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January 7, 2009
Linguistic Diversity In Pre-State Contexts
Darrell Pursiful, Dr. Platypus, directs us to a guest by Don Ringe on Language Log. Ringe's post is "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe." While this post is abnormally interesting in its own right, I couldn't help but wonder if Ringe's thoughts might be applied to the language/dialect mix that we see in the Levant at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Here's a sample:
The basic fact of pre-state language distribution is that no single language can occupy, for more than a few centuries, an area too large for all its native speakers to communicate with each other regularly. The reasons for that are simple and obvious. All languages change, slowly but steadily, over time. Each change originates in a small part of the speaking population and spreads outward through the speech community. . . . Many changes either spread through the entire community over two or three generations or are suppressed by social “stigmatization”; some are accepted by some parts of the community but not by others, creating “dialect” differences within the broader speech community. But if parts of the speech community cease to communicate altogether, or communicate so rarely that they have no incentive to imitate each others’ speech, changes cannot spread from one to another; different changes will accumulate on either side of the linguistic barrier, and within a thousand years, at most, a single language will have become two or more. [References omitted]
I found his discussion of Johanna Nichols' work particularly fertile. What do you think?
I may have more to say about this as I reflect on how it applies to Rainey's thoughts on the origin of Hebrew and the Hebrews and on Garr's work on the dialect geography of Iron Age Syria-Palestine. But more thought is required than I can give the subject just now.
Posted by Duane Smith at January 7, 2009 8:30 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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