Kate Burridge in Daylesford

Language change is interesting, so I considered myself lucky to be in Daylesford recently for the Words in Winter festival and able to attend a talk on this topic by Professor Kate Burridge, linguist and radio commentator.

She started by showing us the rate of change is not constant.

For centuries the norm was rapid change in spoken English. For instance, between the times of Chaucer (fourteenth century) and of Jonathan Swift (early eighteenth century) there was such a massive change that Swift's readers would have had difficulty reading Chaucer.

She read the first lines of the Prologue from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales - in the accent of the time, I might add!

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;
When Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye -
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages -
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

In contrast, when she read the opening to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, we had no trouble understanding the text.

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, and eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years.

Out of interest, after typing this quote, I spell-checked it, and Word thinks it is acceptable modern grammar.

The rise of written English as the pre-eminent form is the reason behind this slowing of the rate of change. When most business and study and social interaction occurred through spoken English, people didn't mind language changing, as long as they could understand each other. But we, with almost universal literacy, are strongly influenced by the way a word is written, visualising it as we say it, and this makes us resist change.

It was a great talk and has given me lots to think about.

caring about dying languages

I attended an interesting book launch last Wednesday in the Alcaston Gallery, in Fitzroy. In the midst of beautiful artwork produced by indigenous women on Mornington island in Queensland, Professor Kate Burridge from Monash University introduced a new book, Dying Words,
by Nicholas Evans. The setting was chosen because much of Evans' work has dealt with indigenous languages of Australia.

Dying Words deals with a subject I am passionate about – the study and preservation of the many languages of humanity.

Professor Burridge said, amongst other things:
• The book is timely, due to the crisis in loss of languages. Of the six thousand extant languages, half will probably die in this century.
• It has much to say to experts in the field of linguistics.
• It is readable and enjoyable and is accessible to the general public.

Google book Search has a so-called 'preview' of the book, so it should be possible to read parts of it and decide whether you want to buy it. I bought it, because I'm interested in the way languages shape our view of the world. It seems a tragedy every time a language dies - that is, when the last speaker of the language dies. I remember, many years ago, meeting a young woman who said her language, Romansh, was nearly gone.

However, I read on a Swiss site that the language is still in use today.

Though Rumantsch has been an official language in canton Grisons for centuries, it has not been officially recognized as a national language of Switzerland until 1938. The sudden recognition was motivated by Switzerland's will to resist the ideology of incorporation of all ethnic Germans and Italians into Hitler's German Reich or Mussolini's fascist Italy. So the exotic fourth national language was very welcome to demonstrate that Switzerland is different from its neighbours ...

Until towards the end of the 20th century, there was no such thing as a standard Rumantsch language. If at all, people wrote in one of the five local dialects - which made it definitely unrealistic that anybody would translate anything into Romansh for a few readers (considering that a total of only 60,000 people are speaking one of the five Rumansch dialects). When it became clear that Rumantsch risks to become extinct the Lia Rumantscha [league for the preservation of the Rumantsch language] defined a common standard language called Rumantsch Grischun in 1982.

It seems a huge task to try to prevent small language groups being overwhelmed by larger ones, but all humanity loses out when a unique way of visualising the world is lost. I'm looking forward to reading Nicholas Evans' book, to see what he says about this distressing situation.