Re: Writing as a Conservitizing Agent in Language

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 19:15:21 +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
wrote:

>Hallo!
>
>First of all, the question is whether writing has any effect on the rate
>of language change at all.  It is frequently claimed that writing slows down
>language change, but that is just as frequently doubted, too.  I'd say that
>writing slows down language change only if a sufficiently large proportion
>of the population is literate, which in most cultures is a fairly recent
>conditions.  Otherwise, the written and the spoken language diverge.  For
>example, written Latin more or less stayed Latin in early mediaeval Europe,
>but spoken Latin evolved into the Romance lannguages.  A similar development
>happened in the Arabic world, I have heard.  Icelandic indeed changed little,
>but that may still be due to the geographical isolation of the languag
>rather the relatively high literacy - and Icelandic *pronunciation* has
>changed considerably.  Or look at the not very phonemic spellings of languages
>like English, French or Irish.  The spelling conserves old pronunciations,
>while the actual pronunciations have changed a lot.
>
>But if writing exerts a conservative influence, I'd expect logographic
>writing (*) to leave sound changes more or less alone - the language may
>keep its syntax, but still change its pronunciation greatly.  But as the
>examples given above show, it may still change much even if an alphabet
>is used.
>
>(*) I say "logographic" rather than "pictographic" because that is what
>you mean here.  Logographic characters represent words; pictographic
>characters do not represent *language* and are thus no true writing
>at all.
>
>... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Thanks for the clarification on the terms. Sorry about mixing them up. I
appreciate the help, and thank you for explaining it.

Now I see why it's really more doubtful than a truism.