(2) Direction and Rate of Historical Changes
Linguists have repeatedly looked for universal trends in the direction of recent historical changes of natural languages. There seems to be fair consensus that no modern language is in a more primitive stage today than any other; conversely, none may be considered to have arrived at any ultimate, mature, or final stage. All languages have histories, and no language is expected to remain indefinitely in its present outer form. Sapir (1921) and others have proposed a certain cyclicity or universal drift in which languages so from one general type, for instance, a highly inflectional or polysynthetic type to another uninflected, analytical type, and then from this type back to one that essentially resembles the former. The drift hypothesis has not been accepted by all philologists, and the extent of cyclicity is quite uncertain. In recent years, a painstaking search for universals in historical changes (Cowgill, 1963; Hoenigswald, 1963) revealed very little that the authors were willing to regard as evidence for such universals. It appears that historical changes mat take many directions, although certain types of changes occur again and again. This is essentially what the present theory would expect. The outer form, or the realization of what is possible and latent, permits great variability and, sub specie, there is no inherent preference for one or the other course. In fact, tolerance for variability on superficial structure follows directly from the nature of the cognitive mechanisms that underly verbal communication.
We have stressed in earlier chapters that the entire language process may be derived from man’s peculiar mode of categorization. Strictly speaking, words are not labels of fixed and conventionally agreed upon classes of objects but labels of modes of categorization: they characterize a productive, creative process, and the same is true of the categorization of the deeper schemata called phrase-markers. If language functioned by agreement, instead of merely labeling types of processes, utterances would be extremely limited in scope, we could not talk about anything new, and it would take many more years for children to acquire a stock of what to say. Common observation on verbal communication clearly shows that this is not so. Because the vocabulary as well as syntactic rules are manifestations of processes, individuals have considerable freedom to apply them in their own way: the fact that other individuals understand the individualistic modes of rule-application (that is, understand any new utterance that is formed in accordance with rather broad laws) presupposes the degree of tolerance postulated here.
Table 9.2. Variations and constancies of Natural Languages
Tolerance extends to the coining of words, syntactic reclassification of words, and small acts of violence to common syntactic and phonological rules; this tolerance is the key to historical change. The freedoms that individuals may take do not appear to be regulated by any constant and everpresent forces. Consequently, languages may move through history in any one of a great many possible directions, and certain features may disappear or reappear again and again without any apparent order.
The rate of change is ultimately controlled by the turnover of generations ( as also postulated by Hockett, 1950), and this in turn is related to the resonance phenomenon, that is, plasticity during childhood with subsequent consolidation for the rest of an individual’s life. Since each individual becomes stabilized by puberty and does not ordinarily change his language habits, language changes cannot be handed down faster than the duration of one generation. The overlapping of and interaction between generations further slows the rate of change. Thus, historical changes do not become obvious during timespans of less than 60 to 100 years. For a summary of the argument see Table 9.2.
(3) Distribution
G. B. Shaw’s Professor Henry Higgins has made the world aware of dialect geography. Populations that are geographically stationary and not contaminated by language influences from invading or migrating groups or whose language habits do not become equalized through mass media of communication, such as the radio, tend to organize themselves into dialect communities. The geographic extent of each community is fairly well determined by the extent of social, face-to –face interaction of its members. Interacting individuals infects one another with their speech habits due to the resonance phenomenon. Adjacent dialect communities are distinguishable by clear-cut features that separate one community from the other increases with geographic distance (that is, with the number of intervening communities). Dialectal differentiation takes place by discrete steps, and the steps are not of equal size; some isoglosses mark whole bundles of distinctions enhancing the difference between adjacent dialects.
Language geography is further complicated by the fact that the territories of peoples speaking languages of entirely different stock abut. Roman Jakobson noted that it is common for entirely different but adjacent languages to be contaminated by each other in terms of certain phonological features. For instance, clicks are found in many African languages which by their grammar and lexicon cannot be considered as cognate. The distribution of the interdental spirant(th)in Europe is not restricted to cognate languages but is appraently the result of diffusion in the recent past across boundaries of languages of different origin. Some American Indian languages along the Pacific and around the Gulf of Mexico have a characteristic sound-cluster, usually transcribed as /tl/, even though the languages are of very different types.
