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November 20, 2005
Chapter 11
I believe that phonetic change is focused the most in this chapter because it is the most readily apparent and accessible subject for an introductory level of linguistics. Though making generalizations is dangerous, nearly everyone knows how spoken language has changed over the past centuries. I suppose it could be stated as becoming "less formal", and new words have entered our vocabulary as others have been lost. Also, language change begins with phonetic change before it changes syntactically or in the lexicon. We are constantly learning new words from other languages and integrating them or pronouncing already known words a different way. Both our spelling and sentence structuring reflect our speech which make it only natural that those two components of language should change after the phonetics. It would be impossible for language change to occur in reverse. I think that baby talk is similar to language change because a baby first learns pronouncing spoken language, then how to put words together to make meaning, and then continually adds new words to its vocabulary. The pronounciation is learned through hearing others speak and the repetition of those spoken words. Syntax is also learned through hearing others form sentences.
Posted by lcisfreya at November 20, 2005 07:20 PM