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A room for one’s words
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François Jacquesson
Published/Copyright:
March 13, 2012
Abstract
Smaller animals have more names than bigger ones, not because of size, but because they escape people’s attention. For objects out of scope, human language cannot focus, and names proliferate from village to village. This paper gives examples from Slavic and other language groups. From these examples, the author shifts to the root/affix structure, showing that roots and affixes may change at different paces, giving a wide scope to dialect diversity. With reference to theories of cyclic evolutions of languages (Beames, Haudricourt, Hagège), the possibility is considered that the difference between center (root) and periphery (affixes) is motivated by opportunities for disjoined evolution.
Published Online: 2012-03-13
Published in Print: 2012-03
© by Akademie Verlag, Villejuif cedex, Germany
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Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- Dialectology, typology, diachrony, and contact linguistics: a multi-layered perspective in Purepecha
- On the usefulness and limits of a geographic perspective in dialectology: Arabic and Berber examples
- Linguistic geography of Breton and sociocultural motivations
- A room for one’s words
- The ALMaz (Atlas Lingüístico Mazateco): from geolinguistic data processing to typological traits
- Surnames and geolinguistics in Brittany: a study of concordances
