister", etc.).
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know the point
when it became impossible, or highly marked, to
use "my father" in addressing one's sibling, and
whether anyone has discussed this shift from a
sociolinguistic (or other) perspective?  Did
something similar take place with "mon père",
"meine Mutter", etc.?

LH

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