Italy today or Germany today.
take say Italy today or Germany today. I mean the differences among the things that we call German are enormous. So enormous as to lead to non-mutual intelligibility. We have to learn the national language when you go to school. It’s a different language from the one you spoke at home. What happens is between generations there usually small changes having to do with other influences from the outside and so on. And these things are cumulative sometimes they leave pretty dramatic changes. For when we talk about the language change that’s very misleading. It’s like predicting the weather there’s just too many things going on. Human life is pretty complicated affair
The closer i get to the border between France and Germany would the closer the languages become?
Well, first of all, the French is different from German. The way from Paris to Rome as you go toward the Italian border it starts to sound more like Italian and at some point it becomes Italian. By now there is enough national unity and so on so you can’t really find a border. But if you go back a little years there was no border. There was just constant changes and fluctuations and variations and you started speaking one thing at one place and another thing at another place and are not mutually intelligible often right along the way their sort of changes. In France this position is extreme in fact the interactive agents is a little bit comical. I don’t know if it was actually studied if we go back to the 18th century and read the drow he says,” France is going to be the language of science and German and English will be the language of literature.” The reason for this is that French is very clear and France the words follow the order of the thoughts whereas German and English the words don’t quite follow the words of the thought. So French is good for telling the truth because of its exclusivity and clarity whereas German and English maybe Italian they’re good languages for telling fantasies and postulates so they will be the languages of literature. It is a sort of naive point of view but you can see what was going on on his head. For him, the words in French follow the order of thoughts. When you hear German it seems all confusing and i suspect the methodology of purity and lucidity and clarity of French goes back to ideas of that kind. After all French culture had certain dominance and appeal for a long time so these attitudes get established and some of them may have prestigious associates with them. For example some of them may be the speech of that conquering group or a wealthy group or a priestly cast or one thing or another and we may decide those are the good ones some of others the bad ones but if social and political relations are reversed we’d make the opposite conclusions.
But that raises an interesting question. Why does language have rules? Why were we taught these rules in grade school?
Well, when your taught rules of your own language in grade school the chances are very strong that what you been taught is false otherwise you wouldn’t have to be taught it.
I can see every grade school teacher about to throw an orange at you on the screen.
Well, let me be a little more clear. One of the things you learn in grade school is the literally language. Now, in English, the literally standard is not so radically different from what you and I grow up with but it is somewhat different. The literally standard is not what i learnt in the street and when I went to school I was taught the literally standard. Now, the literally standard has some principles associated with it some of which are those of a real language. Some of which are completely artificial they were made by people who had crazy ideas about language. The reason you have to teach them is because they are not the person’s language. Your actual language nobody teach you. You don’t learn it anymore than you learn to see. Now, the fact is that the system grows in that brain is sometimes different from a system which is regarded for whatever reason as necessary or appropriate or some prestige dialect and maybe typical different from what grew in your brain and is typical is. So what we call good English is a system which is partly artificial which is taught to people because it was legislated to be good English. And you ask the question why do you have to teach people? Well, you have to teach them because it is artificial it’s not their language