Conservative and innovative language
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In linguistics, a conservative form, variety, or feature of a language is one that has changed relatively little across the language's history, or which is relatively resistant to change. It is the opposite of innovative, innovating, or advanced forms, varieties, or features, which have undergone relatively larger or more recent changes. Furthermore, an archaic form is not only chronologically old (and often conservative) but also rarely used anymore in the modern language, and an obsolete form has fallen out of use altogether.
A conservative linguistic form, such as a word or sound feature, is one that remains closer to an older form from which it evolved, relative to cognate forms from the same source.[1]: 87 For example, the Spanish word caro /'karo/ and the French word cher /ʃɛʀ/ are both adjectives meaning dear or beloved that evolved from the Latin word cārum /'ka:rum/. The Spanish word, which is more similar to the common ancestor, is more conservative than its French cognate.[1]: 87
A language or
Writing is generally said to be more conservative than speech since written forms generally change more slowly than spoken language does. That helps explain inconsistencies in writing systems such as that of English; since the spoken language has changed relatively more than has the written language, the match between spelling and pronunciation is inconsistent.[8]
A language may be conservative in one respect while simultaneously innovative in another.
In the 6th century AD,
See also
References
- ^ a b c Trask, Robert Lawrence (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. London: Routledge.
- ^ Contini, Michel; Tuttle, Edward (1982). "Sardinian". In John Green (ed.). Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology 3. Mouton. pp. 171–188.
- ISBN 03-9700-400-1.
- ^ Jones, Michael (2003). "Sardinian". In Harris, Martin; Vincent, Nigel (eds.). The Romance languages. Oxford University Press. pp. 314–350.
- ^ Alkire, Ti; Rosen, Carol (2010). Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
- ^ Friðriksson, Finnur (19 November 2008). "Language change vs. stability in conservative language communities. A case study of Icelandic" (doctoral thesis). Archived from the original on 26 September 2017. Retrieved 26 September 2017.
- ^ Chambers, J.K. (2009). "Education and the enforcement of standard English". In Y. Kawaguchi, M. Minegishi and J. Durand (ed.). Corpus Analysis and Variation in Linguistics. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- ^ Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman and Nina Hyams (2010). An Introduction to Language. Cengage Learning.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ISBN 90-272-4795-1.
- ISBN 978-3-11-086732-9.
- ISBN 978-0-231-11152-2.