Rate of Change

[Gabor Sandi]

>To: Ed Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be>
>Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:06:27 +0200

[ moderator snip ]

>[Ed]

>Italy had a very prestigious culture that exported ideas, art forms, etc.
>rather than receiving them. It was - and still is largely - in the period of
>stability that followed the rapid change after the collapse of the Roman
>Empire (Maybe it didn't change that much, as it is based very much on Tuscan
>regional speech that may be a lot older). The Risorgimento and Mussolini
>caused mainly self-affirmation and glorification, not change.

>Spanish (actually: Castilian) is possibly even more conservative than Italian:
>you can still read Cervantes without any study of older forms of Castilian.
>Its style is very old-fashioned, with very long Latin-style sentences, with a
>lot of verbosity etc. but basically he uses modern Castilian. And even older
>Castilian is not much different.

I don't think that we have any real disagreement, Ed. Rates of linguistic
change vary greatly, and social changes are no doubt an important
contributing factor. The problem that I see is that what I see as roughly
the same level of social upheaval may be associated with different rates of
linguistic change, so that the predictive power of social change ->
linguistic change is rather limited. The War of Roses may well be related to
the Grat Vowel Shift in English, but did the Thirty Years' War, say, have
the same effect on Standard German? Much of the German countryside was
depopulated by the latter war, if I recall my history correctly.

As for Italian vs. Spanish, I was specifically thinking of phonetic change.
I think that the phonology and phonetics of Standard Italian, based on but
certainly not identical to, the dialect of Florence, have remained virtually
unchanged since the Middle Ages. This is not true of Spanish: you may well
be able to read Cervantes in the original, but the following changes have
taken place since the late Middle Ages (which was my baseline): loss of
voiced fricatives (v > b, z > s, Z > S, dz > ts > T (Latin American and
Andalusian s)), followed by retraction of shibillants (S > x). In
morphology, the pluperfect (cantara) has lost its original function (still
there in literary Portuguese) and has acquired the same function as the
imperfect subjunctive (cantase). Has anything equalling these changes taken
place in standard Italian?

Cordially,

Gabor