Re: THEORY: Sound changes in literate societies

Hello,
[Tom Wier:]
> > "Karapcik, Mike" nevesht:
> > >
> > > According to the book "Applied Linguistics", which I read a year
> > > ago, the changes are motivated by the middle class.
> >
> > Maybe in some instances, but historically most cultures
> haven't had a
> > middle class, yet their languages changed.
>
> Right.  In some societies, the very notion of a Middle Class didn't
> even exist, either because social stratification was almost
> nonexistent,
> or because mercantile society (which historically leads to
> the presence
> of a middle class) didn't exist.  In other words, the author of this
> book on applied linguistics was propounding a theory of language
> change that accounts only for a small percentage of the human
> experience, and is in any case dubious for reasons I have already
> pointed out in other posts.
I guess the term "middle class" was used here in a sense different from
modernist ecnomic/social theories, but rather in the Aristotlean sense.
Or would you say there was a middle class in Aristotle's Greece?

Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

'I am a philologist, and thus a misunderstood man'
                 --JRR Tolkien, _The Notion Club Papers_