Quote:
Originally Posted by Ea
I'm not sure how to distinguish between more or less dynamic? How can one pin down, or define, speed of language change? If it is words used by a minority and is a recent change, can it then be said to be truly a part of the 'English language' or is it just a dialect or even a fad?
|
I think language change is only meaningfully assessable in the past. And the way to do it is to take literature producing X hundred years ago from the languages you wish to compare, and assess to what extant each is still intelligible to modern-day speakers.
To be reasonably accurate, such a test might have to change the source text slightly to alter/remove/update aspects of the orthography that would befuddle modern readers for reasons that have nothing to do with language change. (e.g.: Like the penchant of publishers/writers of certain periods to add extra letters into words for purely visual aesthetics. Or a switch of writing system precipitated by mostly or solely political reasons as opposed to linguistic ones.)
I would say any words that are spoken in small isolated communities in ways that do not give said words hope of being adopted into at least a large regional standard lexicon should not be viewed as being part of English in general terms, only a part of a particular minor dialect (or perhaps only minor subdialect) of English.
While I would have difficulty deciding where precisely to draw the line, an inability to deal with corner-cases decisively obviously does not mean that the classifications on either side of said corner-cases are somehow invalid.
About present-day and future processes of language change, I think the best we can have are educated guesses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ea
Another example; the official approach to spelling and langage here is rather conservative - but that doesn't mean that spoken language is nearly as conservative. It changes as lot and there are fads - they just don't make it into dictionaries. Is Danish dynamic?
|
On this, I am unqualified to comment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ea
I would agree that a special "dynamic" of English is the development of branches, such as American, British, Australian, Indian, South African (and probably a few more).
|
I don't know if I'd call this special... and your use of "dynamic" as a noun I think is unrelated to English being described as
being dynamic.
What is happening to the American, British, Australian, Indian, and South African English dialects/languages is very plainly what happens to reasonably isolated populations of speakers that once spoke the same language.
I see it as no different than Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, et al are today. At an earlier stage, but otherwise quite analogous I think.
My sense is that certain views about English relate to its wide use in the world which is seen as linguistic success (as opposed to the political one that it is) and to which people feel the need to ascribe linguistic reasons.
The truth, as I see it, is that English is the relatively young descendant of what was essentially a "contact language" (between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans) merger of Germanic and Romance that to this date hasn't learned to exploit the full benefit of the alphabet*. (Literacy in English being a needlessly greater challenge than literacy in many other languages with largely or wholely phonetic writing sytems.)
- Ahi
* Or, rather, of the Latin alphabet to which they switched--as Old English' use of Old English runes was, I believe, entirely phonetic.