language evolution context hello to all linguist - s ! i am " lurking " to ( proper use ? ) your conversations since now a good year , but , not being a linguist myself , i usually do not talk a lot . first , as a teacher of french language in taiwan , i must tell how much i feel listening to this list really brings me a lot . specially as i hold a non-prescriptive view of my own language ( contrary , i think , to the majority of teachers ( ? ) , and certainly to our embattled french ministre de la culture , mr toubon , that a lot of people in france now usually call mr . " allgood " : ) . i was prompted to write by the problem of the evolution of languages . . . so it is not so far from my allusion to mr . toubon with with i opened my message . . . it seems to me obvious that , ( apart from phonological evolution ) a language may evolve , at the morpho-systactic level , from acculturation , that is , influence of another , ( " dominant " or not ) language , in historical times , close geographically , but also through commercial contacts ( the modern times is another story - what does mean " close " when i can talk with you from taiwan ? ) . but i think the matter is quite more complicated that all that has been mentionned so far . . . first the chinese case seems to me very complicated and specific : a - there is a chinese " isolat " for about 4000 years ( quite no interaction with other cultures , except the bouddhist indian one , where it gave rise to a quite specific " sub-language " , mainly phonetic transcription of samskrit words into adapted-on - purpose chinese characters , but which has little to do with generic chinese , b - there is a feed-back from the ideographs , so that chinese language does n't evolve independantly from its writing since a long time , c - because the phonologic evolution of the spoken language is not directly reflected onto the writing system , which builts upon its own logic , it is possible that its laws of evolution could be very different from languages using alphabetic or syllabic systems of notation ( ? ) . more : my french is certainly influenced by the english i use on internet , and the chinese i use in day-to - day life ( to the point that i sometimes realise that , while talking to my sister in france by phone , i find myself unthinkingly telling her : " j ' habite dans une petite hsiang derriere l ' ecole . " ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ( i live in a little hsiang just behind the school - - " hsiang " being the chinese for a little alley connected to a main street ) . and having to apologize and reexplain . . . but i mainly switch between the languages , and there is little chance i create my own pidgin or creole . . . so do many taiwanese ( min-nan ) speaking people in the south of the island . . . so does it not mean that the evolution should depend on the education level of people - so that it would be differential inside a society according to , say , the social class ? there is probably as well a " critical mass effect " ( if france was turned into some chinese-dominant state . . . ) . is not our idea of " homogeneity " in evolution vitiated by the pretention of modern nation-states to generate a " super-culture " - through linguistic homogeneisation ? ) - i am also aware of phenomenons of resistance to acculturative evolution ( conscious or not ) as for the quebecquois telling , not " un hot-dog " as the french do , but " un chien chaud " ( toubon being in my opinion but a marginal impedement on the natural evolution , whatever direction it takes ) . . . - another exemple of the complexity of those issue would be the " rigidification " of a language facing a threat . it was given to me as an explanation when i was a student of kurdish , when i learnt that this language has in common with old persian an " ergative " ( ? ) construction for transitive verbs in past tenses , which was presented to me as a " quite - passive " construction . to allow for comparisons by more knowledgeable people , i will explain a little : there , the infix representing the agent is appended at the end of the verb , while the infix representing the subject is appended after the object , as : mindal-eke sew - ek - y xuward - 0 ( - eke and ek ( [ ^ e ] k ) being suffixes expressing definiteness ( eke = the ) ( child-the apple-one - he ate ) and indefiniteness respectively ( ek = a ) ) here , - y represents the child , - 0 a null infix ( there is only one apple ) , so " the child ate the apples " would be : mindal-eke sew - ek - y xiward-n < - - - - " - n " : there are several apples ( child-the apples-the - he ate-them ) so i was told at this time that this construct , which was used in old persian ( and is still used in the variety of persian spoken in afghanistan , is an archaic construction , characteristic of the periphery of the indo-iranian domain , that is , in kurdistan ( south-kurmandji , or sorani-speaking part ) , and also among the baluches , and represents a rigidification of the language due to a threat from other languages , ( so that languages at a domain periphery would sometimes evolve more slowly ) and that it has disappeared from standard modern persian . . . i would want to know if all that is still considered true , though . what do you think of it ? i guess there are as well different levels of evolution taking place simultaneously , that can be contradictory ( phonology , vocabulary , syntax . . . ) . anyway , i see several reasons why it should be difficult to infer any " linear " evolution of languages ( whatever fascination i feel when i read posts speaking of modelisations of 10 or 20 000 years back . . . ) on anything else that a case-by - case basis ( or does the fact that populations densities has obviously undergone a dramatic change since then , changing the dynamics of contacts . . . ? ? ? ? ) . to resume my questions : how can we ascertain that this language has had this reaction without having to resort to extra-linguistic implicit hypothesis as : homogeneity through classes , identity of evolution whatever the number of speakers would be ( lng-switching vs creolisation . . . ) , existence ( or not ) , type , and evolution of a scripting system ( * * ) etc . . . ? as i told , i am no linguist , ( neither " linguistician " nor philologist : ) , so i hope i did not waste your time , thus getting all your community angry at me ( ack ! - terrible perspective ) . but i will be very interested to read more about all this . friendly to all , gerard gautier ( * * ) once more , kurdish would be a good case in point , as it uses up to three different scripting systems according to the place ( latin , arabo-persian , cyrillic for the north-kurmandji , and latin and arabo-persian for sorani ) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ wen-tzao school | \ | / / gerard gautier of foreign languages | / \ \ | . . \ | \ | | _ _ > | _ / \ _ > o _ _ _ > kaohsiung - taiwan _ / _ / . . _ / ( _ s . . _ / gauier @ cc . nsysu . edu . tw ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~