Re: [tied] English.

Dear Mark,

If I may correct a few details: Chaucer's language is one of the cluster dialects that formed the historical basis of modern _standard_ English (the East Midlands and London), but Shakespeare's native Stratford dialect was rather distant from those roots. What Shakespeare _wrote_ was of course the standard literary English of the day, but a _spoken_ standard did not exist yet and while the London variety may have been fashionable, educated people did not lose their local accents (except, possibly, for some stigmatised features). Literature influences language in a rather special way. Shakespeare, for example, had a way with words, so he popularised innumerable phrases, idiomatic formulas and collocations -- we often quote him without being aware of it. But his writing had no observable impact on the development of English phonology, morphology or syntax.

As Labov's recent research shows, BOTH areal convergence AND local divergence are taking place in American English, and the latter process is very much active, perhaps surprisingly so, preserving many of the old dialectal divisions and introducing new ones. What we get in the long term is some kind of complex dynamic equilibrium between the two forces rather than constant unidirectional drift either way.

Spanish is not "left in the dust" behind English but seems to have more native speakers at the moment. (The page referred to below shows figures that are a few years old and not uncontroversial, but any changes since that time have most likely strengthened the position of Spanish against English). English still wins easily when we include fluent speakers of English as a second language, but even then the proportion is something like 500 mln (English) : 400 mln (Spanish).

http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html

Tom MacArthur's 1998 book _The English Languages_ (Cambridge: CUP) presents a stimulating view of English as a language family.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: markodegard@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 5:40 AM

Subject: [tied] English.

Piotr reminds us that Alfred's Old English is not ancestral to ModE. Nor is Geoffery Chaucer's MidE. Even Edmund Spenser's ModE does not stand directly ancestral to what we speak today (he wrote in the Court Dialect). Shakespeare, tho', is pretty close to being ancestral to what reigns today. The King James Bible is a miracle, a synthesis of the best of the bush of then-current formal English; it influenced English rather much like the Armenian bible influenced the development of modern Armenian. It's delightfully amusing and -- commenting on my own nation's educational system -- rather obscene that Piotr, a Pole, knows more about English that just about any native-speaker, and particularly, about the History of English (Hel, as we call her, tongue-in-cheek). You get two opinions. The first is that literature and writing doesn't influence language that much, the the second that it influences it very greatly indeed. Both views are in fact correct; it just depends on the language, and how its history develops. Currently, English is severely constrained by its literature (and universal literacy). We need keep ourselves literate in what's gone before and thus subject ourselves to the prescriptivists, notwithstanding a generations-long revolt against them. Innovation often gets stillborn. Our technology has added additional constraints to our language. We listen to 100+ year old sound recordings, and watch nearly 75-year-old talkies. Fred and Ginger had rather sharp accents, not the sort of thing you hear today anywhere, but we nonetheless understand each word of their witty repartee. We now not merely read what they wrote, we also understand the archaic way they spoke. Diachrony and synchrony are merging. One wonders what how the native English speakers of 2101 or 2201 will regard Rhett and Scarlett's English. I marvel at how huge English is. We count native-speakers in a significant fraction of a billion people. Other English speakers push it up to the billion mark. Only Mandarin comes near, and this is essentially a lingua franca (vs. a 'native-speaker' language); Spanish, Arabic and Russian are left in the dust behind us. I marvel even more at how you have to travel to Great Britain or Ireland to find something that gets difficult to understand dialect-wise (but just about everyone whose native dialect gives a problem can code-switch to something resembling MidAtlantic). Yeah; the Brits are listening to us USians, and modifying their speech accordingly. And I marvel most at the fact that English is essentially one monolithic whole, mostly as an artifact of universal education, and of the recorded (written, filmed, etc) literature we are all forced to assimilate. Notwithstanding some delicious hints at differences, all forms of native-speaker English are in grammatical unity; despite regional lexical differences, the dictionaries are used in common, and lexical items flow freely. We all know language change is mostly propelled by phonological change: despite some extravagant accents (some of which are quite deliberately acquired), despite the regional lexicalisms (which either spread like wildfire elsewhere or are embalmed forever in the OED), English is actually moving towards a common phonological center. The center is what we already call MidLantic, e.g., Patrick Stewart doing American TV. English began with convergence. A West Germanic dialect encountered a North Germanic dialect in the North of England. The Icelandic sagas say these two peoples more or less understood each other -- more or less. The stress of getting rid of the 'less' ultimately lead to the dropping of case endings and verb endings, a restructuring of the pronouns, the development of an extravagant appetite for prepositions, etc. We are still converging. Even worse, we seem to be converging with every other language in the world. It would be so nice if English could go its merry way and fracture into a number of interesting daughter languages. But this seems to not be in the cards.