Cladistic language concepts

[Isidore Dyen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Your point is interesting and relevant, but the question would remain
whether Malkiel or anyone else for all of their approach to omniscient are
able to control all the facts. What is at issue for theories concerning
linguistic change is what is intrinsic to natural language as an
instrument and what is extrinsic. This question concerns, I suppose, what
we would expect to happen in a language in the absence of abnormal social
events like conquests and enslavements, restrictive laws including
persecutions, that sort of thing. Under the least interference I would
expect linguistic change to go on, unevenly in proportion to the extent of
the community with homogeneity depending on the rate of interlocution ( or
intercommunication). Such a theory which distinguishes between linguistic
change that is inherent and that which reflects social stress may suffer
because the distinction between the two effects cannot always be made and
perhaps can never be made, but would have the value of recognizing one of
the components or factors in linguistic change.
Resistance to maintain identity comes into play when the threat to the
identity involves some loss and in this sense the insistence on the
identity is a pursuit of advantage. Although this pursuit is omnipresent,
questions of identity do not usually arise without association with loss
or gain. Perhaps what I am trying to say is that in a community in which
threats or advantages related to identity did not arise, lingusitic change
would still go on and in this sense such threats and advantages are
extraneous social factors, no matter how close to universal.
 
On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Roger Wright wrote:
 
> ----------------------------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
>