Re: Learning a language
From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 06/15/04
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Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 11:31:46 GMT
Eugene Holman wrote:
>
> In article <10csjepkib16f22@corp.supernews.com>, "alexB"
> <alexb7623@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "Eugene Holman" <holman@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote in message
> > news:holman-1506040119090001@c518-m3.eng.helsinki.fi...
> <deletions>
> >
> > Thanks for explaining. I appreciate it. I will have to read it 5 more times
> > at least to get a sense (perhaps) of some fine print. There is also a huge
> > gap between us and ultimately it boils down to how differently our minds
> > work. It is aside from the fact that I am totally ignorant in the matters
> > you are talking about. My hope is to catch the pith.
> >
> > I want to use this opportunity to test your theory. I will give it a
> > touchstone. But first I want to rephrase the key part to make sure I
> > understood it correctly. You are saying that what happened at Martha's
> > Vineyard can be used as a model to the fact that a separate pidgin English
> > (apart from a standard English) was developed 300 years ago by the African
> > slaves in America.
>
> In a very general sense, yes. The speakers of a language, any language,
> are constantly subject to conflicting social pressures to express
> themselves so that they can be understood by everyone else who speaks the
> same language, and to use the language in a way which expresses their
> individuality and thus distinguishes them and the peer group they
> identitfy with at any particular time from everyone else. For a
> relatively recent theoretical framework, see L. Milroy 1987, *Language and
> Social Networks*.
You really have a knack for ferreting out the
influential-among-outsiders but dubious-to-specialists, don't you! The
Milroys are widely read and widely disputed.
> In the slave subcultures that developed in North America
> there were many communicative needs, but one of them was to elaborate
> varieties of English that would reflect the different social statuses of
> slave and slave-owner. Briefly put, slave-owners had more and better
> access to the standard Englishes of the time than slaves did, and the
> choices that they made with respect to the variety of English that they
> elaborated and handed down to the next generation were governed by a
> different input and by different norms than the English, including the
> heavily accented and "broken" foreigners' English, that the slaves had
> access to and handed down to their offspring. Different vernacular norms
> arose and, as was the case in Martha's Vineyard, some of their features
> became sociolinguistic markers, that is to say, features of usage widely
> recognized as signs of a specific social identity: "Why do you say /gwain/
> rather than /'goiN/? Because that's what is expected of slaves when they
> speak their recognized form of vernacular English."
>
> > You are saying that their sole motivation was to
> > distinguish themselves, to set themselves apart.
>
> Please. don't put words into my mouth.
I hope this helps you realize that your excessive verbiage and your
convoluted syntax don't much help getting across whatever your points
may be? Here we have a theoretical innocent who is _trying_ to follow
you sympathetically and, you say, not succeeding.
> I'm saying that this is a factor,
> one factor. In Labov's recent monumental work in linguistic change he
> recognizes three types of factors that contribute to the process which
> allows linguistic innovations to acquire semiotic valency and thus
> establish themselves as changes and social markers: structural factors,
> functional factors, and social factors. Structural factors make it
> probable that certain types of linguistic innovation, such as the loss of
> the redundant ending in the third person singular present of English verbs
> (he goes > he go), will occur, functional factors, the desire to express
> individuality by testing or even flaunting existing norms, will allow it
> to become established in a given vernacular norm, and social factors, the
> ability to resist pressure to conform to the old norm and consciousness
> that this alternative norm serves to distinguish "us" from "them", will
> provide the confidence and motivation to use this alternative norm in at
> least certain types of communicative situations.
A 104-word sentence with nary a semicolon.
> This is what, in Labov's
> formulation, resulted in the reversal of the trend to level the
> "centralization" of the aw and ay variables that had been noted in
> Martha's Vineyard by Kurath and his fieldworkers during the 1930s and
> semioticize it as a linguistic sign of "native islander status".
>
> > I assume it for granted
> > that I am correct in interpreting what you said this way, if not, disregard
> > the rest of the message.
>
> I've tried to give more detail. I've been taught to distinguish carefully
> between linguistic innovations and linguistic changes. Due to the
> complexity, irrationality, and high degree of redundancy in all human
> languages, innovations will constantly by cropping up. Indeed, speakers of
> the same language will come up with the same innvations, such as dropping,
> generalizing, or mirror-imaging that pesky third person singular present
> of English verbs (he goes > he go, or I goes, you goes, he goes, or I
> goes, you goes, he go) due to "drift". What is done with the innovations
> produced by drift as new vernacular norms are elaborated is a different
> issue altogether, see e.g. J. Cheshire "Present Tense Verbs in Reading
> English" (1978).
