rate of language change

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:
<<This is along the same vein.  If "moving between languages" means anything,
it means changing languages.  And if it means bilingualism or changing
languages between generations, it is one very important form of linguistic
change.>>

In a message dated 4/28/99 7:23:04 AM, you wrote:

<<-- you're being a little obtuse here.  "Changing languages" -- as in
linguistic succession, people abandoning, say, Celtiberian for Latin -- is a
different phenomenon from "linguistic change", say Marcus ==> Marco.>>

Nobody said they were the same thing.  But "changing languages" is an
established and important way in which linguistic change happens.  Remember
the cite I gave you for Mallory, IE and bilingualism?  Get a chance to read
it?  Didn't think so.

"Changing dialects" is of course a more common way in which language changes,
but the difference is quantitative not qualitative.  Early English speakers
(including Johnson) who recognized the GVS described it simply as "a change
in dialect."  "Acceptance" of innovations has often meant acceptance and
often individual awareness that one is speaking in a new way.  Even where
speakers are not aware of the changes they are adopting, "acceptance"
requires a change not in one speaker but in many.  And in the interim the new
and old must exist alongside one another.  And the contrast is often obvious.

And of course it takes a certain obtuseness to talk as if "changing
languages" had no connection at all with "linguistic change."  Obviously a
group of people changing languages or dialects are undergoing linguistic
change.  In fact, in between the new and the old language or dialect, there
is the potential for the most extreme and permanent kind of linguistic
change.  See e.g., Katsue Akiba-Reynolds, cited in Lehmann's HL p. 314, for
solid evidence that Japanese had its origins as a hybrid of two languages.

And - going back to the original topic - whether speakers are aware or
unaware that they are accepting changes in their language may be quite
irrelevant to the fact of that change.

S. Long