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Conservative offshoots | ||
Tags: Multilingual | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 1 of 5 20 June 2011 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Quebecois French pronunciation is more conservative than Parisian French. American English pronunciation is more
conservative than British English. Taiwan Mandarin pronunciation is more conservative than Mainland Mandarin. What's going on? Is this a coincidence? Can anyone think of more examples or counterexamples? If this is a genuine tendancy, what's the mechanism? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 5 20 June 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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As a very general observation, linguistic innovations originate in the "motherland" or some center and may or may not diffuse outwards to other areas of the native speech community. As an example, changes in certain British dialects may or may not spread to dialects in North America. For those that don't spread, the result would not only be divergence, but the feeling that North American dialects are "older" because they bear some characteristics that are no longer used in British dialects. A variation of this idea is that languages that are furthest away from the point of origin or the native territory of the proto-language are most likely to show traits of that ancestral language.
In another example, Prof. Marc L. Greenberg criticizes a model of language differentiation proposed by Croatian linguists which contradicts evidence from linguistic geography: namely the tendency for linguistic innovations to radiate from the center rather than from the periphery.
However this is a very general observation and there are instances where even within the same language, archaisms and innovations co-exist. For example, it is believed that Proto-Slavonic came into being (i.e. as something distinct from Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Balto-Slavonic) somewhere around southern Belorussia or northern Ukraine. The languages that are geographically furthest from this point would be Sorbian and Slovenian and by this model would be conservative. In a certain way, they are indeed conservative because they still use the dual (and Slovenian maintains some sort of pitch-accent) which has been reconstructed for Proto-Slavonic. However they have innovated because they no longer use the of tenses in the same way as reconstructed for Proto-Slavonic nor do they have the nasal vowels. Bulgarian and Macedonian are also quite far away from this supposed Proto-Slavonic homeland in Belorussia or Ukraine and are quite conservative in verb conjugation (in fact they show a more elaborate adaptation of the reconstructed Proto-Slavonic system of verb conjugations). On the other hand, this conservatism doesn't show up at all for declension with these two languages since they basically function with one (maybe two) cases outside the pronouns, no dual, no pitch-accent. Macedonian also has fixed stress instead of the mobile stress of the proto-language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 5 20 June 2011 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting stuff! But why would there be such a tendency? Why don't people who have moved far from the
motherland innovate as much? Is it a feeling that the language isn't theirs to change, but that the authority would lie in the homeland speakers? Edited by Ari on 20 June 2011 at 9:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5047 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 4 of 5 20 June 2011 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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How would Spanish and Portuguese fit into that theory?
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 5 22 June 2011 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Part of the problem I have with this theory is to do with the simple idea of innovation.
Quebecois French is descended from dialects of French from fairly far from Paris, whereas the standard school French is based on the dialect used in the Paris court. So Quebecois certainly preserves forms that have fallen out of use in France, but they weren't lost in France due to innovation, but to standardisation, and the forms chosen for the standard may be just as old as the forms previously used in the dialects. sOfist, This theory is really specific to emmigrant communities. Spanish in South America is not the language of a community of immigrants from Spain, but the language of the people conquered by immigrants from Spain. The same goes for Protuguese in Brazil. If you want to examine immigrant languages in South America, you'll want to look into the Italian, Jewish and Welsh communities in Argentina and the German communities in Argentina, Chile and Brazil. This is where you're likely to find conservatism (many of the languages/dialects spoken in Germany are not recognised in the education system, and are dying out; Jews in Argentina come from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups, and their various languages are being killed by Modern Hebrew; Welsh underwent very late standardisation, so dialect-levelling is still occurring in Wales.) 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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