Good article, but it's not true that if you put the tribes on different islands that their languages wouldn't change. Languages change really fast unless there is a developed written culture to slow it down. Hence Papua New Guinea has more than 800 indigenous languages.
I'm not sure! Lithuanian and Slavic languages are said to be some of the most archaic in terms of their grammar, but they had no writing for most of their history. I'm not sure the same can be said for Greek, which has been written down for 3600 years, but has lost significant parts of its tonality. This topic definitely deserves its own debate/article. Wish I was an expert in linguistics so I could give this topic due justice. Hopefully will come across the proper research someday.
Grammar is not the right way to look at this question. To take an extreme example, in a certain technical sense French and Spanish are closer to Urdu than they are to Basque, a non Indo-European language. But if you listen to Basque it kind of sounds halfway between French and Spanish, and it has loads of French and Spanish loan words, so a French/Spanish speaker has a much better chance of getting the gist of someone speaking Basque than an Urdu speaker.
Language drift is fundamentally an extension of accent change. Accents change extremely fast. Look at how distinct New Zealand and Australian accents became over about 150 years before television and the internet created instant language contact. And that was with regular travel and developed literacy. When an accent changes so much that it becomes unintelligible it means that the words are no longer the same as in the original language. For example, in Latin the word for father is famously 'pater', but there are dialects of English spoken by the elderly in Northeast England where the word sounds as different from the word 'father' as 'pater' is. It is only the consistency of the written word that anchors them in the same language.
Linguistics is definitely the funnest subject to learn and think about.
In total linguistic isolation, what is the psychological force driving accent entropy? Youthful rebellion? Tolerance or acceptance of change? Under what sociological conditions could these forces be maximized or minimized? Are accent shifts used as a form of social signaling (slang) to demonstrate fitness? Is Zoomer slang a result of sociological factors?
Good questions. There are definitely at least two processes. (i) Accent drift in linguistically isolated communities. Probably this happens like evolution with random mutations and then people mimic the high-status accents (ii) semi-deliberate use of language markers like jargon to create indicate membership of a communities. These roughly speaking create what are called 'dialects' and 'registers'. Historically, (i) is more important, but it's been arrested and even gone into reverse because of the internet, travel and TV.
As to the actual mechanisms, it's actually hard to find any real research. There are 2 basic models of what language is in linguistics: a tool for structuring thought (Chomsky), or a tool for communication (pre-Chomsky, but still common in what is called 'applied linguistics'). The idea that language is a tool for group identity and a test for distinguishing in- from out-group is not really recognised, even though it's kind of obvious. This is because linguists are all either liberals or communists.
Good article, but it's not true that if you put the tribes on different islands that their languages wouldn't change. Languages change really fast unless there is a developed written culture to slow it down. Hence Papua New Guinea has more than 800 indigenous languages.
I'm not sure! Lithuanian and Slavic languages are said to be some of the most archaic in terms of their grammar, but they had no writing for most of their history. I'm not sure the same can be said for Greek, which has been written down for 3600 years, but has lost significant parts of its tonality. This topic definitely deserves its own debate/article. Wish I was an expert in linguistics so I could give this topic due justice. Hopefully will come across the proper research someday.
Grammar is not the right way to look at this question. To take an extreme example, in a certain technical sense French and Spanish are closer to Urdu than they are to Basque, a non Indo-European language. But if you listen to Basque it kind of sounds halfway between French and Spanish, and it has loads of French and Spanish loan words, so a French/Spanish speaker has a much better chance of getting the gist of someone speaking Basque than an Urdu speaker.
Language drift is fundamentally an extension of accent change. Accents change extremely fast. Look at how distinct New Zealand and Australian accents became over about 150 years before television and the internet created instant language contact. And that was with regular travel and developed literacy. When an accent changes so much that it becomes unintelligible it means that the words are no longer the same as in the original language. For example, in Latin the word for father is famously 'pater', but there are dialects of English spoken by the elderly in Northeast England where the word sounds as different from the word 'father' as 'pater' is. It is only the consistency of the written word that anchors them in the same language.
Linguistics is definitely the funnest subject to learn and think about.
In total linguistic isolation, what is the psychological force driving accent entropy? Youthful rebellion? Tolerance or acceptance of change? Under what sociological conditions could these forces be maximized or minimized? Are accent shifts used as a form of social signaling (slang) to demonstrate fitness? Is Zoomer slang a result of sociological factors?
Good questions. There are definitely at least two processes. (i) Accent drift in linguistically isolated communities. Probably this happens like evolution with random mutations and then people mimic the high-status accents (ii) semi-deliberate use of language markers like jargon to create indicate membership of a communities. These roughly speaking create what are called 'dialects' and 'registers'. Historically, (i) is more important, but it's been arrested and even gone into reverse because of the internet, travel and TV.
As to the actual mechanisms, it's actually hard to find any real research. There are 2 basic models of what language is in linguistics: a tool for structuring thought (Chomsky), or a tool for communication (pre-Chomsky, but still common in what is called 'applied linguistics'). The idea that language is a tool for group identity and a test for distinguishing in- from out-group is not really recognised, even though it's kind of obvious. This is because linguists are all either liberals or communists.
Doesn't the concept of "code switching" in critical theory imply the "identitarian function" of language, even from a liberal/communist perspective?