Re: Measuring language change

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!

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