Re: [tied] Moment (was: Re: Ah, look at all...)

----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Wordingham
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 2:44 PM
Subject: [tied] Moment (was: Re: Ah, look at all...)


> Are there any witty rules for chopping languages up diachronically?
Synchronically, we have, 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'.

Diachronic cutting is almost always quite arbitrary, and done for the sake
or convenience. If you have a single linguistic lineage, periodisation is
simplicity itself. You divide the whole temporal span into three roughly
equal periods and call them Old, Middle and New (or Modern in the case of a
living language) -- the classical triad of historical linguistics. You can
further justify the division by pointing to major historical events that
coincide with your chronological boundaries more or less (some always will;
there are so many of them). If necessary, any period can be subdivided into
Early and Late. If you aren't sure whether a given stage is still Old or
already Middle, you can say that it belongs to the Transition Period between
them. Naturally, if a language has a really long written history (like Greek
or Egyptian), each period will be enormously long. For most other languages
they'll be duly contracted.

In lineages that split, any split would seem to be a natural divider.
Unfortunately, it's typically impossible to pinpoint a split in time, except
in special cases like the Austronesian colonisation of the Pacific islands.

Piotr