Dear Andy,
Yes, that is a way we use of tracing language change statistically. It
appears that:
1) A person's pronunciation becomes "fixed" between the ages of 13 and 16;
2) A person who has resided in a community for more than 3 years (I use 5
years to be safe) speaks like his/her agemates rather than like his/her
parents.
Because of this, if you get a family whose members have resided in one
area for 4 or 5 generations, when you describe the changes in speech among
the members, you are describing the changes in speech (pronunciation) for
the area in which they reside.
It's complicated, and we hope that speech analysis by computers will
help in some way. Since vowels exist along a continuum rather than as
absolutes, it's been tough even telling the computer what to look for now. I
am no longer at the heart of Statistical Dialectology, so I haven't kept up
to date on this. But we know phonetics are constantly changing.
One of the other things we look for is spelling mistakes and alternate
spellings. When people don't know how to spell a word in Conventional
Spelling, they often spell it like a word they think it rhymes with.
Historical linguists spend a lot of time reading diaries, letters, etc. to
see what kinds of ways people spell "mistakenly," and looking at what rhymes
with what, when and where.
Inflection is really, really hard to study at present because of the
lack of long speech samples from earlier periods. Do you think that, for
example, the intonation of your questions differs from that of other English
speakers? from that of other people in different parts of Australia?
Linguistics gives a basis for examining questions of spelling and
influences the choice of "standard" spellings for a language. As a person
who writes down unwritten languages, I have to choose some sort of standard
spelling. The deviations help me adjust the spelling. Deviations are always
good grist for the linguist.
Dr. Daniel
----------
>From: "Andy Callaway" <acal@...>
>To: shavian@...
>Subject: Re: [shavian] Questions concerning vowels, etc.
>Date: TueThurSepJun 2629, 2000200029,20:50
>
>
> Daniel (And all)
>
> I have noticed subtle changes in speech. If you listen to a recording of
> someone 20 or 30 years ago, while it's still the same English we would speak
> today, there is something subtley different about the speech which /dates/
> it. Something about the inflection more than the pronunciation, I think.
> This is more noticable with someone familiar.
>
> Incidentally, this is a response to the Daniel's long message about
> pronunciation in St. Louis etc, which my mail reader seems to have dropped
> off, or included as an attachment or something.
>
>
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