rate of language change

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: X99Lynx at aol.com <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Date: vrijdag 16 april 1999 11:18

[snip]
>For Mallory, "moving between languages" was the crux of the whole
>Indo-European issue. (ISIE, p257)  I read in D, Crystal that the loss of
>inflection in English has been closely connected with the bilingualism
>effected by the Danish invasions (CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32).

>Steve Long

[Ed Selleslagh]

That may be right, but how do you explain the same, and simultaneous,
phenomenon in Dutch, a closely (geographically and linguistically) related
language, which underwent only a very minor influence from the Viking
invasions?  The rest of Low-German equally lost a major part of its
inflection, in contrast with High-German - and a lot of the little that's
left may be attributed to High-German influence, or even re-introduction by
analogy (HG being the language of education).

Could it be that this phenomenon is the dominant one in Germanic, and that
High-German is the exception? (and why, or 'how come'?)

BTW, I don't know the answer.

Ed.