[PW] Re: Hypothetical cultural divergence

[Peter Zilahy Ingerman, PhD]

If my foggy memory serve me correctly, Michel Breal, in the late 1890s, 
posited that if a linguistic group is isolated then either the language 
freezes, or it runs wild.

The length of time it takes for a language to change would appear to be 
about 20 years: I was told that Charlemagne issued an edict that said 
(paraphrased, of course) that he was tired of the sermons being preached 
in bad Latin, and henceforth the sermons were to be preached in good 
Latin.  And about 20 years later he issued a second edict to the effect 
that since the people no longer understand Latin, it would be necessary 
to preach the sermons in the language of the people. In other words, the 
bad Latin was serving as a brake on the development of French as an 
independent language, and once the brake was removed, French went its 
own linguistic way.

There are (were?) Pacific Island autochthons that had taboos against 
naming the dead. Persons were named after objects, and it was presumed 
that the dead were hard of hearing, so when a person died, a new word 
was invented for the object after which s/he had been named, as well as 
for similar-sounding words/objects. Missionaries who had left for only a 
few years would return only to discover that the vocabular had changed 
beyond any recognition (although the basic grammar of the language had 
not changed.)

On the other hand, until "modern" communications and anthropologists 
muddied the waters, the language spoken in Appalachia was very much 
closer to Elizabethan English that it was to contemporary American, so 
there's an example of a language "freezing" in an isolated community.

Mind you, this is all off the top of my head. I may (but make no 
promises!) be able to dig up harder details if they're required, but 
from the tenor of your question they may not be necessary?

Peter Ingerman

Megan Fitzgibbons wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I've had a friend ask me a hypothetical, possibly unanswerable question, and I
>thought this excellent listserv would be the best shot of giving me direction
>toward finding some sort of answer. The question, in my friend's words, is:
>
>If you have a fairly homogeneous group of people that speak a common language
>that are then sundered by a cataclysm, following which the different groups
>remain fairly insular with little to no communication with each other or
>outside cultures, how long would it take the languages to diverge? After, say,
>300 years, would they be separate languages or dialects? What types of
>differences would one expect? I want fairly pronounced differences of custom
>and ritual, but this would no doubt be accompanied by divergence in language as
>well.
>
>I believe this is for a book he is writing.
>
>I realize that there are probably not any "real life" anthropological examples
>that could provide evidence of this scenario, but it is possible to find
>scholarly speculation about the time needed for cultural and linguistic
>divergence? I am aware of glottochronology theories, but they are not very
>accepted amongst linguists.
>
>Any suggestions will be most appreciated.
>Thanks,
>Megan Fitzgibbons
>MLIS Candidate
>megan.fitzgibbons at dal.ca
>_______________________________________________
>Project Wombat
>list at project-wombat.org
>http://www.project-wombat.org/
>
>
>  
>