Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!news.alpha.net!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!news
From: need@bloomfield.uchicago.edu (Barbara Need)
Subject: Language Identity, etc.
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: bloomfield.uchicago.edu
Message-ID: <D4zHtr.HLx@midway.uchicago.edu>
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: University of Chicago -- Academic Information Technologies
References: <3j7qfj$gcn@newsbf02.news.aol.com>
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 20:20:15 GMT
Lines: 35

In article <3j7qfj$gcn@newsbf02.news.aol.com> perotean@aol.com (Perotean)  
writes:
[stuff deleted]
> The respectable analyses provided by Need and Hunt, above,
> notwithstanding, it is quite impossible neatly to fit any natural set of
> spoken, semantically filled sounds discretely into a package called
> "English." or "French," or "Old Norse," etc.

Well, of course it is. It is alos impossible to fit the labels Old, Middle  
and Modern onto the periods of English (or to even say exactly when  
English became English and stopped being just Anglo-Frisian, or whatever).  
However, when developments are already in progress before the first date  
of a language contact (say between Old English and Norman French) than the  
contact cannot be said to be responsible for the changes. In addition, if  
there is a continuous tradition of transcription and there is nothing in  
the written texts to show sudden, unexpected changes, we cannot describe  
this as creolization or pidginization.

>  Both the sounds and the
> semantics of any group constantly shift over space and time due to a
> variety of factors, but there is never a neat dividing line between when
> something that was one set of sounds and semantics becomes suddenly
> another, completely or substantially different set of sounds and
> semantics.  All language is a continuum that has its origins deep in
> the past---even beyond the budding of the hominids, in my opinion.

Though I am not certain I would agree with your last statement, I fully  
agree with the first part. This is the nature of language change and  
langauge acquisition (after all no child learns exactly the same language  
his parents speak).

[more deleted]

Barbara Need
University of Chicago--Linguistics
