language change

Subject: language change Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" language change

JMP writes

Oaks don't evolve from acorns; they grow from them. I think one could argue that languages do evolve, i.e. they adapt to fit a sociological niche (or die off) the way that species adapt to fit an ecological niche (or die off). But it's a metaphorical similarity at best, I suspect most linguists would reject out of hand the idea that languages evolve.

Sorry. Bad word choice on my part. Why I didn't stick with 'languages change' I don't know.

SJW: When I say change I include vocabulary as well as syntax, phonology etc. I seriously doubt whether nothing of any sort has happened on Iceland. Also, I think it's not very practical to not use arguments from languages that list members are reasonably familiar with, or provide references. French is certainly changing, even in the written form, but certainly in the spoken language.

Pggg= an approximation of a plosive followed by a guttural sound that the Dutch and some others can produce:-) Stands for, as you saw, amusement gone out of control.

As to the vowel shift, people will have to go to the lecture (On Thursday, March 1, William Labov will deliver the William Vaughan Moody Lecture at 4:30 PM in Kent 107 -UofC campus) or check out the Atlas of North American English. I'm in Princeton this year, so I'm as intrigued as you are!

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Good basic read on language change:

Jean Aitchison's Language Change : Progress or Decay? (Cambridge), which includes the tale of the English bishop I referred to.

For a round-up of language myths,

Language Myths ( Bauer & Trudgill eds) -Penguin

Blurb copied from Amazon:

"The media are ruining English"; "Some languages are harder than others"; "Children can't speak or write

properly anymore." Such pieces of "cultural wisdom" are often expressed in newspapers and on radio and

television. Rarely is there a response from experts in the fields of language and language development. In this book Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill have invited nineteen respected linguists from all over the world to address these "language myths"--showing that they vary from the misconceived to the downright wrong. With essays ranging from "Women Talk Too Much" and "In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare" to "Italian Is Beautiful, German Is Ugly" and "They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City," Language Myths is a collection that is wide-ranging, entertaining, and authoritative.

I think that it is in this book that I saw the very amusing maps of English "accents": In which regions does somebody from Atlanta or Boston or Detroit or .. think that English is spoken with or without an accent.

Helma Dik
Department of Classics
University of Chicago
helmadik@midway.uchicago.edu
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/classics/
2000-2001: Institute for Advanced Study