LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.19 (03) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 19 October 2009 - Volume 03
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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.18 (01) [EN]

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk <mailto:
sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>>
 Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.16 (03) [EN]

  From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net <mailto: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.
>

Uh? You must get some sort of compensation?

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

That's what I was originally saying, I think?

Anyway, a question that I'm interested in seems to be going unanswered
here, and that is, do languages change even if there isn't contact with
other languages? A small island with only a few dialects of one language
and no outside contact would be hard to find these days, but such was
less unusual in the past, so would these languages still have kept
changing, and in what ways?

 In English, you could say that contact with Celtic, Norse or French led to
the loss of inflections. However an alternative explanation is based on the
internal dynamics of the language: Old English had strong initial stress,
which led to unstressed inflectional vowels becoming schwa, which led to
case endings becoming ambiguous, so word order was used to help mark case
which led to case endings becoming redundant. This reasoning helps to
account for the survival of genitive singular ending - it was phonologically
distinct even when unstressed. (Additionally, the genitive plays a role at
the noun phrase level, rather than at the clause level like the other
cases). As far as I can see, most linguistic changes are amenable to
internal explanations, rather than reference to outside influence.

> ... so would these languages still have kept
> changing, and in what ways?

All languages are changing all the time. Obviously I can't prove that
statement, but when you consider the nature of languages and of language,
the chance that a language does not change over a period of time seems
vanishingly small. Phonemes represent ideal target sounds, and in reality
they have a range of realizations, which leads to drift over time, speakers
are constantly trying to make their speech emphatic and lively, so new
expressions are created and old ones become non-emphatic, the forces of
analogy, assimilation, dissimilation, and the reinterpretation of syntactic
and phonological structures are ever present.  In an abstract sense, there
is always a tension in language between communicative clarity (which
encourages redundancy) and communicative efficiency (which discourages
redundancy).

Paul Tatum.

•

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