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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Degenerating languages
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Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 02:03:52 GMT
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In article <3nmvo3$is5@sunburst.ccs.yorku.ca>,
Luigi M Bianchi <lbianchi@sol.yorku.ca> wrote:
>	Premise: I am not a professional linguist.
>
>	1.	From what I have read, there seems to be a consensus 
>that virtually all known languages--alive or dead--are essentially up
>to par, in the sense that they are all competent to provide a viable
>description of the world.

A reasonable premise.
>
>	2.	Languages evolve, but it seems that, at any point in
>their evolution, they are competent as per 1.

This less so.  As another poster pointed out, if one accepts this premise,
"degenerated" languages, by definition, do not exist.
>
>	3.	Question: is there any evidence of a language that,
>rather than evolving, "degenerated"--in the sense that it partially
>lost the competence defined above?

Yes.  There is a phenomenon called "language death," only studied in
detail this century, whereby languages that are being abandoned in
favour of others (i.e. Occitan for French, Yupik for English, etc.)
go through a period of degeneration during which the speakers' 
competence declines.  The classic study of language death (whose title
I can't remember but will look up) focused on a Scots-Gaelic dialect
that was being given up in favour of English.

The decline occurs in roughly generational stages.  In a case of steep
decline (e.g., the case study above), the oldest generation are fully
competent in language A, but habitually use language B in most domains
and often borrow words or phrases from it in order to express concepts
for which terms have not been coined in language A.

The middle generation may still have decent comprehension, but their
active vocabularly is small (they constantly revert to language B to 
describe things for which they do not know the words) and, when they do
use language A (generally only to speak to members of the oldest genera-
tion) they frequently make grammatical mistakes.  

The youngest generation know only a few words or phrases in language A, 
if that, and normally use only language B.

The language of this "middle generation" could be termed a "degenerated
language" (the language of the oldest generation still meets the 
criteria specifed in point #1, above; the performance of the youngest
no longer constitutes a "language" at all).  This pattern is common
among immigrants:  many second generation immigrants I've met speak
of learning "kitchen Greek/Czech/Spanish/Chinese/etc."  That is, they
lack the vocabularly for non-domestic activities and are incompetent
in non-intimate registers.  Since they use the language rarely, to com-
municate with relatives, they have trouble with more complicated con-
structions and exceptions to grammatical rules.  This represents a 
"degeneration" vis-a-vis the fluency of their parents.

Note that the reverse also occurs, i.e. there are languages in the 
process of "being generated."  Creoles are the best examples.  Haitian
creole, for example, is a fully-functioning language according to the
point #1 definition.  However, it began as a pidgin, i.e. a truncated 
code derived primarily from a single source language and used for inter-
communication between people of various mother tongues.  Therefore, 
over the course of its history, it went form being a "non-language" to
being "up to par."
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
