This is a complete summary (chapters 1 through 16) of the 2013 edition of Jean Aitchison's Language Change: Progress or Decay? The summary is based on the weekly assignments for the UvA course Variation & Change and may include some extra information given in our seminars.
Chapter 1: The Ever-Whirling Wheel: The Inevitability of Change
There are three possible directions for language change:
1) Slow decay
2) Slow evolution towards something more efficient
3) The possibility that language remains more or less the same over time from the
perspective of either improvement or decay.
The idea that language is decaying is based on social class prejudice
Latin has been held in high regard in Europe for many centuries. Latin was considered a
‘good’ language because of its association with the church and with academic discourses
and scholarship from the Renaissance onwards.The centrality of Latin in education around
1700 contributed to the idea that there was a fixed, correct form of a language. Secondly,
because Latin is a dead language, its perceived superiority led to the perceived superiority
of written language over spoken language: ’The written language is secondary [to the spo-
ken one] and derivative’. Thirdly, English was seen as a descendant of Latin that had lost
its endings or suffixes, and languages, like Latin, with inflections, were considered
superior.
Especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people were worried about language
change.
Linguistic purism: the belief that words derived from foreign languages should be
avoided. A notable occurrence is the resistance against ‘inkhorn terms,’ words derived
from Latin and Greek, in the 16th century.
The notion that there should be a ‘correct’ language is based on snobbism and people’s
natural tendency towards keeping things as they are or used to be. Not all countries have
as strong a standard language ideology as the countries of Western Europe. However, in
some cases, a fixed form of language can help avoid ambiguities or misunderstandings.
Grammar can be either:
1. the grammar of linguistic purists with the intention of spreading the perceived ‘proper’
usage, delineating ‘incorrect’ usages and educating the ignorant, or:
2. the grammar of linguists, which intends to describe language is actually used rather
than prescribe how it should be used. This is the difference between prescriptive and
descriptive grammars. I do think this distinction is important in keeping the task of the
linguist separate from things like prejudice or subjective judgement.
Prescriptive grammar: prescribes how language should be used.
Descriptive grammar: describes how language is actually used.
Bishop Lowth wrote a prescriptive grammar.
phonetics concerned with the sounds of speech
phonology concerned with how sounds are organized within languages
morphology concerned with words and their formation
syntax concerned with sentence structure
semantics concerned with meaning and the way language conveys meaning
The rise and fall of single words are only a symptom of people’s subconscious language
rules and attitudes, therefore the latter is the focus of Aitchison’s book.
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