Re: Language change among immortals

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, 轡虫 <snapping.dragon@G...> wrote:
>
> This is a question that has been bothering me for a while. I may have
> asked the conlangs comm on LJ about it a while ago, but either I
> didn't get an answer or I didn't understand/forgot it.
>
> How would a population being immortal, or at least very long-lived,
> affect the way that their language evolves?
>
> Tolkien's languages are the only conlangs I can think of at the moment
> that are spoken by a very long-lived race, but I haven't studied them
> at all. I should probably do that sometime. =)
>
> --
> kutsuwamushi
> (Watch reply-to, gmail user!)
>
1.  How good are these people's memories?
If they have periodic recurring attacks of Alzheimer's disease every
fifty to a hundred years or so, and have to re-learn how to talk
afterward, their languages may evolve at the same rate as ours.  If the
attacks occur every 18 years or thereabouts, maybe quicker.

2.  How fast-paced are their social and technological changes?
Technological change, warfare, natural disasters such as advancing ice
or melting ice caps or land subsidence or the sun expanding or cooling
off or whatever, may force people to change rapidly and continually.
Even if they are not _forced_ to change, they may be _induced_ to
change.  As people do new things, they begin to say new things -- as
they begin do new things, or to devote different proportions of time to
talking about things, they begin to talk about them in new or different
ways.

3.  How often do these people reproduce?  And how fast do they grow up?
If they have a pair of twins every year, and only take two years to
grow up -- one year of childhood and one year of adolescence -- then no
matter how long they live, there will be a rapid onslaught of new
speakers, each of whom learned to talk in a home with two thousand-year-
old parents and two surly slang-entranced adolescent siblings.

4. When you say "immortal", do you mean just that they don't "die of
old age"?  Or that they can't: 1 starve to death 2 die of thirst 3
suffocate 4 be poisoned 5 be crushed or butchered or burned or frozen
to death or whatever 6 catch an infectious disease and die from it 7
get cancer? (Well, maybe "cancer", and diabetes too, for that matter,
should go out along with "old age".)
According to some theorists, one of the major engines behind the rapid
linguistic change in the Papua/New Guinea area and its nearby islands,
and one of the major regions that this 1% of the world's inhabited land
area contains 15% of the world's languages, is that when someone there
dies, it becomes taboo to say their name -- and, of course, most
people's names are words or short phrases (usually nominals or
adjectivals, of course).

5.  Finally, what if there is just a fashion/fad to change a particular
part of the way of speaking every year for no good reason?  Language
*there* could be like clothes or cars *here*.  The changes each year
could be so minuscule that only people who really, really care --
professional linguists and "fashionistas" -- could tell the differences
from one year to the next; yet each ten or twenty years or so, enough
differences would have accumulated that anyone could tell the
difference, and after fifty or one-hundred-and-fifty, the difference
would be so much it would make you laugh or make you angry; and after
five hundred, you just wouldn't get much use out of the old way of
doing things.

-----

Tom H.C. in MI

P.S. Thanks for a fun question.

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