Cladistic language concepts

[Roger Wright]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Fri, 9 Oct 1998, Isidore Dyen wrote:
 
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I will take up only one point, the one regarding social resistance to
>change based on the desire to maintain identity. The facts seem to
>indicate that such resistance is usually coupled with some other basis of
>resistance such as a political, religious, or economic motivation. The
>complication is that such resistance tends to disappear with the
>disappearance of the motivation.
 
 
Sometimes it seems, to us looking back, like unnecessary resistance, at
other times it seems like unnecessary innovation. But at the period
concerned, it usually takes the form of a motivated choice between
existing variants. Malkiel, for example, pointed to several cases in
which sixteenth-century Portuguese had two variants available (in
morphology or phonetics, but it also applies to vocabulary), both
indigenous, and they - perhaps consciously - chose the one that was
least like Spanish, asserting their identity that way. Well, sometimes
they chose the least evolved variant (thereby appearing to be resistant
to change) and sometimes thereby they chose the most evolved (thereby
appearing to be changing more than expected) but in neither case was the
choice of variant based on relative archaism. But it doesn't look as
if they chose forms, archaic or innovative, that didn't actually
exist at all at the time; it was a choice between already existing
variants. This train of thought and motivated choice of variants is
still happening within the non-Castilian regions of Spain, particularly
in vocabulary; where Catalan, or Galician, has two words that are for
practical purposes synonymous, one of which is like the Castilian word
for the same meaning and the other of which is not, the dictionaries and
the standardizers of Catalan and of Galician have tended to prefer the
one that isn't like Castilian. (In order to annoy the Castilians, but of
course in practice it just annoys many Catalans and Galicians, since the
Castilians couldn't care less). This is known as "diferencialismo".
                                        RW