THEORY: Anglic languages (was: Difthongization...)

>On 19/02/08 21:48:23, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>> It's part of sweeping changes taking place in North American
>> English.  Read the Labov articles I linked and it will all
>> become clear.  I guess the risk that NAmE splits into
>> mutually incomprehensible languages is a baehd thing,
>> but the alternative is to kill it!
>
>A bad thing? As a conlanger, surely not! It's just the Real World
>conlanging for a change. Europe and India manage to get by just fine
>with lots of different languages. Why couldn't North America? The
>written language needn't break up right away anyway: Much like the
>status of Latin in the early stages of the Romance family/late stages
>of Vulgar Latin.
>
>--
>Tristan.
I assume English is even bigger a mess than Vulgar Latin was, tho. It also
demonstrates nicely that language change doesn't work strictly phylogenetically.

Which brings me to another topic: what do you suppose future linguistics
will come to consider the "primary branches" of the Anglic languages? Will
the basic geographical divisions be maintained? How about beyond them, can
those be bunched into larger groups (according to when each group split off
from Britain?) or will we just have to do with Proto-Anglic > half a dozen
different subfamilies? Which isoglosses will be considered family-defining,
which areal influence / parallel developments - rhotacity, cot-caught,
pin-pen, th-stopping?

(Actually, on second thought, let's put this under THEORY too.)

John Vertical

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