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

Ämne: Re: [CONLANG] Evolution of dialects (was
Re: Tirelat and related dialects) Från: "Benct
Philip Jonsson" <melroch@...> Datum: Thu, 25
Sep 2008 09:51:59 +0200 Till: bpj@melroch.se

Indeed the decisive factors for the rate of
change in a language variety seem to be primarily
the degree of contact with other
places/dialects/languages and degree/rate of
social change/upheaval, which may or may not be
interconnected and may differ with time. For
example there were few or no towns in Scandinavia
just before the viking age, but it was a period
of intense social upheaval and concomitant
linguistic change -- rpmably centered around a
population explosion due to improved agricultural
technology and a conflict between the cults of
Othin and Thor.

Moreover the existence of a written language,
whether formally standardized or not, usually has
an inhibiting effect on language change in
societies with a high literacy rate, and the
bearers of such a literacy is usually the urban
higher and middle classes. In Sweden it used to be
the case that peasants and rural nobility spoke
the same rather 'advanced' dialects while the most
conservative dialects were spoken by the urban
middle classes precisely because their speech was
most influenced by the written language. Modern
spoken Standard Swedish in many ways is just one
big spelling pronunciation and even has restored
sounds that were lost in all dialects two hundred
years ago. Sometimes this is hypercorrective as
when modern [d] [g] correspond to medieval [D] [G]
-- in fact [D] and [G] had both merged with zero
in the meantime, but were 'restored' as stops from
the spelling!


Maybe the problematic status of Tirelat (IIRC)
stress and length which you, Herman, mentioned
some weeks back is because the dialects which
formed the base of the standard language had
actually lost length, but it was erratically
reintroduced from erratic spellings where the old
graphies for long vowels had partly come to be
used to mark stress?

AFMOC I explain some immature historical
phonological changes in Classical Sohlob as
spelling pronunciations: I've come to realize that
preserved [k] and [g] before [i] is rather
unrealistic when *kj > [ts\], so I explain it away
thus that at a time when they had no good spelling
for [ts\] or felt queasy about the spelling they
had {k} for /ts\/ before /i/, which later led to
spelling pronunciations like /kidz\i\b/ and
/kidil/ for what in Kidilib is [ts\idz\ib]
[ts\idz\il] -- in that dialect spelled and
reasonably phonemicized {tidib} {tidil}. Another
example is the preservation of /mp nt nk/ in
Classical Sohlob. The retroexplanation is that at
the time CS spelling became fixed *nt was
invariably /nd/ while in *nd there was lectal
variation between /nd/ and /n/. Both these were
spelled alike, but to indicate an 'invariable'
/nd/ a diacritic dot was sometimes used. Later,
when the -- still always sporadic -- use of
diacritics became more fixed the usual function of
the dot was to distinguish {t} from {d}, so that
/nt/ etc. were retrointroduced due to a faulty
interpretation of diacritics! The actual
pronunciation at the time CS spelling was fixed
was not so different from later Heleb /pand/ <
*pant@ and /pan/ < *pand@ as Classicist
pronunciation leads one to believe. BTW Heleb
introduced the spelling {ngg} /Ng/ < *nk vs. {ng}
/N/ < *ng/*N, which never was accepted in CS.

/BP

2008/9/24, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>:
> > Den 24. sep. 2008 kl. 23.04 skreiv Jörg
> > Rhiemeier:
> >
>> >> 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,
> >
> > Actually they are much the same reasons.
> > Country dwellers don't just lag behind, they
> > preserve their heritage actively just as the
> > city upper class do. This is true even with
> > today's weakening of the countryside societies
> > in the western world, although with different
> > force in different countries, and just a few
> > generations back, the preservation activity
> > was very forceful indeed.
> >
> > LEF
> >

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