Re: Plausibility Check


Peter T. Daniels kirjoitti:

me wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

me wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Languages just don't "converge,"

You presumably mean merge:

No, OP proposed that the world's languages would "converge" if they were
all written with a common phonetic alphabet.

OK; I thought he meant to say that dialects of one language (eg.
Serbo-Croat) would merge if they didn't have separate scripts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_merger
It has been proposed by some linguists that actual merger was the source
of what would ultimately become the modern German language, arising as a
homogenized dachsprache of several regional German dialects. This
process, which took place over a period of several centuries, was neither
truly natural nor truly artificial. What began as a formal language of
the clergy and aristocracy developed progressively into an everyday
spoken language, and has now nearly completely displaced the original
dialectical forms of German.

And the mountains of evidence provided by wikipedia for this assertion?

They haven't given any evidence that this has been proposed by some
linguists. Has it never been proposed by any linguist?

I'm not a Germanicist, but looking at it again, it might be a reference
to Martin Luther's creation of a common literary language out of a
variety of spoken languages for his Bible translation.

Well, the very concept of a language merger is somewhat unclear.
Personally, I don't think it exactly catches the point of what Luther
actually did. As I see it, he took an existing literary tradition -
that of Gemeines Deutsch - and made it more accessible by widening its
dialect base and by making its syntax more colloquial. But was this a
merger? I don't think so. It was rather a recodification of the written
standard.

And what is happening with German dialects, is definitely not a merger.
Rather, the "genuine" (whatever THAT means) dialects are being ousted
by the literary language in forms that vary somewhat, due to the
influence of the substratum.

And before you ask: yes, I majored in German.

.

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