>
> > Now, using your theory please explain the first and second consonant shifts
> > in Germany during the Middle Ages.
>
> First, you have your dates and times all wrong.
>
> The First Sound Shift, aka the Grimm's law changes (e.g. PIE *p > PG *f,
> PIE *d > PG *t, PIE *gh > PG *g), took place during the last-pre-Christian
> millennium in conjunction with the spread of the Indo-European dialects
> spoken by the agriculturalists and conquerers from the south-east into
> what are now northern Germany and southern Scandinavia.
>
> The Second Sound Shift, aka the High German Sound Shift (e.g. PG *p > HG
> pf/ff, PG *t > HG ts/ss, PG *k > HG kx/xx) took place much later, beginning
> in what are now Switzerland and south-eastern Germany some time during the
> first five centuries of the Christian era and arguably still going on, or
> at least stalled, with modern Standard German reflecting a more
> conservative stage of the change than the phonologically most innovative
> (in this respect) Alemennic dialects of Switzerland.
>
> > The Second one is the Grim' Law, I
> > reckon. Was it that the whole nation was driven by the desire to set itself
> > apart from itself?
>
> It was the first one, not the second one, that is popularly known as
> Grimm's Law.
>
> Why these changes took place is, given the time depth, difficult to say.
> However many linguists in this part of the world attribute the massive
> changes undergone by Indo-European as it was introduced to the area
> concerned, already sparsely inhabited by pre-Indo-European foragers, some
> of whom evidently spoke Finno-Ugric languages, to a period of language
> contact followed by a period of rapid Indo-Europeanization of some
> pre-Indo-European language, possibly a Finno-Ugric one. Of all the
> reconstructed Indo-European matrix languages (e.g. Proto-Germanic,
> Proto-Romance, Proto-Slavic, Proto-Baltic, etc.) Proto-Germanic shows the
> most radical innovations in phonology (e.g. the Grimm's law changes, the
> mergers of PIE *o and *a to PG *a, and of PIE *â and ô to PG *ô, the
> replacement of a mobile musical accent with a fixed root-initial one) and
> morphology (the radical restructuring and simplification of the IE case
> system, the radical restructuring and simplification of the IE systems of
> tense and mood, the systematization of Ablaut in the verb system, as well
> as the introduction of the dental past tense marker), not to mention the
> high frequency of basic vocabulary items such as 'hand' and 'finger' with
> no equivalents outside of Germanic, to a pre-Indo-European substrate
> language. Simply put, proto-Germanic appears to have originated as
> Indo-European restructured with many features taken over from some earlier
> language that would have been quite different in phonology, morphology,
> and
> lexicon.
>
> Why the phonological changes collectively referred to as the Second Sound
> Shift took place I cannot say. I do not subscribe to the old
> pre-theoretical explantion of it being the consequence of "Steigerung des
> Lebensgefühls" due to the beauty of the Alpine areas from which it
> radiated northwards. I would not be surprised, although I will not further
> speculate, if it might have had something to do with the introduction of
> Germanic to an area with a Celtic substratum. The varieties of Germanic
> most affected by the Second Sound Shift are relatively late colonial
> varieties located at the southernmost periphery of the Germanic dialect
> continuum in areas that once had Celtic populations.
>
> The Second Sound Shift today plays an important role in distinguishing one
> local variety of German from another, something every student of German
> dialectology learns when acquainting his or herself with the so-called
> Benrath line
> (http://www.deutsch-lernen.com/learn-german-online/german_language.htm#benrath).
> Which constellation of sounds the Second Sound shift affected plays an
> important role in determining which German traditional dialect is which
> (http://www.deutsch-lernen.com/learn-german-online/german_language2.htm)
> and thus has obvious sociolinguistic relevance.
>
> Regards,
> Eugene Holman
-- Peter T. Daniels grammatim@att.net
- Next message: Peter T. Daniels: "Re: "I'm coffee and he's espresso." -- facially nonsensical"
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- In reply to: Eugene Holman: "Re: Learning a language"
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