[PW] Re: Hypothetical cultural divergence

[Brian Whatcott]

Building on Peter's input, it is possible to easily distinguish the
  American and Australian variants on English after a geographical
seperation spanning 200 years or less.
Entertainment media now homogenize variants on the language
  with some rapidity, however.

Brian Whatcott   Altus OK

At 07:58 AM 9/3/2006, Peter Ingerman,  you wrote:

>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


Brian Whatcott    Altus OK    Eureka!