Re: One language or two?

Staving Isidora Zamora:


>My question is this: considering the time scale involved, do these people
>speak one language or two?  I am thinking that a good deal of linguistic
>change would have had to have occurred during the millennium and a half
>since their first poems were written.  Would this change be of such a
>degree that it would be necessary for these people to maintain two dialects
>of their language, one for everyday speech, and an older, largely
>fossilized, form used for the composition of poetry and for ceremonial
>occasions?  How different would these two dialects be likely to be?
>
Given that this is an open corpus of oral tradition, I think it would
follow language changes, although possibly as a discrete distance. Each
bard would learn the poems verbatim from his master during his
apprenticeship (assuming that the bard is a special position in society),
and attempt to reproduce them as exactly as possible. However, he is likely
to subconsciously adapt them to his own speaking style, so sound changes
and the like will be absorbed. The bard will therefore recite the poems in
slightly archaic but understandable language, although there are likely to
be fossilised expression here and there whose meaning has been lost in
semantic shifts - these would sound cryptic, and possibly become the
subject of metaphysical speculation (Moab is my washpot; over Edom I cast
out my shoe). When new poems are composed, they will be in contemporary
form. I would imagine that wholescale linguistic fossilisation is unlikely
to occur before the poems are written down.

Pete

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