Re: Is language development evolutionary, or designed by the culture?

Nathan Sanders <nsanders.DIE.SPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:nsanders.DIE.SPAM-F01499.23533014062005@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> In article <Xns9675E90C447D2nokvamli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> "David Wright Sr." <dwrightsr@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Nathan Sanders <nsanders.DIE.SPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
>> news:nsanders.DIE.SPAM-5F6728.20594414062005@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
>>
>> I agree with all of your comments, especially, that it is impossible to
>> predict how language will change, but in response to the original
>> question, I do maintain that it is various societal pressures that
>> cause the changes whatever they may be.
>
> Why would you think that? Which societal pressures do you think cause
> which linguistic changes, and what natural, explainable, inherent link
> do you propose exists between them?
>

>From personal experience and observation.

The primary purpose of language is *communication*. Anything which tends to
inhibit communication will be modified to some extent. How much an individual
modifies his language and how much he retains of the modification depends on
the individual.

I grew up in Atlanta in the 40s and 50s. I lived in the city and all of my
relatives lived in what we then called the 'country[1]'. Even at the age of 8
or 9 I noticed two things when I visited my relatives. 1) the older
generation spoke considerably different than I did and 2) my contemporaries
also spoke differently than I did, but different from their elders as well.
I assumed at that time, that although the kids still retained a considerable
amount of commonality with their parents, that education and radio with which
they had grown up as opposed to their parents accounted for these facts.

I went to college and after realizing that I was not cut out to be a
physicist, I switched my major to German. My primary professor had spent
considerable time in the south of Germany and Austria and thus I found many
years later that I could understand Germans from those areas much better than
I could those from the north.

I studied Russian at the Army Language School in a one-year intensive course.
When I visited my old German professor, he said that I was speaking German
with a distinct Slavic accent. He was very familiar with that because he had
worked with displaced Slavs of all sorts in the post-war years.

I attended Indiana University in the late 60's and obtained a Master's in
Linguistics. I will be the first to admit that my degree is almost 40 years
old and that I have never, except for one year, had anything to do with
linguistics in any professional sense. Recently, I have tried to update
myself on current thinking in Linguistics. My point here is not that I have a
degree, but that while in Bloomington, my wife and I had two very close
friends from California and spoke and talked with them daily for over two
years. When they returned to California, they were kidded about the Southern
accent that they had come home with.

We lived in Arizona for three years and when returned to North Georgia where
we currently live, everyone here spoke very funnily and we were told the same
about the way we spoke. After a few months, everyone had stopped speaking
that way and so did we.

The point of all of this is to make my point that whenever a speaker of a
language finds himself in a different linguistic environment, even when the
languages are the *same*, he will adapt his linguistic habits to facilitate
communication, because differences can impede understanding. All of this is
usually done without conscious effort on his part and over a period of time.

Here I have been speaking only about individual, isolated examples, and which
would probably not cause any permanent language change, but putting large
groups of people with different languages or dialects together where many
people have to adapt then it is more likely that the adaptations will persist
and cause permanent change, especially the longer the groups are bound
together while still maintaining some of their original identity.

The major example to all of us is English, which contains a vast number of
French words and expressions primarily due to the Norman conquest. I suspect
that even morphology and syntac as well semantics were also heavily
influenced by these events. But I don't have any specific knowledge of this
beyond vocabularly and I would stand to be corrected on the subject.

> A preponderance of social classes is linked to aspiration of voiceless
> stops? A sudden childhood plague causes agglutinative morphology? A
> high marriage rate correlates to SVO word order?

As we have already agreed, the particular effects are totally unpredictable,
and I would add that, if for no other reason, that there are many non-
linguistic variables in any such situation which could possibly have
influence.

>
> Note: in case this is the source of our disagreement, when I talk
> about linguiistic change, I'm talking about regular, systematic
> changes that indiscriminately affect every elligible utterance, not
> sporadic changes to a limited subset of utterances.

Over time, even sporadic subsets could be passed on to succeeding
generations.

>
>> I have always considered that immigrants in isolated language groups
>> who experience a similar environment to that from which they came, will
>> generally maintain the language without as much change as the parent
>> group.
>>
>> Can you think of a case where this didn't happen? Not criticising, just
>> wondering if you have a counter-example.
>
> The American South. As a native Georgian, I can usually tell the
> difference between the speech of native speakers from Alabama,
> Georgia, and Tennessee (to within about an hour or so from their
> hometown), but their cultural histories are pretty similar, so there's
> no cultural/social explanation for why these states have different
> dialects. They just do, because languages naturally change
> spontaneously over time.

I didn't say that all such would stay the same, but that in general, they
tended to be more conservative than otherwise. Certainly, they could vary one
from the other. I would maintain that there was *something* different in
their environment which propagated the change. Conceivably, even the
individual differences of a prominent individual could cause the surrounding
speakers to adapt to his idiolect.

I strongly disagree that such wholesale change occurs spontaneously. I can't
prove it, but I am of the firm opinion that *all* language changes have some
causes, even though it might be very difficult to determine what they might
be, if not impossible. Yes, there might be individual spontaneous changes,
but I do not believe that they would become spread through the rest of the
language group without some factor causing that to happen.

I admit that I can't prove any of this. Do you have references to any studies
that demonstrate that languages spontaneously and naturally change over time?

I would be happy to study them myself.


[1] What was 'country'then is today wall-to-wall subdivisions and shopping
centers.

David Wright Sr.
For e-mail, remove the 't' from 'dwrightsr'
http://home.alltel.net/dwrighsr
.

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