Re: Necessity of Conculture?

dunn patrick w wrote:

> Culture and language are incontrvertably linked.  British English differs
> from American English strictly *because* our cultures differ.
Well, I'm not so sure about that.  Usually, when peoples start expanding
and colonizing new areas, like the British were starting to do in the late
16th century, the linguistic features of the colonists will tend to remain
conservative relative to the mother country just because more things are
going on in the mother country than in the colonies.  The American colonies
were, for a long time at least, typically backwaters when compared to imperial
capitals like London.  Yet the dialects of the American colonies preserved
features that have largely disappeared or are disappearing in Britain today:
rhoticness, which though still there in some dialects is certainly not very well
looked upon;  lexical items like the American "Fall" for British "Autumn";
and grammatical features, like the American past participle "gotten" for RP
"got".    These things have to do more with sociohistorical phenomena than
simply cultural differences.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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