Dead Languages and Normal Language Change
Linguists distinguish between language "death" and the process where a language becomes a "dead language" through normal language change, a linguistic phenomenon analogous to pseudoextinction. This happens when a language in the course of its normal development gradually morphs into something that is then recognized as a separate, different language, leaving the old form with no native speakers. Thus, for example, Old English may be regarded as a "dead language", with no native speakers, although it has never "died" but instead simply changed and developed into Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. The process of language change may also involve the splitting up of a language into a family of several daughter languages, leaving the common parent language "dead". This has happened to Latin, which (through Vulgar Latin) eventually developed into the Romance languages. Such a process is normally not described as "language death", because it involves an unbroken chain of normal transmission of the language from one generation to the next, with only minute changes at every single point in the chain. There is thus no one point where Latin "died".
Read more about this topic: Language Death
Famous quotes containing the words dead, languages, normal, language and/or change:
“Alas, how quickly the gratitude owed to the dead flows off, how quick to be proved a deceiver.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“You have promise, Mlle. Dubois, but you must choose between an operatic career and what is usually called “a normal life.” Though why it is so called is beyond me.”
—Eric Taylor, Leroux, and Arthur Lubin. M. Villeneuve (Frank Puglia)
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
“I acknowledge that the balance I have achieved between work and family roles comes at a cost, and every day I must weigh whether I live with that cost happily or guiltily, or whether some other lifestyle entails trade-offs I might accept more readily. It is always my choice: to change what I cannot tolerate, or tolerate what I cannot—or will not—change.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)