Linguists have repeatedly looked for universal trends in the direction of recent historical changes of natural languages. There seems to be fair consensus that no modern language is in a more primitive stage today than any other; conversely, none may be considered to have arrived at any ultimate, mature, or final stage. All languages have histories, and no language is expected to remain indefinitely in its present outer form. Sapir (1921) and others have proposed a certain cyclicity or universal drift in which languages so from one general type, for instance, a highly inflectional or polysynthetic type to another uninflected, analytical type, and then from this type back to one that essentially resembles the former. The drift hypothesis has not been accepted by all philologists, and the extent of cyclicity is quite uncertain. In recent years, a painstaking search for universals in historical changes (Cowgill, 1963; Hoenigswald, 1963) revealed very little that the authors were willing to regard as evidence for such universals. It appears that historical changes mat take many directions, although certain types of changes occur again and again. This is essentially what the present theory would expect. The outer form, or the realization of what is possible and latent, permits great variability and, sub specie, there is no inherent preference for one or the other course. In fact, tolerance for variability on superficial structure follows directly from the nature of the cognitive mechanisms that underly verbal communication.
We have stressed in earlier chapters that the entire language process may be derived from man’s peculiar mode of categorization. Strictly speaking, words are not labels of fixed and conventionally agreed upon classes of objects but labels of modes of categorization: they characterize a productive, creative process, and the same is true of the categorization of the deeper schemata called phrase-markers. If language functioned by agreement, instead of merely labeling types of processes, utterances would be extremely limited in scope, we could not talk about anything new, and it would take many more years for children to acquire a stock of what to say. Common observation on verbal communication clearly shows that this is not so. Because the vocabulary as well as syntactic rules are manifestations of processes, individuals have considerable freedom to apply them in their own way: the fact that other individuals understand the individualistic modes of rule-application (that is, understand any new utterance that is formed in accordance with rather broad laws) presupposes the degree of tolerance postulated here.
Table 9.2. Variations and constancies of Natural Languages
Tolerance extends to the coining of words, syntactic reclassification of words, and small acts of violence to common syntactic and phonological rules; this tolerance is the key to historical change. The freedoms that individuals may take do not appear to be regulated by any constant and everpresent forces. Consequently, languages may move through history in any one of a great many possible directions, and certain features may disappear or reappear again and again without any apparent order.
The rate of change is ultimately controlled by the turnover of generations ( as also postulated by Hockett, 1950), and this in turn is related to the resonance phenomenon, that is, plasticity during childhood with subsequent consolidation for the rest of an individual’s life. Since each individual becomes stabilized by puberty and does not ordinarily change his language habits, language changes cannot be handed down faster than the duration of one generation. The overlapping of and interaction between generations further slows the rate of change. Thus, historical changes do not become obvious during timespans of less than 60 to 100 years. For a summary of the argument see Table 9.2.
(3) Distribution
G. B. Shaw’s Professor Henry Higgins has made the world aware of dialect geography. Populations that are geographically stationary and not contaminated by language influences from invading or migrating groups or whose language habits do not become equalized through mass media of communication, such as the radio, tend to organize themselves into dialect communities. The geographic extent of each community is fairly well determined by the extent of social, face-to –face interaction of its members. Interacting individuals infects one another with their speech habits due to the resonance phenomenon. Adjacent dialect communities are distinguishable by clear-cut features that separate one community from the other increases with geographic distance (that is, with the number of intervening communities). Dialectal differentiation takes place by discrete steps, and the steps are not of equal size; some isoglosses mark whole bundles of distinctions enhancing the difference between adjacent dialects.
Language geography is further complicated by the fact that the territories of peoples speaking languages of entirely different stock abut. Roman Jakobson noted that it is common for entirely different but adjacent languages to be contaminated by each other in terms of certain phonological features. For instance, clicks are found in many African languages which by their grammar and lexicon cannot be considered as cognate. The distribution of the interdental spirant(th)in Europe is not restricted to cognate languages but is appraently the result of diffusion in the recent past across boundaries of languages of different origin. Some American Indian languages along the Pacific and around the Gulf of Mexico have a characteristic sound-cluster, usually transcribed as /tl/, even though the languages are of very different types.
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