Re: Do Basque words for farm animals resemble Indo-European ones?
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal (mcv@pi.net)
Sun, 10 Nov 1996 02:27:14 GMT
Richard M. Alderson III wrote:
>
> In article <55r933$kut@stc06.ctd.ornl.gov> Jonathan Adams <jonathan> writes:
>>... to show how very rapidly can languages diverge from
>>one another in the 'primitive' state (unwritten and spoken by small, tribal
>>populations)
>
>I can, however, speak to the assumption here: Mary R. Haas (in her monograph
>_The Prehistory of Languages_), Leonard Bloomfield, Catherine Callahan, and a
>number of other historical linguists working Native American languages have
>demonstrated that the rate of change in unwritten languages is no different
>from that of written languages, neither highly accelerated nor highly retarded.
>Haas' work is probably the most accessible to the non-linguist.
Thanks for the references. I have always known in my guts that this
supposition of "unwritten languages change faster" was a myth, but I had
never seen a reference to any study investigating it. I'll look into
it.
==
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~
Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~
mcv@pi.net |_____________|||
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