Re: Language

Occidental <Occiden...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But why would an individual in a language group start using a new word
for a thing, idea, principle etc, in place of the original? Why would
the new usage spread, unless there were some impulse in Hs to create
and/or accept word variation?

On Mar 9, 3:22 pm, Walter Bushell <pr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There is. Ingroup vs. outgroup, for example.

Quite so. Maybe my post didn't get through to your ISP:

===============================================================
Here is Robin Dunbar's evolutionary explanation:

QUOTE
Early Voices: The Leap to Language NICHOLAS WADE, NYT

Dr. Dunbar [Robin Dunbar, evolutionary psychologist at University of
Liverpool in England, author of "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution
of Language"] notes that social animals like monkeys spend an
inordinate amount of time grooming one another. The purpose is not
just to remove fleas but also to cement social relationships. But as
the size of a group increases, there is not time for an individual to
groom everyone. Language evolved, Dr. Dunbar believes, as a better way
of gluing a larger community together. Some 63 percent of human
conversation, according to his measurements, is indeed devoted to
matters of social interaction, largely gossip, not to the exchange of
technical information...

snip

But sociality, from Dr. Dunbar's perspective, helps explain another
feature of language: its extreme corruptibility. To convey
information, a stable system might seem most efficient, and surely not
beyond nature's ability to devise. But dialects change from one
village to another, and languages shift each generation. The reason,
Dr. Dunbar suggests, is that language also operates as a badge to
differentiate the in group from outsiders; thus the Gileadites could
pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite asked to say ''shibboleth''
because, so the writer of Judges reports, ''He said sibboleth: for he
could not frame to pronounce it right.''
END QUOTE

We observe, for example, that sub-groups within large advanced
societies (gangs, ethnic groups, teenagers) often spontaneously
develop an idiosyncratic in-group language to set themselves apart
from everyone else.

More broadly, humans positively *like* novel pronunciations and
pointless neologisms and reversals of meaning and the use of a
familiar word to mean something for which a word already exists. This
behavior is, according to Dunbar, a legacy of our tribal past.

===============================================================

Hence kids talking about
their rants, meaning to old foggies parents.

I think you mean "rents":

QUOTE
American Heritage Dictionary
rent n. Slang
A parent. Often used in the plural: had to stay home with the rents.
[Short for parent.]

Our Living Language : When young people talk about their rents, that
is, their parents, they are using a slang term that is of interest to
language historians, if not necessarily thrilling for parents
themselves. The term is a prime example of one of the fundamental
characteristics of slang, which continually creates novel ways of
expressing what are often rather ordinary things (if parents may be
considered ordinary things). Slang has recently produced two
expressions for "parents" that have gained wide currency -- rents and
parental units. Both expressions demonstrate slang's use of unusual or
creative linguistic means to achieve novelty of expression. While
there are many slang terms, such as bod for body or rad for radical,
that result from the clipping of unstressed syllables, rents is a
clipping that drops a stressed syllable, much like the similar term
za, "pizza." The desire to coin new ways of referring to things also
leads speakers of slang to use circumlocutions like knuckle sandwich
for "punch." Parental units falls into this category. It plays on the
jargon of bureaucrats and social science, in which the world is viewed
as so much data waiting to be quantified. The appearance of terms such
as rents and parental units also shows that all available styles and
levels of language can be grist for slang's mill--so long as the
material is perceived as irreverent, funny, or just plain cool.
END QUOTE

(similar remarks could be made about "cool")

.

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