Re: OT: Evolution of dialects (was Re: Tirelat and related dialects)

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:05:22 -0400, Alex Fink wrote:
>> - your "'higher' sides of life" are the areas where speakers are going to
>> have more social motivation to adhere to a formal standard language, if such
>> a thing exists, and this does retard innovations.
>
> Indeed.  Rural dialects tend to be more conservative than
> urban ones, as Alex has said; however, if there is something
> like a standard language, it is the upper classes that tend
> to adhere most closely to it, and standard varieties are often
> oriented at a corpus of "classical" texts which are often in
> an older version of the language.  Thus, the urban upper
> classes may be just as conservative in their language habits
> as the countryside dwellers but for different reasons, or
> their language is conservative in other regards than the
> rural dialects.
This starts to get into conculture aspects, but that's inevitable with
fictional langs. Indeed, the Tir people, as typical of Sangari cultures,
have a rather stratified social system with distinct "classes". They
might not use the "upper" / "lower" metaphor to describe them -- I'll
have to find a suitable equivalent -- but I think there's a distinct
sense of the "standard" dialect being more "refined" than the regional
varieties; the high degree of regularity in the grammar may be
associated with that. The "standard" dialect retains more of the complex
verbal system including details of tense and evidentiality, along with
the distinctions of vowel length that were lost in the other dialects.
On the other hand, the "standard" dialect has lost some of the
distinctions kept in other dialects (such as the dental fricatives). I
may want to re-introduce the gender system into an older version of the
language. That was a late addition to the language that wasn't very well
thought out or integrated into the structure of the language, but could
make sense for a conservative rural dialect.

> I am working with these assumptions in working out the
> dialectal divisions of Old Albic.  There is a standard
> variety (which is by far the most developed so far) which is
> used primarily by the urban upper classes, and based on the
> classical texts, and there are several regional dialects
> (for which there are as for now just lists of sound changes
> starting from Proto-Albic).  These dialects are in some
> respects more innovative than Classical Old Albic, but the
> northern dialects are more conservative than the southern ones
> (the most prosperous and densely populated part of the country
> is in the south).
>
> Dialects, of course, are what daughter languages are starting
> at.  I am planning to evolve a number of daughter languages
> from them.
>
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
In my case, I'm starting by taking advantage of the many intermediate
stages of my development of Tirelat that I've got scattered about, using
those as starting points for the regional dialects. Some of the
"dialects" actually have interesting phonological developments (such as
the rare phoneme /H_0/ < /fj/ ) and minor differences in the definitions
of words, so that's a good place to start. I've always liked the
dialectal word for "whistle", /'H_0yH_0y/ (Standard Tirelat /'fjufju/).