[ADS-L] Austen and language change

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Interesting, and certainly the "my father" reference would be marked today. I 
assume that the two sisters were not having a tiff? If so, a 20th century 
participant could take it as perhaps meaning 'Father as he appears to me as 
opposed to your view of him'. Ausgten can be very subtle ...

In a message dated 9/2/08 10:07:19 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:


> 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
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> 




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