Re: Representing futuristic English

James A. Donald <jamesd@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> David Friedman:
>> > Couldn't one plausibly argue that wide-spread
>> > literacy, recording technology, and the like would
>> > reduce the rate of change enough to make it
>> > plausible?

> Brian M. Scott.
>> We've been through this before. I've also been
>> through it several times in sci.lang. There is no
>> convincing support for the argument.

> Latin, icelandic, arabic and chinese seem to me
> convincing support for the argument, Chinese being the
> best evidence. Spoken chinese drifts all over the place,
> but written chinese has remained stable enough since the
> empire became too large to govern by swordsmen, and
> mandarins got the upper hand over the men with swift
> swords. Presumably widespread literacy and the ready
> access to ancient recordings will provide at least as
> much stability as a literate upper class did, and
> probably a great deal more stability.

This is a question that I've wondered about for years, and
I almost raised it in my original post.
It seems that you can distinguish drift in the spoken and
written languages. It also seems fairly clear that written
languages can indeed stay quite stable over long periods of time.
You can have a written language that originally was just the
written form of a spoken language, but that subsequently remained
stable while the spoken language changed, until the two diverge
dramatically---even when both continue in use.
But maybe that is only likely to happen when the written
language is the domain of a small elite? Maybe widespread literacy
would cause the written language to change along with the spoken
language?
A separate question is whether the widespread use of writing
can actually slow the change of the spoken language. If I understand
Brian correctly, he is saying that it evidently cannot have that
effect.
I've read that modern Greeks find the writing of Plato about as
easy to understand as present-day English speakers find the writing
of Chaucer. Since Plato lived about three times as long ago as
Chaucer, that would indicate that Greek has changed much more slowly
than English, probably because of the effects of literacy. But
maybe either my facts or my reasoning are mistaken here.
Recording devices are yet another issue. They haven't been
around for very long yet, so I don't really see how you can say what
their long-term effects might be. If I posit that they do indeed
slow linguistic change of the spoken language, would linguists find
that implausible?
If anyone could recommend any online or offline resources
pertaining to these questions, I'd be interested.



Kevin
.

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