Mycenaean (Standardization)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/12/99 10:03:40 PM, gordonselway at gn.apc.org wrote:

<<Utter nonsense, twaddle, just blethering.  Definitions in statutes are
given for the purpose of understanding the statute, and do not - cannot -
have a wider function>>

That's interesting.  But not necessarily true.

A case in point.  Unfortunately, just recently , I must have heard the word
'FEMA' repeated at least fifty times by some folks who used it very much in
the context of ordinary speech.  What they were using word referring to a
situation, an action and a consequence that was thoroughly originated in the
language of government.

The next time you ask for "whiskey" at a bar, consider that it was the law
that defined the word that makes it predictable what you get in response.
Ask for a "pound" of meat and realize that modern weights and standards are
the result of governmental action not common usage.  Before government
defined it in a statute, the "gasoline" someone offered you might not have
been something you would have wanted to put in your car.  And in London,
before Parliament acted, if you were a country bumpkin and pledged your
"cattle" to a London banker, you may have thought you were pledging your
livestock, but you were possibly pledging - per London usage - everything you
owned.

Language's first function is communication.  Ambiguoty can interfere with
that communication to the point where it has adverse social consequences.  It
is really a bit naive to think that government can have no effect on such
situations.  And the next time you hear it called the King's English, be
assured that it was therefore not expected that anyone at all could change it
as they wished.

Mallory in ISIE identifies the three leading "agents" of language change in
three "persona": the soldier, the priest and the merchant.  All three have in
the past been identified as having interests intricately wound up in what we
know as "government."

<<What evidence do we have that the good folk of Argos, Knossos, Pylos,
Tiryns, wherever, spoke the language of the tablets?  Maybe the tablets
show a version of Greek which is a short branch off the main thread of the
story, cf the Rgveda language in the history of Indian.>>

I believe Linear B Greek was called "archaic Greek" before someone noticed it
was a dead ringer for Aeolian.  I really don't know what the writings can
tell us about the early standardization of a language.  But I do know that it
would be a mistake to think that they can't tell us anything - at least
without closer examination.

Regards,
Steve Long