Re: terminal dialect?

At 23:45 30/03/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Gary Shannon wrote:
>> This radical change could very well cause the English language, at
least, to
>> become much more stable in the centuries to come.  My grandchildren are
>> watching the same Bugs Bunny cartoons on TV that I watched in the theaters
>> when I was a child.  So for two generations we have been exposed to the
same
>> pronunciation.  And once the reruns of I Love Lucy are no longer being
>> watched, the reruns of tomorrows sitcoms (featuring pronunciation that
those
>> actors learned while watching I Love Lucy reruns) will continue to
>> perpetuate the "standard" pronunciation.
>
>Well, technology is definitely causing greater standardization, but I
>doubt that reruns will be popular enough to retard language change
>significantly.  You must also consider that technology is changing
>society at an unprecedented rate, and rapid social change is always
>associated with rapid linguistic change.  I mean, I can see your point
>about technology retarding change, and maybe there's something to it.
>Who knows which influence will win out?
>
        I think you exagerate the association between social change and linguistic
change. The example I always give is the one of the Russian Revolutions in
1917. The social change that happened during that revolution was the most
important one any country ever beared during History. The country, which
was very rural and religious, became in less than 10 years industrial and
atheist. No other social change in any other country can be comparable.
BUT, the Russian language didn't change at all during the revolution. Well,
at least, its rate of change didn't change during the revolution. The
social change didn't accelerate the linguistic change.

        So I think that even if there is a connection between social and
linguistic change, it is not as simple as it may seem. Language is a social
institution, it's true, but with its own inertia and its own laws, and if
major social changes sometimes result major linguistic changes, it is not
always true, and one must be very careful before using such arguments.

>--
>"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
>was hanged." - Irish proverb
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>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html