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.)
“Wealth is so much the greatest good that Fortune has to bestow that in the Latin and English languages it has usurped her name.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)
“A normal adolescent is so restless and twitchy and awkward that he can mange to injure his knee—not playing soccer, not playing football—but by falling off his chair in the middle of French class.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
““But there’s always been rich and poor, and that’s all there is to it. And us two won’t change it, either.”
The carpenter calmly puffs away: “Only the ones that likes it ought to be poor. Let the others have a try at it first. I ain’t got no liking for it. A fellow gets tired of it after a while.””
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)