Celtic influence

[iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu]

On Mon, 15 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time,
> iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes:

> >Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages
> of stratified societies are always class dialects.>

> -- That's simply not so.  In the US, dialect is regional rather than class-
> based.

	It's both.  I hear lower-class dialect fairly frequnetly.

> "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland
> dialect.  I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week,
> and they have no correlation to class at all.

> The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a
> class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very
> rare phenomenon.

	Not that rare.  Classical Latin was also a class dialect.  In
general anything that leads to lessened contact will lead to divergence,
and that includes class barriers, gender barriers, even (dare I say it)
mountains.

> > Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect

	Of an upper class.

> Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect...
> because that's exactly what they did.  Prior to the 18th century, squire and
> tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects.

	The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous,
because the previous standard had been destroyed by the Norman Conquest.
As a new one emerged, for a time everyone spoke his local dialect, because
there was nothing else. Thus the class barriers in English at that
time were relatively recent, and there had not been much time for
much divergence to occur.

> There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in
> Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke
> various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose
> that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much
> different from the spoken language.  Perhaps a bit more conservative, but
> then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken
> language as well.

	Yes, and various sub-standard features, such as the accumulative
("double") negative and Black English "be", despite being old, are
suppressed.

					DLW