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catsidheI've been thinking about how languages develop recently. It beats thinking about work.
Now, I know that this is all stuff that any half-trained historical linguist will look at and go ‘duh!’, but I'm not even half-trained. This is all stuff I've picked up, and figured out, and this is just trying to put them into some sort of order, so as to make sense of them.
Let's use English as an example.
I'll use the history of English for three reasons.
(i) It's the language you're reading this in, so I'll assume you, the reader, are familiar with it.
(ii) It's the language I know of most about its history.
(iii) There are people who are to language what 9/11 Truthers are to politics. (Yes, the Catsidhe in that discussion is me, and the M. J. Harper is, I'm fairly sure, the author of the work in question. I have been meaning to write a criticism of that book since I read it, but I still haven't got my head around its fractal wrongness. By which I mean that any statement or section from it, taken alone, is as wrong as the whole work. And that's pretty thoroughly wrong. But I digress.)
Anyway, I was going to write a history of English, as I understand it, but I've put that aside for the nonce. Instead, I want to get these ideas out of my head.
There are several forces at work when languages change. There is social status at play: phonological and vocabulary changes to fit in with a given social level (not always upwards, either). There is lost knowledge of etymology, where the meaning of a word or the origin of a sound change is lost, and it is ‘regularised’ to make it make sense. There is neologism and borrowing, deliberate and happenstance. No doubt other forces as well. But these are the ones that are at the top of my mind right now.
The thing about the changes brought about through the loss of knowledge of why the grammar is as it is, the important thing is not that the grammatic/phonological form being regularised away is irregular: they came about through forces perfectly regular and describable; it is not that they make less sense, sometimes the lost form makes more sense than the replacement. It is that they have become opaque.
In a history of the English Language I'm reading at the moment, there is mention that ‘depart’ originally meant ‘to separate, to part one from the other’. So when the traditional vow of marriage ends “until death us depart”, it means ‘until we are separated by death’. As the meaning of ‘depart’ changed to ‘separated from we who remain here, left, gone away’, then the original phrase made less sense, it became more opaque. And so people made sense of it, in two ways. One was to turn ‘departed’ into a euphemism for ‘the dead’. The other was to split the word up into something which sounded similar but made more sense: “until death us do part”. And now that this change has been made, you can hear the phrase as “until death do us part” and other splittings of the infinitive.
Originally, nouns and verbs in Old English came in strong and weak cases/declensions. One strong noun form was to apply i-mutation to the vowel, thus ‘tooth, teeth’ (tōþ, tēþ), ‘man, men’ (mann, menn) &c. There were more of these, but they tended to be regularised to weak forms during the Middle English period. Bōc, bēc should have become ‘book, *beek’, but instead we have the weak form ‘book, books’. The strong form was kept in old words, but when Norman speakers got confused, they would default to the more regular weak form, which is not as opaque as the i-mutation.
In Old English, consonants at the end of a syllable (which ‘closed’ a syllable) were pronounced voicelessly. [f] as \f\, [p] as \p\, &c. But if they opened a syllable, then they were often voiced. Thus we have the pairings ‘cloth, clothes’ (cloþ \kloth\, cloðes \klo-dhes\), ‘knife, knives’ (cnīf \kniif\, cnīfes \knii-ves\. And yet, later on this voicing had become opaque, so the regular form was (and is) to simply add ‘-s’: this process continues still. When I was a child, I was taught that the plural of ‘roof’ is ‘rooves’. This is now seen as just wrong, in favour of ‘roofs’. But it has a far longer pedigree: ‘rooves’ goes all the way back to Old English hrōfes
I don't know if this will make any sense to anyone who isn't into linguistics, or if it will be anything other than trivial to anyone who is. But I'm thinking onto a keyboard, here.
Now, I know that this is all stuff that any half-trained historical linguist will look at and go ‘duh!’, but I'm not even half-trained. This is all stuff I've picked up, and figured out, and this is just trying to put them into some sort of order, so as to make sense of them.
Let's use English as an example.
I'll use the history of English for three reasons.
(i) It's the language you're reading this in, so I'll assume you, the reader, are familiar with it.
(ii) It's the language I know of most about its history.
(iii) There are people who are to language what 9/11 Truthers are to politics. (Yes, the Catsidhe in that discussion is me, and the M. J. Harper is, I'm fairly sure, the author of the work in question. I have been meaning to write a criticism of that book since I read it, but I still haven't got my head around its fractal wrongness. By which I mean that any statement or section from it, taken alone, is as wrong as the whole work. And that's pretty thoroughly wrong. But I digress.)
Anyway, I was going to write a history of English, as I understand it, but I've put that aside for the nonce. Instead, I want to get these ideas out of my head.
There are several forces at work when languages change. There is social status at play: phonological and vocabulary changes to fit in with a given social level (not always upwards, either). There is lost knowledge of etymology, where the meaning of a word or the origin of a sound change is lost, and it is ‘regularised’ to make it make sense. There is neologism and borrowing, deliberate and happenstance. No doubt other forces as well. But these are the ones that are at the top of my mind right now.
The thing about the changes brought about through the loss of knowledge of why the grammar is as it is, the important thing is not that the grammatic/phonological form being regularised away is irregular: they came about through forces perfectly regular and describable; it is not that they make less sense, sometimes the lost form makes more sense than the replacement. It is that they have become opaque.
In a history of the English Language I'm reading at the moment, there is mention that ‘depart’ originally meant ‘to separate, to part one from the other’. So when the traditional vow of marriage ends “until death us depart”, it means ‘until we are separated by death’. As the meaning of ‘depart’ changed to ‘separated from we who remain here, left, gone away’, then the original phrase made less sense, it became more opaque. And so people made sense of it, in two ways. One was to turn ‘departed’ into a euphemism for ‘the dead’. The other was to split the word up into something which sounded similar but made more sense: “until death us do part”. And now that this change has been made, you can hear the phrase as “until death do us part” and other splittings of the infinitive.
Originally, nouns and verbs in Old English came in strong and weak cases/declensions. One strong noun form was to apply i-mutation to the vowel, thus ‘tooth, teeth’ (tōþ, tēþ), ‘man, men’ (mann, menn) &c. There were more of these, but they tended to be regularised to weak forms during the Middle English period. Bōc, bēc should have become ‘book, *beek’, but instead we have the weak form ‘book, books’. The strong form was kept in old words, but when Norman speakers got confused, they would default to the more regular weak form, which is not as opaque as the i-mutation.
In Old English, consonants at the end of a syllable (which ‘closed’ a syllable) were pronounced voicelessly. [f] as \f\, [p] as \p\, &c. But if they opened a syllable, then they were often voiced. Thus we have the pairings ‘cloth, clothes’ (cloþ \kloth\, cloðes \klo-dhes\), ‘knife, knives’ (cnīf \kniif\, cnīfes \knii-ves\. And yet, later on this voicing had become opaque, so the regular form was (and is) to simply add ‘-s’: this process continues still. When I was a child, I was taught that the plural of ‘roof’ is ‘rooves’. This is now seen as just wrong, in favour of ‘roofs’. But it has a far longer pedigree: ‘rooves’ goes all the way back to Old English hrōfes
I don't know if this will make any sense to anyone who isn't into linguistics, or if it will be anything other than trivial to anyone who is. But I'm thinking onto a keyboard, here.
