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


"Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:d8o4cf$ds6$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, "Ken Shackleton" <ken.shackleton@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Bobby D. Bryant wrote:
> >> On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, "Ken Shackleton" <ken.shackleton@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
> >>
> >> > Comments please?
> >>
> >> Could you clarify the question? What do you mean by "language
> >> development"?
> >
> > Hey....I've seen you on talk.origins.
> >
> > I was looking for an opinion on language development within a
culture
> > over many generations. I believe that it is molded by evolutionary
> > forces, others argue that it is "designed" by the people within the
> > culture.
> >
> > What is your take on this?
>
> I think it's mostly like genetic drift: it just happens, without
> anything driving it in any particular direction. The closest thing to
> 'design' that I know of is when subcultures deliberately adopt some
> mannerism as an in-club marker, and that mannerism spreads to the
> language at large. (I'm reluctant to call even that 'design', since
> it doesn't involve deliberate planning for the language's future.)

I'm thinking of Australian languages, where what you are saying applies
pretty accurately, except that, instead of "subcultures" we have
"tribes" or "nations" -- the basic political group, with the order of a
thousand or two members, each conscious of owning a distinct "language"
(not necessarily mutually unintelligible with the neighbours' --
"dialects" if you prefer, but they thought of them just as we do our
national languages). While, as you say, most change was due to
unconscious drift (and unconscious borrowing from neighbours), conscious
"design" was involved in three ways:

(1) Everyone knew some of the phonetic and grammatical peculiarities
that distinguished their language from its neighbours, and made an
effort to maintain and accentuate them (shiboliths).
(2) Whenever anyone died, new words had to be more or less consciously
invented to replace all those tabooed because they sounded like the dead
person's name.
(3) The "mother-in-law languages", used in ritual situations or in
interacting with certain relatives, replaced some, or most, or all, the
words of the ordinary language with different ones -- to a significant
extent, these were consciously invented (conlangs).

Unlike your example, there was certainly some "deliberate planning for
the language's future" (just how much is hard to say). Also, it's
hardly necessary to mention the "spread to the language at large" since
the language doesn't extend beyond the group that initiated the
innovation.

As others have pointed out for European languages, this sort of change
applies mostly to lexicon (since this is what speakers are most
conscious of), but pronunciation and even grammar are definitely
involved.

The cultural-linguistic situation in Australia is probably a bit extreme
compared with elsewhere, but surely not unique.

John.

As others have indicated, the
>
> --
> Bobby Bryant
> Austin, Texas


.

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