On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 02:03 AM, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
400 hundred years ago Agricola codified Finnish yet today there are more
than 80 dialects not to mention the huge variation between the written and
spoken forms.
I'm not a linguistic scholar, but I read once that linguistic scholars have noticed that throughout human history, there has always been a trend of languages diverging, rather than converging (as one might expect). As the amount of widespread-edness* of a language grows, the more likely that subgroups using the language are to evolve with their own dialects of that language, separating from the main "trunk" as it were. I wonder sometimes about the grammars that people use to write software and how closely or not so closely it relates.
* case in point
Erik
-- Erik Price
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