Jay Doubleyou: why is it that languages always change?

The anthropologist David Graeber looks at rules and freedom, games and play - by taking language as an example:

The most obvious example is language. Call it the grammar-book effect. People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

It’s easy to observe this phenomenon in places where grammars were only written recently. In many places in the world, the first grammars and dictionaries were created by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth or even twentieth century, intent on translating the Bible and other sacred texts into what had been unwritten languages. For instance, the first grammar for Malagasy, the language spoken in Madagascar, was written in the 1810s and ’20s. Of course, language is changing all the time, so the Malagasy spoken language—even its grammar—is in many ways quite different than it was two hundred years ago. However, since everyone learns the grammar in school, if you point this out, people will automatically say that speakers nowadays are simply making mistakes, not following the rules correctly. It never seems to occur to anyone—until you point it out—that had the missionaries came and written their books two hundred years later, current usages would be considered the only correct ones, and anyone speaking as they had two hundred years ago would themselves be assumed to be in error.

In fact, I found this attitude made it extremely difficult to learn how to speak colloquial Malagasy. Even when I hired native speakers, say, students at the university, to give me lessons, they would teach me how to speak nineteenth-century Malagasy as it was taught in school. As my proficiency improved, I began noticing that the way they talked to each other was nothing like the way they were teaching me to speak. But when I asked them about grammatical forms they used that weren’t in the books, they’d just shrug them off, and say, “Oh, that’s just slang, don’t say that.” In the end I found the only way I could really learn contemporary spoken Malagasy was to tape-record conversations, try to transcribe them myself, and then ask friends to clarify every time I came across an unfamiliar usage or expression. Nothing else would work: once they had decided these grammatical forms were errors, they simply could not describe them to me in grammatical terms.

...The Malagasy attitudes towards rules of grammar clearly have nothing to do with a distaste for arbitrary authority, and everything to do with a distaste for arbitrariness itself—a distaste which leads to an unthinking acceptance of authority in its most formal, institutional form. After all, what is our first experience of formal, rule-governed authority if not our grade-school teachers? This is as much true in Madagascar as anywhere else. In fact, when I asked my friends why people didn’t really speak the language described in the textbooks, the inevitable reply was always to the effect of “well, you know, people are lazy.” Clearly, the problem was that the entire population had failed to memorize their lessons properly. But what they were actually denying was the legitimacy of collective creativity, the free play of the system.

It’s worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the picture of the schoolmarm rapping a child across the knuckles for some grammatical error as one of our primordial images of oppression. But at the same time, if there were no shared conventions of any kind—no semantics, syntax, phonemics—we’d all just be babbling incoherently and wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other at all. Obviously in such circumstances, none of us would be free to do much of anything. So at some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating. And this is what linguists always observe. There is no language without grammar. But there is also no language in which everything, including grammar, is not constantly changing all the time.

We rarely ask ourselves why that should be. Why is it that languages always change? It’s easy enough to see why we need to have common agreements on grammar and vocabulary in order to be able to talk to one other. But if that’s all that we need language for, one would think that, once a given set of speakers found a grammar and vocabulary that suited their purposes, they’d simply stick with it, perhaps changing the vocabulary around if there was some new thing to talk about—a new trend or invention, an imported vegetable—but otherwise, leaving well enough alone. In fact, this never happens. We don’t know of a single recorded example of a language that, over the course of, say, a century, did not change both in sound and structure.

(Note 169: Not only do they change, they tend to change at a fairly constant rate, regardless of historical circumstances. There is, indeed, a whole science, glottochronology, premised on this fact.)

This is true even of the languages of the most “traditional” societies; it happens even where elaborate institutional structures have been created—like grammar schools, or the Académie Française—to ensure that it does not. No doubt some of this is the result of sheer rebelliousness (young people trying to set themselves off from elders, for example) but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that ultimately, what we are really confronting here is the play principle in its purest form. Human beings, whether they speak Arapesh, Hopi, or Norwegian, just find it boring to say things the same way all the time. They’re always going to play around at least a little. And this playing around will always have cumulative effects.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

From Britannia:

Glottochronology, the study of the rate of change occurring in the vocabularies of languages for the purpose of calculating the length of time (time depth) during which two related languages have developed independently. Glottochronology rests upon statistical comparison of the basic vocabulary shared by two or more related languages and on the assumption that the rate of vocabulary replacement is constant over sufficiently long periods of time. A number of linguists do not accept the methods or findings of glottochronology, for two reasons: the difficulty of compiling a culturally unbiased basic vocabulary list and the belief that the rate of linguistic change is not the same for all languages and is not constant for any single language.

Glottochronology | linguistics | Britannica

And from Wikipedia:

The original method presumed that the core vocabulary of a language is replaced at a constant (or constant average) rate across all languages and cultures and so can be used to measure the passage of time

Glottochronology - Wikipedia

And a couple of videos:

How Fast Do Languages Evolve? - Dyirbal glottochronology 1 of 2 - YouTube

How long can a language last before it's unrecognizable? - Dyirbal Glottochronology 2 of 2 - YouTube

It is clear, though, that language changes over time:

Linguistics 001 -- Language Change and Historical Reconstruction

Why does language change over time? - BBC Bitesize

How language changes over time | TED Talks

Language change - Wikipedia

How the English language has changed over the decades

How does language evolve? - LanguageWire

With a couple more videos: