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Rate of Change of Vocabulary | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Aoshi Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5728 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 1 of 7 15 April 2009 at 7:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have become curious as to what causes languages to change and why it's different among different languages, specifically in regards to vocabulary. For example, taking English, a modern speaker can understand Shakespeare without much difficulty, but give him Chaucer or even something earlier and he'll be lucky if he knows half the words in any given sentence. By contrast, I have heard a well-educated Greek speaker can leaf through Aristotle without too much difficulty.
For the curious, this question came about by a desire to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish and seeing a quote that modern Spanish hasn't changed all that much in terms of vocabulary from Cervantes. Incredulous, I searched for an answer and even tried reading the book myself, but decided in the end to come here as I should get some interesting discussion. I would simply read the book, however I'm afraid of accidentally making my Spanish archaic and having to repair that damage, so at the moment I'm waiting to get more competent in the language. If anyone knows the answer to this question specifically, I'd be happy to know the answer. :D If I'm just spouting urban legends here and The Republic just looks like gibberish to a modern Greek speaker, I'd like to know that too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sprachefin Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5746 days ago 300 posts - 317 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Spanish Studies: French, Turkish, Mandarin, Bulgarian, Persian, Dutch | Message 2 of 7 15 April 2009 at 7:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think that vocabulary changes depend on many different factors:
Slang sometimes become "promoted" into actual words, and as we all know, slang changes very quickly, and it is sometimes embarrassing when you use an outdated word. Political changes sometimes influence a language. Different views may cause governments to take on a more nationalistic way. The may influence language reforms causing changes in vocabulary to be more homogeneous and have fewer load words. If a country is influenced or taken over by another, more loanwords may be included. Immigration also brings change to languages. If you have a small country, and a pretty even spread of immigrants, you will no doubt have loanwords seep into that country's language. Of course these are just a few examples of why languages change. There are some factors that we can not explain. Sometimes a language just changes and there is no possible explanation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 3 of 7 16 April 2009 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It would be particularly interesting to know why languages undergo sound changes. Those are a bit of a mystery. Some other changes (like vocabulary) are often easier to trace (influences from foreign languages etc.)
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| guilon Pentaglot Senior Member Spain Joined 6192 days ago 226 posts - 229 votes Speaks: Spanish*, PortugueseC2, FrenchC2, Italian, English | Message 4 of 7 16 April 2009 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sound changes are also studied by philologists and traced at least in the last centuries, Spanish underwent a major readjustment of consonants throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are plausible theories about the causes thereof. Not such a mistery in this case. By the way "El Quijote" is quite transparent to modern speakers of Spanish, your main concern shouldn't be the vocabulary but the complexity of the sentences (that may be an issue for natives too) but then again it depens on your level of Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| modus.irrealis Bilingual Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5878 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, Greek*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Danish, Turkish | Message 5 of 7 16 April 2009 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The thing with Greek is that there has been a massive influx of Ancient Greek words into Modern Greek in the last few centuries, with minimal changes at most. So there are a lot of words in Modern Greek that come from Ancient Greek but not because they have been preserved but because they have been reintroduced (into the everyday language). This really makes it easy to recognize a lot of words in ancient works (although understanding them is a different matter and I haven't heard of anyone who could do that without actually studying Ancient Greek).
But Greek has replaced a lot of its everyday vocabulary, either with other Greek words or with loanwords, but because the Ancient Greek words have been reintroduced as more formal words, a Greek person will still know the latter. A good example of this is how "white house" is άσπρο σπίτι (aspro spiti), with σπίτι actually being a loanword from Latin, but "White House" is Λευκός Οίκος (lefkos ikos), which uses the ancient words (in their spelling). So I don't think that Greek is more conservative in its everyday language than English, and the most common words in English are still Germanic ones. I suspect that the biggest difference is in higher register language, and English uses Latin a lot in this area, where Greek uses an older form of itself. But if English had used Old English, I think it would be in a situation similar to Greek's (in terms of its vocabulary seeming to be conservative), but I don't think it would be related to rate of change of vocabulary, but about the source of new words. A minor factor might also be the spelling, which is extremely conservative in Greek especially when it comes to the roots of words. So even when a word has been preserved in Greek, it'll often be spelt the same way as it was over two thousand years ago and that also helps in recognizing words. Edited by modus.irrealis on 16 April 2009 at 9:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| GibberMeister Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Scotland Joined 5808 days ago 61 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Spanish, Catalan, Lowland Scots*, English*, Portuguese | Message 6 of 7 20 April 2009 at 12:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Social stautus or domination by a contact language considered to be of more importnace can increase the absorption of foreign words into a language.
Middle English absorbed a good deal of French in this way. Welsh and Basque absorbed hundreds or even thousands of Latin words in this way. Hindi today has absorbed many English words and uses them naturally too. Trade contact also increases exchange, with a foreign word deemed more accurate for the artcile. Spanish has taken 'ticket', 'parking' and 'la web' in this way as the English words, apart from being ubiquitous are simply shorter and cooler. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 7 of 7 21 April 2009 at 3:39am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm going for it:
Edited by luke on 21 April 2009 at 12:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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