LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.16 (03) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 16 October 2009 - Volume 03
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From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.15 (01) [EN]

Dear Mark, Ron & Co:

Subject: LL-L "Language varieties"

What a fine string:

But let me explain my absence: In a surprise development (Thank God my
father did not live to know it), some misbegotten son-of-a-geologist
determined that the slough of blue marle-clay that bedevilled access across
to the farm these last hundred & more years is the crown of a pipe of
kimberlite - diamond-bearing. It is not on our farm but next-door. Koos
Engelbrecht's eyes have turned into dollar-signs, but the rest of us know
that any hope of continuing actually farming anywhere around, game or
anything else, has gone for a ball of pawpaw. The farm has been sold & we
have been packing & moving.

Mark, you think we could say then that generally languages in contact tend
to simplify.

However, at issue is what rates as simplification for the speaker, & he has
other priorities than anyone else.

This is a pet subject of mine. I believe either of two tendencies come into
play, depending on whether the languages are closely or distantly related.

If they are comparatively close, then the core dialect common to both is
preserved & reinforced, the peculiarities of each fall away. This leaves a
simpler language preserving the most archaic survivals of the relevant
mother tongues. I call this ablation.

If they are comparatively distant, then the socially dominant language
acquires the working lexicon of the other. I call this agglommaration.

I cite for agglommaration the example of Kiswahili, an Eastern-Coastal Bantu
languages on a largely Arabic grammatical matrix.

For ablation I cite Fanagolo, a blending of closely related Bantu languages
of Southern East-Coasta origin.

Afrikaans is ablative. So is Modern English where it applies to Old English
& Old Norse dialects. However English is agglommarative where it applies to
Early Middle English, Church Latin & Norman-French. There English acquired
the habit of 'borrowing' terminology from any other language it can lay its
hands on.

Simplification occurs in both, & in both cases the trend seems to lean
towards a more analytic grammar

Moderately off the subject I recall reading in 'The Loom of Language' how
the author rejected the notion of language evolving in any direction away
from grammatical or towards the analytical, or to any degree of
simplification. Rather, he explained, it is a cyclic process, in which
analytic features blend into neighbouring words & become indivisible
constructions of a grammatical form, that gradually fall away as other
analytic devices are brought into use to be absorbed & suffer modification,
loss & replacement in their turn. He referred to examples in the Indic
languages with a Sanskrit base, arguing (I don't know) that dialects could
be picked out showing different points in this cyclic process between
grammatical & analytic in repeated cycles.

While we're on this subject I can just recall a letter sent by a friend (an
Afrikaner) who immigrated to New Zealand a few years ago. The letter was in
Afrikaans but it was not an easy read. Practically every word he used was
what we here call an 'Angalisisme' - a re-working of an English term by
Afrikaans pronunciation & orthography into something an Afrikaner can read &
pronounce, & presumably understand. This is not a well-liked phenomenon.

Piqued by a notion I re-wrote it in English & found it much less unpleasant
to follow. This, though I took care not to preserve it, epitomises
agglommaration in language. Consider if a whole community or a whole subject
people were to do this, & their children to learn to talk that way!

For an experiment I hauled out my Sweet & took it to the same letter,
replacing every Romance word with one in Old English. on the strength of
this I am easily persuaded that a Fleming of John of Gaunt's time would
consider English as merely another dialect of his own tongue, itself so
fecund of dialect.

Ah, the English (as Kipling said), the English are a race apart!

Yrs,
Mark

•

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