Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Measuring language change

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 21, 1999, 15:55
FFlores wrote:
> > Are there any scientific ways to measure and/or > predict language change? I'd like to know, mostly > in order to make dialects with a reasonable rate > of change. All I've heard is that glotochronology <sp?> > estimates that a language loses X percent of its > lexicon every N years, or something of the sort.
Glotochronology has been discredited. There's no consistent rate of change. I have read of an Australian language that changed so much in just 15 years, that someone who had been away from the tribe during that period initially had difficulty being understood! In comparison, English of 15 years ago has NO noticeable differences. There may be a few statistical differences, e.g., in dialects with rhotic/nonrhotic variation, the percentage of rhotic uses may have changed slightly, but nothing that would be immediately obvious. It all depends on a number of factors which aren't all fully understood, such as population size, isolation, conservativeness of the people, and less tangible things, like how fond the speakers are of foreign words. There are cases of Australian languages replacing as much as 13% of their vocabulary in 50 years, mostly with words from other Australian languages, apparently just because the speakers like to use foreign words! -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor