Usitative, etc.

[Rudy Troike]

Mia,

     You are in danger of sounding like Rousseau. The GIS article amused me
with one point about a term for a passageway for water after a rain, in an
area like the Southwest U.S. where surface water is a temporal thing. Here
in Arizona and New Mexico, we have a similar feature which has a label, 
"wash",
which finds no counterpart in the better-watered parts of the English-speaking
world, and might equally confound the GIS article author. I was amused 
recently
by a story told by a man here in Tucson, who took his sons back to his own
childhood home in Ohio for a visit. When they got into the Midwest, at one
point they crossed a river, and one son excitedly pointed out "Dad, look!
The river has water in it!" Unlike the assumption of the GIS author that
"river" is defined as water moving in a stream bed, here in Arizona children
grow up understanding "river" as a stream bed that may occasionally have some
water in it. Do we speak the same language? Do Arizona children have a 
"deeper"
conceptual-cognitive understanding of "river" than speakers of English in
most of the rest of the globe? Or has the dessication of the atmosphere
impoverished their cognitive competence?
     Ever since the rise of cities, country-dwellers have been ridiculing
their "city-slicker" visitors for their atrophied awareness of country 
features,
while the urbanites retaliate by making fun of the rural "yokels" for
their ignorance of the citysphere. But their grammars don't differ in
profound ways, although rural linguistic features earn the label of
"solecisms", going back to the Greeks, and urban features may draw private
rural scorn, but public envy, which is why historically, cities show rings
of isoglosses around them as the surrounding rural populations have
imitated urban speech.
     Language changes for the same basic reason that any other form of human
behavior changes -- fashion, and the desire to imitate someone or some group
who/which is admired. Grammar is usually the most resistant part of language
to change, in part because it is so largely out of awareness, but that is
not always true. On the one hand, the -m in "am" is a first-person marker
that goes back to Indo-European, but has disappeared in all English verbs
except "be". On the other, "like" has emerged as a quotative marker in
American teen speech with lightning speed, and "you guys" has become the
new 2nd person plural pronoun with equal rapidity. Evidentials in verbs,
an old element in the Turkic language family, was borrowed into Bulgarian,
alone of the Slavic languages, as a result of the Ottoman occupation of
the area. And Gumperz has documented a village in India where three
languages are spoken, two related and one not, where all three, while
retaining their native vocabulary, have developed perfectly identical
patterns of morphology and syntax. Grammatical borrowing is so common, in
fact, that linguists are now suspicious of grammar as a major evidence for
genetic relatedness between languages.
    The interpretation of identical grammatical structures may differ between
languages, even closely related languages, because of fashion-driven change.
We have little micro-evidence to prove why, when, or how changes start, but
we are able to catch them only after the fact, when it is too late to
reconstruct their orgins, except speculatively. So as Scott warns,
attributing understandings of the universe to grammar is a hazardous and
largely unvalidated undertaking, best avoided.

      Rudy