Re: Age of langs (was Tempus)

On 11 March, Raymond Brown wrote:


>Of course not; and you can bet your bottom dollar that people living at the
>periods somewhat arbitrarily chosen as the traditional dates for these
>diachronic "beginnings" weren't aware of this at the time.  No one woke up
>one day and said "Hey, I'm speaking Old French now, but only the other day
>it was Gallo-Romance!"
    Not only that. Language is also differentially fluid with respect to its
various aspects: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, etc.
IIRC, it is accepted that they all change at different rates.
    How different from today's usage in how many aspects must
speech be in order to be considered a different lang? The slipperiness
of this kind of decision must be taken into account, IMHO,
when comparing relative durations of modern langs.
(ie, how long has a given lang been  in existence)
    And sometimes there are practical rammifications too.
Vocabulary is notorious for relatively rapid change. Speech therapists
must sometimes teach language-disabled children massive amounts of
vocabulary. But first, one must assess how much vocabulary they
already have. I have had to use standardized tests (in America)
that were becoming useless to me because in the time since they
were first compiled, the culture had moved on and much of what was
commonly known then was totally unknown to the children I was testing.
For a child to do badly on this test told me nothing whatsoever
about the state of his vocabulary.
And we're talking "decades", not  "centuries"!
Different lang? Certainly many differences in the lexicon.
    And, of course, there are said to be differences among individual
words, some changing or being replaced faster than others.

Dan Sulani

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