Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 March 11

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 11

Language Change and Population Size

Is there any connection between population size and the rate at which a language changes? Will the language of an extremely small, isolated population change at a faster or slower rate? déhanchements (talk) 03:18, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't think there's any rigid correlation. Some anthropological tribes or bands practice customs where people are commonly named after animals or with other relatively common nouns, and names of dead people are tabooed, which ensures a high turnover rate in part of the vocabulary. On the other hand, Iceland had a relatively small population and a high degree of isolation for centuries, but the grammar and morphology were stabilized to some degree by a high literacy rate (the phonology less so). I would guess that sociolinguistic factors are most important -- many speakers of a language having extended personal contact with speakers of other languages (i.e. the opposite of isolation) tends to cause a relatively high rate of change, while a high rate of literacy tends to be a stabilizing factor. In the case of an unwritten language with a very small number of speakers, there would be fewer barriers to fads and influential individuals lastingly changing the language, but I don't know if that's a significant effect... AnonMoos (talk) 09:43, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• If I were answering this question for myself, I would start at the Wikipedia article titled Language change and follow on links from there, either to other Wikipedia articles, or to external sources, and continue on until I found my answer or learned more in general about how and why and how fast languages change. --Jayron32 11:41, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I can't find a proper link, but I've often heard this phenomenon described as "localization". An isolated group's language tends to evolve away from the original to varying degrees. It's actually the opposite of the mythology of the Tower of Babel story. Television and other mass media have spread the use of English through the world. I've often thought that if TV had been around from the time of ancient Rome, we would all be speaking Latin (which, in a way, we are - only it's localized variations of Latin). ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:56, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
    • Actually, it actually tends to work the other way; isolated speech communities tend to be more conservative than those in contact with other speech communities, so that language change tends to happen less rapidly (not no change at all, just less change) among isolated communities. In the English language, we see this in dialects like High Tider and Chesapeake Bay Islander which are generally agreed to be much closer to older varieties of English than any modern dialect on either side of the pond. In the British Isles the plethora of interacting dialects actually leads to lots of linguistic changes and linguistic drift; languages like the Scots language, which is relatively isolated and more conservatively resemble older versions like Middle English. This sort idea that contact between different speech communities leads to more rapid linguistic changes is represented in all sorts of linguistic concepts like creolization, stratum, calques, loanwords, etc. etc. --Jayron32 20:20, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

age of idiom "it's a long shot"

Dear English Wikipedia,

I'm writing a story set in 1770's Virginia. Would they say "it's a long shot" meaning it has little chance of success. My dictionary gives dates when words first appeared in English---but that doesn't work with idioms.

Thanks For Your Help, Vicki Martin UT

I think that's a more recent idiom. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, that meaning of "long shot" was first recorded in 1867. Deor (talk) 19:45, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

A long-shot was originally a gun, first recorded in 1595, and there are cites in the OED for more figurative usages, but I agree that the modern idiom seems to have been a gradual and more recent development. Dbfirs 20:36, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Occasionally referring to arrows also, although firearms seem to be the dominant literal usage. (From looking for the term in Newspapers.com, a pay site.) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:45, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

There's probably no way of knowing if it was an established idiom at that time and place, but if the meaning is clear from the context you can probably get away with it. If you think it might jar with the reader, as it seems you do, it's probably best to play safe and avoid it.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:36, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

The OED Online takes it back to 1796, with the definition "A venture or undertaking with great potential but with little chance of success; a far-fetched explanation, a wild guess; spec. (orig. Horse Racing) a bet laid against considerable odds, or a horse, etc., attracting such a bet." The 1796 cite is from James White's book of Falstaff's letters (i.e. fictional letters) and reads, "Robin thought half a noble a long shot." Presumably in speech the expression is older. So if your character might be familiar with horse-racing talk, it wouldn't be terribly anachronistic. --76.69.46.228 (talk) 10:05, 12 March 2019 (UTC)