Re: Writing as a Conservitizing Agent in Language

Hallo!

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 09:39:18 -0500, Jason Monti wrote:

> I have heard that when a people develope a writing system for their
> language, it tends to conservatize - slow down in its evolution. However, I
> have a question about how pictographic writing affects the rate of change of
> a language, since whereas an alphabetic system would have a more obvious
> conservatizing influence upon the language, it SEEMS at least to me that a
> pictographic system (eg kanji) would be much less influential since they
> don't tend to have related sounds:
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.

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