|
 |
Dialect Divergence | ||
Tags: Dialect | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6691 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes  4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 1 of 11 10 August 2007 at 10:47am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Has it been proven why certain dialects have diverged, and evolved into new languages such as the Second Germanic consonant shift and the Romance languages? When do dialects branch off into a new language? Is anything like that occurring today?
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 11 10 August 2007 at 11:46am | IP Logged | |||||
|
This article from Wikipedia may give some clues to why languages change.
For me, language change seems at times to be messy process, other times it's seems as precise as a ballet. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6691 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 11 10 August 2007 at 12:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Thanks for the link. To what extent are languages changing today? The only thing I notice is the new vocabularly words from technology and the internet.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6386 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 4 of 11 10 August 2007 at 12:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
When politics are in play. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dmg Diglot Senior Member Canada dgryski.blogspot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7011 days ago 555 posts - 605 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch, Esperanto | Message 5 of 11 11 August 2007 at 12:19am | IP Logged | |||||
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joan.carles Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6333 days ago 332 posts - 342 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Hungarian, Russian, Georgian | Message 6 of 11 11 August 2007 at 1:08am | IP Logged | |||||
|
For sure language change is still an ongoing process and it has been in the past. Not only Germanic and Romance, think of all the other Indoeuropean languages (to name just a single family) that evolved from a group (Baltic, Slavic, Persian, Indic...) which in turn evolved from one or several Indoeuropean languages.
There are many examples that show the process is still in action. Most English speaking people facing Spanish, Portuguese, Russian or French must know the different levels of politeness and number that the forms Tu/Usted, Tu/Voce, Ty/Vy, Tu/Vous allow us to express while English has always been regarded as not having this type of distinction, once Thou was lost. But think of all the different variants we have nowadays to express the plural you, you-guys, you-folks, yous... So English it's evolving and has found a way to express this idea, maybe by influence of the rest of modern languages that surround it. In fact guys and folks here is losing its semantic value while it grammaticalizes. So here you are a change which is not due to technical innovations. And I'm sure we all can identify many other examples of ongoing changes, in English or whichever language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joan.carles Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6333 days ago 332 posts - 342 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Hungarian, Russian, Georgian | Message 7 of 11 11 August 2007 at 1:32am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Before going to sleep, another example, this from the Romance languages.
Spanish participle nowadays is undergoing a process of dental drop, the same thing that happened to French some centuries ago. So although we write 'enfadado', 'comprado', 'sentado' in daily speech, mostly in the south and central parts but nowadays quite extended, we pronounce 'enfadáo', 'compráo', 'sentáo', and even with the 'ido' forms, 'vendido' -> 'vendío', 'partido' -> 'partío'. Scholars and the Real Academia de la Lengua see this as bad speech, but the curious thing is that no scholar would dare to say that French is corrupted because the original '-ato'/'-ata' (as in trovato/trovata, approximate spelling) has derived into 'trouvé'/'trouvée' by drop of the latin dental (and other changes), which Italian still conserves and Spanish had softened into a voiced dental fricative and it's likely that eventually will lose it as well. That's for a phonetic change. So add this and other changes to the living languages and as time goes by, languages diverge to an extent that they become mutually unintelligible. R.M.W. Dixon explains that languages tend to coexist and to borrow things from their neighbours which tend to create shared features along great areas of languages with different origins (tones in Asia, Ergativeness in the Caucasus, similar sound patterns in Australian languages, evidentials in North and South American languages...) and at times, there are some dramatic events that tend to break this long term assimilation process (punctuated equilibrium). You can check about all this in Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance, by A.Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon. Edited by joan.carles on 11 August 2007 at 1:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 8 of 11 11 August 2007 at 3:34am | IP Logged | |||||
|
I think it's somewhat hard to tell at the time if and how quickly a language is changing. What 500 years from now may be obvious as a linguistic shift at the time seems like dialectical differences or fads. Words or patterns that crop up and are obviously different might just disappear again as well — like the "his genitive" in English that emerged in widespread use for only 20 years before disappearing again.
To give a modern example: it's clear from my studies of Japanese that the language completed, more or less, a grammar and pronunciation shift about 100 years ago. There are still ways in which regional and colloquial Japanese deviates from the standard language, but who can tell whether they will become the standard of tomorrow or not? 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
