Re: USAGE: Shavian: was Re: USAGE: Con-graphies

Hi all,

On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Gary Shannon wrote:
<snip>
> Ultimately, the reason I lost interest in Shavian is
> that it doesn't record "the language", but records a
> particular spoken dialect of the language. Spelling
> can be either standardized OR phonetic, but it can
> never be both, and given that choice I think I would
> opt for standardized non-phonetic over phonetic but
> non-standardized every time. It's just so much easier
> to read, fluently, a standardized spelling than to get
> bogged down puzzling over what some word might be
> because the writer, a native German living in Boston
> spelled it with his own idiosyncratic blend of German
> and Bostonian accents.
>
> A pox on phonetic spelling!

Seconded, Gary!

But what's even worse, from my point of view,
is that English now has so many different
phonemic realisations (languages?; if Cantonese
and Hokkien are Chinese dialects, then these
are English dialects; otherwise, they're languages
...) that we can either have a phonemic spelling or
a standardised one.

Still, most of us DO manage to learn to spell
correctly most of the time - and almost all of us
learn to read even those words we habitually
misspell.  So I guess I'd opt for the standardised
spelling.

All this stuff on Yet Another English Spelling
Thread (well, it's not *only* YAEPT, is it?) has
made me ponder yet again the factors influencing
the rate of language change.  And I don't mean
vocabulary churn, but syntactic and semantic
change.

I think it a fair conclusion, from the examples of
English, Greek and Latin, that any language that
achieves wide usage across a number of different
cultures will find its phonemes, eventually, bent so
far out of shape as to be unrecognisable.  And its
only the prestige of an interlingua that drives
people from those other cultures to try to perfect
their usage of a particular - to be precise, a
prestige, dialect.  Without that prestige, the
language will spawn many a bastard child on other
cultures.  Or some other mechanism must operate
to conserve the ubiquitous parent; perhaps the
extreme conservatism of many Muslim societies
partly accounts for the long-term preservation of
classical Arabic.  I also seem to remember an
argument that the widespread use of printing has
helped to fossilise and stabilise many languages.

Hmmm, I seem to've found three ... what other
factors affect the rate of language change?

Regards,
Yahya

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