Cladistic language concepts

[Isidore Dyen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I like yor contribution to the discussion. When I spoke of a main factor
in linguistic change, I was trying to get at the notion that there will be
linguistic change regardless of extraneous factor s such as those that
bwald is insisting on. The point is, as I see it, that linguistic change
is built into the way the community interacts with its language, whereas
some aspects of linguistic change are conditioned by the social changes
that are going on in the community. The latter type of change, since it is
local and temporary I thought could be excluded from being regarded as
a 'main factor', but I suppose it gets to be a matter of defintion.
 
The advantage of looking at the matter the way I have been doing it is
that the effects of linguistic change in the fragmentation of a linguistic
community can be related to the rate of intercommunication among the
speakers. Of course this rate is itself dependent on social factors, but
can be regarded apart from those factors as a matter of objective
observation, even though I would not seriously recommend that anyone
undertake to do it, even Labov. In the absence of other factors, we would
expect a community to become linguistically disparate and finally mutually
unintelligible if it were to separate into two sets that did not
intercommunicate with each other for some long period, say a thousand
years. Social factors other than the separation could be disregarded even
if they could not be actually excluded, human beings being what they are.
 
 On Sat, 10 Oct 1998, H.M.Hubey wrote:
 
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> > On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, bwald wrote:
> >
> > > Sorry I did not have time to reply to Isidore Dyen's message sooner.  He
> >  writes:
> > >
> > > >one of the main factors in linguistic change and
> > > >perhaps the main factor is the drive for efficiency in communication
 which
> > > >is dialectically resisted by the need for clarity so that efficiency does
> > > >not actually increase and the actual level of clarity does not change.
> > >
> > > I think there is good reason to keep these two traditional factors in mind
> > > in any attempt to understand constraints on linguistic change *overall*.
> > > There are, however, other factors involved in promoting change beside
> > > efficiency of communication, if that is intended to refer specifically to
> > > communication of *referential* information.  There is also the factor of
> > > maintaining some kind of (local) social identity, viewable as a shorthand
> > > for shared knowledge of the local society, and therefore contributing to
> > > communication (esp what can be understood within the social group *without
> > > having to be said*).  An important issue is the extent to which the
>
> If the factors all do not operate on the same time scales, the effects
> will
> not necessarily cancel out or mutually re-enforce each other.
>
> A good example of a similar problem is in the Brownian motion problem
> solve in the early part of this century. Atoms of a liquid are in
> continual motion but we cannot see them. The time scale in which they
> act/react/move is also very short compared to motion at slightly larger
> scales. The motion we can observe (with a microscope) is the motion of
> larger objects (like dust particles). The motion of these particles is
> due to correlated motion of atoms. The basic idea is that like throwing
> up 1 million pennies. Almost all the time, about half will be heads, and
> half tails. Similarly of all the atoms banging into these particles,
> about half will be in one direction and half in the other so that their
> combined effects will cancel out and there will be no observable motion
> of the particles. However, just as there will be cases in which about
> 900,000 coins can be Heads or Tails, there will instants in time in
> which most of the atoms will be moving in one direction (which is the
> "correlated motion" of the huge ensemble of atoms) and that effect will
> be seen in the motion of the particles suspended in the liquid. That
> motion is Brownian motion. IT is still random just like the underlying
> random motion of the atoms. But the fluctuations of the atoms cancel out
> almost all the time at their own time scales.
>
> The forces which have a propensity to create linguistic change also
> occur at various temporal and spatial scales. The rapid and local
> fluctuations in speech do not normally have permanent global effects.
> Every once in a while, there will a larger scale changes correlated in
> space and time, and it is those changes that we track in historical
> linguistics. IT would probably be a good idea to categorize the changes
> mentioned into different classes based on time and space scales.
>
> --
> Best Regards,
> Mark
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