A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLanda

Author:Manuel DeLanda [Delanda, Manuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science -- Philosophy -- History; Nonlinear theories -- History; Philosophy -- History; Geology -- History; Biology -- History; Linguistics -- History, History, General, Philosophy, https://archive.org/details/thousandyearsofn0000dela
ISBN: 9780942299328
Google: IfsyEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0942299329
Publisher: ‎Zone Books
Published: 2000-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

3: MEMES AND NORMS

Linguistic History: 1000–1700 A.D.

Human languages are defined by the sounds, words, and grammatical constructions that slowly accumulate in a given community over centuries. These cultural materials do not accumulate randomly but rather enter into systematic relationships with one another, as well as with the human beings who serve as their organic support. The “sonic matter” of a given language (the phonemes of French or English, for instance) is not only structured internally, forming a system of vowels and consonants in which a change in one element affects every other one, but also socioeconomically: sounds accumulate in a society following class or caste divisions, and, together with dress and diet, form an integral part of the system of traits which differentiates social strata. A similar point can be made about lexical materials and grammatical patterns. As the sociolinguist William Labov has observed, a language communicates information not only about the world but also about the group-membership of its human users.1

This section outlines the broad history of linguistic accumulations in Europe between 1000 and 1700 A.D. and the more or less stable entities they gave rise to, particularly when linguistic materials accumulated within the walls of a city or town. Thus, as the sounds, words, and constructions constituting spoken Latin sedimented in the emerging urban centers of the southern regions of Europe, they were slowly transformed into a multiplicity of dialects, certain of which eventually developed into modern French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. (And a similar process transformed the Germanic branch of Indo-European dialects into various modern tongues, including English, German, and Dutch.)

Here we will explore the idea that the different structure-generating processes that result in meshworks and hierarchies may also account for the systematicity that defines and distinguishes every language. In particular, each vowel and consonant, each semantic label and syntactic pattern, will be thought of as a replicator, that is, as an entity that is transmitted from parents to offspring (and to new speakers) as a norm or social obligation. A variety of social and group dynamics provides the selection pressures that sort out these replicators into more or less homogeneous accumulations. Then, other social processes provide the “cement” that hardens these deposits of linguistic sediment into more or less stable and structured entities. This is not, of course, a new idea. Indeed, it would seem to be the basic assumption behind several schools of historical linguistics, even if it is not articulated as such. This is particularly clear in the role that isolation plays in these theories. Much as reproductive isolation consolidates loose accumulations of genes into a new animal or plant species, communicative isolation transforms accumulations of linguistic replicators into separate entities. In the words of the evolutionary linguist M. L. Samuels:

It is … the mere fact of isolation or separation of groups that accounts for all simpler kinds of [linguistic] diversity. Complete separation, whether through migration or geographical or other barriers, may result in dialects being no longer mutually intelligible; and thus, if there is no standard language to serve as a link between them, new languages come into being.

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