Mycenaean (Standardization)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:
<<The original point was that a  language that splinters into dialects is
moving towards imprecision.>>

In a message dated 4/13/99 7:40:58 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
<<-- no, it isn't.  It's not become less precise, it's developing
differences.  Speakers of the same dialect will have no problem with it.>>

I wrote
<< And Nestor notices in one province oddly low counts of cows and
aurochs....  Upon investigation, he finds that a dialect has developed
locally, where cows now mean cows and aurochs,...  And he finds that his law
"you must pay taxes on all animals" in this new dialect means "you may pay
taxes on animals."

We may just see a "difference" between the dialects here.  (A structural
difference.)  But Nestor sees this as a functional matter - the common
language has become "imprecise."  Words no longer refer to the same thing and
do not have the same effect with this new dialect.">>

In a message dated 4/28/99 6:36:26 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
<<-- this is, to put it mildly, not a real problem.  You're confusing
historic time with the everyday, ordinary-priorities variety.>>

Doesn't "everyday" time become "historic time?"
To put it just as mildly, you don't know what you are talking about.  You're
confusing blarney with saying something.

For anyone else on the list who might have even a little serious interest in
the subject, there is large volume of legal and some linguistic scholarship
on how the dialectical differences or new dialects can affect the precision
of old terms of custom and law and how those imprecisions have been
corrected.

A very relevant example:  English encountered this with the word "cattle"
where dialect came to use it to refer to only to livestock, while in its
earliest sense it originally referred to any form of personal (versus real)
property.   Cognate with "capital", the form travelled into English with the
Conquest as Anglo-Norman "catel" and then "chatel."  By the 15th century,
"cattel" (in various spellings w/o /ch/) was being used in the West Country
only to refer to livestock, but in London, in Parliament and the common law
courts, it continued to be used interchangaeably with "chattel" to mean all
goods and personal property.

The eventual distinction between cattle and chattel took some time to happen.
 In the Taming of the Shrew, we read, "Shee is my goodes, my chattels, she is
my house."  In the Trial of the Regicides, eg, the instruction is to
determine "what Goods, and Chattels" the convicted might have, specifying
livestock was separate.  Drayton and de la Pryme use "chattel" to refer to
livestock in the 1600's.  By this time, however, this split meaning was
creating problems in terms of census, taxes, rents and inheritance.

In 1741, Parliament specifically narrowly defined "cattle": "By cattle in
this act, it is understood any bull, cow, ox, steer, bullock, heifer, calf,
sheep and lamb, and no other cattle whatever." Act 15 & 16 Geo II 34,
excluding chickens and bees and personal property.  This followed the common
law courts in converting from "cattle" to "chattel."  Cattle continued
however to refer to horses and other domesticated quadrupeds into the 19th
Century.  See Ash Sheep Co. v. US, 252 US 159.  Finally in the US, based on
"the sense in which the term is used in the western states," the term cattle
was recognized to refer only to members of "bovine genus" in various western
state courts.  State v. Dist Ct Nye County, 42 Nev 218.  It would be some
time however before this primary sense came into popular usage in the eastern
US and was included in legislative definitions.  See Bell v Erie R Co,  171
NYS 341, 343.  But still today "chattel" in contracts and in the speech of
lawyers and bankers means any personal property.

>From all this, when we picture such culturally vivid things as cattlemen,
cattle drive, cattle town or cattlecatcher, we do not include either sheep,
bees or objects obtained at a neighbor's yard sale - although they were all
once 'cattle.'

This is a pretty good example of how ambiguoty created by dialectical usage
caused an unacceptible imprecision from the official perspective and resulted
in effective official standardization to cancel the ambiguoty.  There are
hundreds of examples like this in English that materially changed the course
and the history of the language and the culture.  One of my favorites is the
path of change in meaning, morphology and phonetics that the word "saloon"
went through thanks to officialdom.

And of course - to get back on track - it might have been so with the
Mycenenaeans.

Hope this was of use,
Steve Long