Re: OT: babel and english

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> what matters is that
> at some point in time, some new foreigners come in, perhaps for economic reasons,
> and thereafter, their presence is linked in the popular mind with an influx of other
> languages
I can imagine people telling their children and grandchildren about the
good old days when they were young and everyone talked and acted the
same, when you didn't have all these foreigners with their
impossible-to-understand speech messing everything up.  Perhaps after
the stories had been passed down a few generations, it might be
misunderstood as being that people actually *did* start to talk
differently, instead of being simply that there'd always been
differences but they weren't known of by most of the population.  With
foreigners being blamed for many of their problems, maybe they'd attach
the existence of those foreigners, and the implication of the existence
of other peoples, on that "disintegration" of the language

--
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A nation without a language is a nation without a heart - Welsh proverb
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