Cladistic language concepts

[Max W Wheeler]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Roger Wright wrote:
 
>
> 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
 
Can you actually substantiate this claim, with regard to Catalan? It is
true that such an effect may appear to someone who doesn't know about
the history of the languages (obviously not you); in several cases
standardizers prefer a form with a longer established literary
tradition. Note that people from French Catalonia have accused the
standardizers of preferring those forms which were MORE similar to
Spanish.
 
 
Max Wheeler
___________________________________________________________________________
 
Max W. Wheeler <maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320
___________________________________________________________________________