GoshDiggityDangit wrote: ↑30 Oct 2020 06:16
Salmoneus wrote: ↑29 Oct 2020 20:34
GoshDiggityDangit wrote: ↑29 Oct 2020 13:12
Wightish would be, because of its distance from other related languages, be one of the most innovative Romance languages, if not the most innovative.
That's not quite how it works, though - isolated, peripheral languages are generally more conservative, not more innovative. However, it is of course possible for their innovations to be relatively distinctive because they can go in a different direction from more central branches.
Really? That's awfully surprising to me, but I'll trust you on it. Anyway, I was thinking what you mentioned later, that being that its own innovations on the language would be more distinctive.
Thanks again to everybody for all the resources.
Yes, this is the opposite of what most people expect. However, it is generally true. This is why, for example, American English is much closer to Shakespeare's English (at least phonologically) than British English is - and why the most conservative dialects in America are in the rural south, and the most conservative dialects in England are in the Fens, or Wales or the like. [all these dialects have of course innovated in their own ways]
Think about modern trends in language, and who sounds most "old-fashioned". Is it a farmer in Alabama, or a social media influencer in Los Angeles?
The more people there are speaking a dialect, the more confident they are in their culture (i.e. not seeing themselves as culturally subordinate to some more fashionable place), the more different people they speak to, the more ingroups and subcultures are able to form, the more they innovate in their language. So innovation happens in populous, central, culturally powerful regions. And the more populous and culturally powerful a place is, the moe its innovations tend to spread uniformly across an area, becoming the new standard - whereas local backwater innovations are likely to be undone or countermanded by new innovations before they have a chance to become standardised.
More simplistically, imagine that you meet X people a week. One fraction, A, have very conservative speech; one fraction, B, have adopted a new innovation; and one fraction, C, have not adopted that particular innovation, but have adopted some alternative innovation in a related part of the language. Do you adopt the innovation? In brute terms, this often comes down to and how many B people you meet (encouraging you to adopt the innovation), and how many A people you meet (pressuring you to remain conservative). In a 'central' location, you meet more people, so you meet more B people - you come into contact with innovations sooner and are more able to hang out with innovators. However, you also meet more C people - because central locations are more diverse - and the presence of C people waters down the influence of the A people: as the percentage of people with SOME innovation rises, the ability of A people to claim to represent the one true standard diminishes, making EACH innovation more able to grow (until they start competing with each other, of course).
However, there are some possible exceptions to bear in mind...
- isolated dialects may change less, but they can change in different ways, branching off and ending up looking 'weirder' by comparison to the other dialects. A good example of this in Romance is Sardinian. The Sardinian dialects are, unambiguously, the most conservative - they have undergone relatively few major changes, and they have resisted most of the otherwise universal changes that have led to modern Romance - they retain the classical vowel system (minus length), and they have resisted palatalisation. As a result, though, they look very odd by Romance standards. And they have undergone a few changes that seem odd compared to the rest of the family.
- dialects spoken by small, isolated groups seem to be better at being pointlessly difficult. Linguistic complexities become marks of in-group identity, and there are few second-language learners arriving to bulldoze interesting features by not bothering to learn them properly. Hence, although language change may be slower in these places (everyone you meet is an A person, and you never meet newcomers), it's more able to 'add up'. It's not a universal rule, but generally you're more likely to find weird and complicated languages in, for example, isolated mountain valley communities (eg the Caucasus), while the languages of continent-spanning empires tend to be 'simpler'.
- language contact can be a big driver of innovation: both because features can be borrowed from one language to another, and because second-language learners may disregard the more counterintuitive parts of the language entirely. Language contact often happens at peripheries, so peripheral dialects can be innovative, at least in the short term. However, in most cases intense active language contact at the periphery doesn't necessarily last that long - once the Romans have conquered an area and everyone speaks Latin, most famers on the Roman side of the border aren't going to meet many farmers from the other side of the border. Conversely, sustained language contact often DOES take place in central locations, as non-native speakers migrate there from everywhere else (New York is a long way from the border, but is one of the places in the US with the most Spanish-speakers; in the same way, there would have been lots of speakers of Gaulish and Germanic in Rome).
- where you specifically have colonisation, you often get dialect-levelling, which can be quite conservative. So the West of the US for a long time was a very peripheral region, yet it had a relatively neutral, conservative dialect (it adopted the innovations that most of the country had adopted, but failed to adopt many local innovations that had taken place elsewhere). This is because settlers to the West came from all over the US, so developed a neutral language-form that was intelligible to all. However, this could still produce innovation - the cot/caught merger, for instance, which I suspect may at least in part have been the result of confusion between the different ways different dialects tried to keep cot/caught separate.