Language Changes Over Time
Base XP: 60
Learning Target(s):
Students will demonstrate how texts are socially, culturally, geographically, and historically constructed.
Students will use found information for diverse purposes and from a variety of sources.
Words change meaning all the time and, depending on the social, cultural, geographical and historical contexts, the changes can be quite drastic.
The words and language that we use are influenced by many factors. Changes to fit the social group, or technological advances, or time and space can be used as a vehicle for communication and understanding.
Watch the 5 minute video (left) to see the evolution of the English language.
(P.S. This is what I did my first degree in! Totally interesting!)
How and why does language change?
There are many different routes to language change. Changes can originate from cultural, geographical, social and historical alterations.
Cultural: Language is transformed as it is transmitted from one generation to the next. Each individual must re-create a grammar and lexicon based on input received from parents, older siblings and other members of the speech community. The experience of each individual is different, and the process of linguistic replication is imperfect, so that the result is variable across individuals. However, a bias in the learning process -- for instance, towards regularization -- will cause systematic drift, generation by generation. In addition, random differences may spread and become 'fixed', especially in small populations.
Geographical: Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language into contact with speakers of another language. Some individuals will become fully bilingual as children, while others learn a second language more or less well as adults. In such contact situations, languages often borrow words, sounds, constructions and so on.
Social: Social groups adopt distinctive norms of dress, adornment, gesture and so forth; language is part of the package. Linguistic distinctiveness can be achieved through vocabulary (slang or jargon), pronunciation (usually via exaggeration of some variants already available in the environment), morphological processes, syntactic constructions, and so on.
Historical: Rapid or casual speech naturally produces processes such as assimilation, dissimilation, syncope and apocope. Through repetition, particular cases may become conventionalized, and therefore produced even in slower or more careful speech. Word meaning change in a similar way, through conventionalization of processes like metaphor.
Adapted from: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/language_change.htm
Task:
For this assignment, choose 10 words from the list below that are unfamiliar to you. Complete research to find a definition from the past and one from current times. Write a sentence for each definition that clearly communicates the meaning of the word both in times past and current times. Be sure to include how/why the word has changed (socially, culturally, geographically, historically) and the source URL from your research.
This quest can be completed as a text document or in a graphic organizer like the one below. (Or some other way that I haven't thought of yet).
Submit your completed assignment in the dropbox when it's ready, and please let me know if you require additional XP.