Re: Tirelat and related dialects

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:32:11 +0000, Jake B <blookerboy95@...> wrote:

>For more agricultural dialects, you may want to really drift from the
originally, and for "higher" sides of life, you shouldn't drift as much.
That's my ruleset. it has exceptions though, so sometimes you gotta be creative.

Well, as I see it there're two different things going on here, and one of
them IME runs the other way than you've suggested:

- per the usual dictum in historical and socio- linguistics, the more
culturally central / active / populated areas of the speech community are
those most likely to breed new innovations.  If rural or outlying varieties
are markedly different it's more likely that they're _conservative_, that
they haven't drifted the way everyone else has.  (Of course, that says
nothing about the extra-fictional direction of the design process; but you
did refer to "the original[ly]".)

- your "'higher' sides of life" are the areas where speakers are going to
have more social motivation to adhere to a formal standard language, if such
a thing exists, and this does retard innovations.

Alex