Re: [tied] Re: Creole Romance?

At 5:50:38 AM on Tuesday, July 1, 2003, tgpedersen wrote:

> There is a problem in a hierarchy: how do you regulate
> who's right and who's wrong?

In terms of speech you don't have to: the speech of those at
the top of the relevant hierarchy is taken as the model.

> Therefore all hierarchical (ie. land-locked) countries

You'd be hard put to find any human society, let alone a
country, that didn't have some sort of hierarchy.

> have a rudeness relation centered on their capital: people
> in the capital may be rude to people immediately outside
> it because of their language, they in their turn may be
> rude to those further out etc. In short, the rudeness
> relation is a partial ordering which orders the nation
> into concentric rings and its transitive closure defines
> the nation.

Except that it doesn't happen unless the area involved is
fairly small. What you get instead are regional centres
defining regional prestige varieties (which may of course
still be less prestigious than that of a national court or
literary centre). And of course Paris and London are
historically notoriously also home to very non-prestigious
varieties.

Brian