Change and What Remains

[Larry Trask]

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Just to untangle the two issues:  the absence of change was always a
> pure hypothetical.  The coexistence of ancestor with daughter
> language is obviously a separate question.

I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
generation to the next.  See below.

> I hypothesized a language that did not share any of the (300?)
> "innovations" that went into the UPenn tree.  When you stated that
> an ancestor cannot co-exist with a daughter, I did my best to
> conform to that 'rule' by hypothesizing a string of "languages".
> Others questioned the parent /daughter statement before I did.

> If you look back at the thread, you'll see that "ceaseless change"
> was used to support your no-parent-with-daughter position.  And with
> regard to that, let me write again that bringing up "ceaseless
> change" tells us nothing about whether enough "remained" of the
> ancestor so that it could co-exist with the daughter.

Sorry, but, with the best will in the world, I can't understand this.
What is the force here of `enough'?

The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.  In that sense, I
suppose, a language can co-exist with its own daughter.  Is that what
you mean?

My 22-year-old niece has acquired some of the vowel changes collectively
known as the Northern Cities Shift.  As a result, her vowel system is
conspicuously different from mine, and I occasionally have trouble
understanding her.  Her parents (my generation) have no trouble
understanding her, because they're exposed to the youngsters' speech all
the time, but they don't talk like her.  But I don't get home very
often, and, when I do get home, I'm startled by the young people's
English.

All of the several generations can talk to one another, just as I could
talk to my grandparents when they were alive.  But my grandparents
didn't sound exactly like my parents, either.  And my Aunt Catherine,
who's now pushing 100, sounds remarkably different from the youngsters,
and even from me.

As I said, ceaseless change.  The incomprehensible English of King Alred
is separated from us by scarcely more than forty generations.
Chaucer's speech, separated from us by no more than 25 generations,
would also be utterly incomprehensible to us.  Even Shakespeare, only
about 16 generations ago, would probably be largely incomprehensible to
us if we could hear him speak -- and some specialists believe we would
not be able to understand him at all.  What will our descendants, 20 or
25 generations from now, make of the sound recordings we'll be leaving
them?

So, apart from the trivial case of me and my niece, how can a language
co-exist with its own descendant?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk