Re: One language or two?

See my original post on this thread for the issue at hand...

I thought of a couple of other questions that relate to this.

Considering that the language is unwritten as yet, how likely is it that
the changes will be dramatically noticeable?  What I mean is something like
this: we still enjoy Shakespeare and the King James Bible today and don't
have too much trouble with them.  OTOH, if someone were to read either of
those aloud to us with the pronunciation used at the time of composition,
we would have considerable difficulty in comprehending the language.  (In
fact, if the original orthography isn't cleaned up and modernized for us,
we feel like we are looking at something slightly foreign.)  Since this
conculture has only oral tradition, the pronunciation of recitations from
that oral tradition would be continually modernized, going through the same
set of sound changes that the everyday language underwent.  Could those
sound changes go virtually unnoticed for centuries (because they have no
written texts to compare themselves to) while the words in the traditional
songs remained unchanged?

How much of a stabilizing influence might the strong oral tradition be on
the syntax and lexical semantics of the language?  These people are hearing
antique songs and formal speeches in a cermonial dialect on a weekly, if
not daily, basis.  Is it possible for this to seriously slow down the
natural processes of syntactic (and even some types of phonological)
change?  A phonological example would be the loss of final 'e' in
English.  If people had been hearing every day important texts in the
language, whose meter would be severely disrupted by the loss of vowels,
would those vowels have survived longer?  (I guess one case study in this
is the phenomenon of khomonia in Church Slavonic.  A schism arose when the
vowels in question were finally officially removed.  I don't remember how
long they had been singing it one way and speaking it another before the
reforms.)  How long could a strong tradition like this put the brake on
syntactic change?

In short, what sort of reasonable and plausible degree of relationship can
I posit between the colloquial dialect(s) and the ceremonial dialect?

Isidora