Herb,

 

Herb,

 

I suspect those articles are primarily written by the PR staffs of the researchers’ respective universities – many tend to show effects of what I think of as the, “I don’t know science, but I’ll try to make this zingy!” mindset (with sometimes humorous results; my favorite headline thus far has been, “Forest Fires Can Pose Threat to Small Children”). I use them primarily as a way to demonstrate to students that active work on these topics is going on all the time. The Webster comment struck me as a bit odd as well, unless you define “American English” as a national variety – which then cannot exist until the region considers itself a nation.  That, however, is what could be called a nice distinction only in one of the earlier senses of nice.

 

The vocabulary-based approach, despite its myriad shortcomings, probably remains popular simply because it’s doable  – languages have a lot of words, so you get more data points, and observing one showing up in a text for the first time does tell you that at least one person was using it at the time the text was written. From the phrasing in the article, I couldn’t tell whether or not “changes in vocabulary” could also include “changes in the pronunciation of vocabulary,” etc. They did seem to be concentrating on “basic vocabulary” (and the definition of that would be crucial); if that includes items like pronouns, and core vocabulary from the “Swadesh list,” etc. then it would be taking into account some slower-changing areas of language. As usual, the devil will be in the details.

 

Bill Spruiell

 

 

 

 

Bill,

 

Thanks for that link.  There’ve been a number of similar studies in the past few years looking at language relationship and language change through the lens of fairly coarse data, like vocabulary change.  It’s certainly true that a language’s vocabulary may change very rapidly, as the vocabulary of English did at least a couple of times during the Middle English period and a number of times since.  Vocabulary is the part of language most susceptible to cultural influence and to changes in the environment it’s spoken in.  The 20^th c. saw more rapid periods of vocabulary change in English.    What’s more questionable is whether such periods of rapid change occur as readily in phonology, morphology, and grammar. 

 

I question the article’s contention that American English appeared when Noah Webster produced his dictionary and speller.  Webster’s influence grew slowly from 1784 through the first third of the 18^th c., and he did have some effect on the spelling of American English.  However, there is good evidence that American English was identified by people in Britain as a distinct dialect as early as 1750.

 

Herb

 

 

Dear All:

 

There’s a science news site called Science Daily that serves as a kind of one-stop press release service for university researchers. I read over it every day or two to see if anything is listed that would be of interest to my students; today, there’s an interesting one on language change:

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080206154123.htm

 

 

The site’s articles range from way-too-technical all the way to way-too-cute, but this one’s not at either extreme.

 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University

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