Re: American as creolish [was] Re: Baltic Is Gothic

From: Marko Rauhamaa (marko_at_pacujo.net)
Date: 06/11/04 

Date: 11 Jun 2004 09:16:07 -0700

"Douglas G. Kilday" <fufluns@chorus.net>:

> "Marko Rauhamaa" <marko@pacujo.net> wrote ...
> > Maybe. Based on the observation of my children and their friends, I
> > think most language evolution originates in small children's
> > simplifications and misunderstandings.
>
> Adults were using <got> as a "verb on its own right" in printed matter
> six or seven decades ago.

Which in itself in no way refutes the conjecture about the children's
language and language evolution. What you do notice is that the children
first pick up regularities and only later learn the irregularities. The
present-tense verb "have - got" is anomalous especially since the
auxiliary has eroded into a barely audible single consonant.

> I pointed out "If you don't knock what you don't got, you gotta knock
> what you *do* got," i.e. condemn your own attributes. [...] Of course,
> *writing* this way incurs the ire of prescriptive schoolteachers.

It's terrible how the brains of children are cleansed of tradition and
culture with bastardizations like these:

   And if that mockingbird won't sing,
   mama's going to buy you a diamond ring.

instead of:

   And if that mockingbird don't sing,
   mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring.

> Otto Jespersen made a big deal out of the purported impact of
> children's simplifications and generalizations on linguistic change
> and neglected to explain why language was not already simplified into
> the ground millennia ago, since hundreds of generations of children
> have been teething on it.

First of all the evolution is relatively slow because in the end most
children do learn all the quirks of the adult language.

My belief is that when the simplification goes too far, the language
becomes difficult to understand (too many homonyms, too little
redundancy). To counter that, the language community automatically
introduces redundancy with formal tokens. Consider for example the
introduction of the articles as the case endings disappeared or the word
"teardrop", which is used where the simple "tear" would be too
ambiguous.

Similarly, the Proto-Indoeuropean had turned personal pronouns into
conjugation endings. The conjugation endings then atrophied, and French,
among others, was forced to redundantly repeat the personal pronouns
before the verbs. But in French, the redundant personal pronouns
themselves atrophied almost to the point of prefixes, and the French
language has begun the next round of redundant pronouns: "Moi, je
pense".

> This theory of massive impact of children on language has joined
> phlogiston and vitalism in the dustbin. One might as well argue that
> most geological change results from erosion. We all stand on dry land,
> do we not?

Whatever the relative importance of erosion in shaping the landscape, I
believe erosion does happen -- or was erosion thrown into the dustbin as
well?

Marko 

-- 
Marko Rauhamaa      mailto:marko@pacujo.net     http://pacujo.net/marko/