🚀 go-pugleaf

--[ wally ]-- (wow@zycor.lgc.com) wrote:
: In article <Csvytu.FC9@inter.NL.net> mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer) writes:
: >In article <300ts4$77t@csi0.csi.uottawa.ca>,
: >Mark Israel <misrael@csi.uottawa.ca> wrote:
: >
: >>(2) We know that geographical displacement correlates negatively 
: >>with language change:  U.S. English and Quebec French are more
: >>archaic than British English and French French. 
: >
: >I doubt that is a "constant".  It's true that U.S. English is more 
: >archaic in some respects. In others, it is clearly not. 

: I would love to see examples of ways one is more archaic than the other.

It is a common misconception that one language is more archaic than a
related contemporary language. Let's say you have a group of people who
speak a common language and the two groups split apart geographically
for a couple hundred years. Both languages will change, independently of
each other, and in a variety of different ways. However, certain
attributes of the initial form of the language will be retained by each
branch, again independently. In general, the things which are preserved
in branch A alone will be perceived as "archaic" by speakers of branch
B, and vice versa. Taken as wholes, however, both branches are equally
modern, since they are spoken contemporaneously.

That said, it is also obviously true that the most effective trigger of
language change is contact with other languages, so if one branch is
relatively isolated, and the other relatively not, then I think that the
isolated branch will contain more elements seens as archaic by the
nonisolated group than vice versa. (This would hold just as well for
things which affect language change other than isolation.)

--
Greg Shenaut -- gkshenaut@ucdavis.edu