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".
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Famous quotes containing the words dead, languages, normal, language and/or change:
“a star
called Wormwood rose and flickered, shattering
bent light over the dead boiling up in the ground,
the biting yellow their corrupted lives
streaming to war, denying all our words.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“The trouble with foreign languages is, you have to think before your speak.”
—Swedish proverb, trans. by Verne Moberg.
“Everyone in the full enjoyment of all the blessings of his life, in his normal condition, feels some individual responsibility for the poverty of others. When the sympathies are not blunted by any false philosophy, one feels reproached by one’s own abundance.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.”
—Augusto Roa Bastos (b. 1917)