No, "Language Divorce" is Not my Amateur Term for Divergent Evolution!

No, "Language Divorce" is Not my Amateur Term for Divergent Evolution! · Proto-Languages - How Are they Reconstructed? · Sabellian and some more, but first Vulgar Latin · Indo-European and Romance are Very Different as to Diachronic Linguistics · More on Language : Latin to Romance · More on Latin to Romance and Middle English to English · More on language in general

Q

What is the phenomenon when one language splits into two different languages called in linguistics?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-phenomenon-when-one-language-splits-into-two-different-languages-called-in-linguistics/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-2

Hans-Georg Lundahl

amateur linguist

1.VII.2023

If you mean like Latin splitting into French and Spanish, there is a term for it, and it is “divergent evolution”. Possibly “divergent development”.

What I mean by “language divorce” (own coinage) is sth different.

In 800 - 813, Latin in France received a new, non-vernacular, pronunciation, from England, where Latin had been a foreign language since 200 years earlier and introduced from Italy rather than France, meaning the pronunciation was even more conservative when it took on.

The old pronunciation didn’t die out since it was the vernacular.

When the old spelling (somewhat corrected) received a new, archaic, pronunciation, and the old pronunciation received (by the end of the 800’s it was already a regular occurrence) a new spelling, what had been one language over writing and speech had become two languages. It’s as if the Greek diglossia had totally ended, with on the one hand a very simplified spelling for Dhimotiki, and on the other hand a replacing of Katharevousa with Erasmian proncunciation of Koiné.

Please do not confuse “language divorce” (happened for French, Provençal, Italian, Castilian, Galician, respective to the stage when these pronunciations were the regular pronunciations of Latin) with divergent evolution (what had gone before, making pronunciation in what later became French and Castilian different).

Language divorce is akin to language reboot. Between Anglo-Saxon (last text in 1166) and Chaucerian Middle English, between Latin and Romanian, there is a period when English / Eastern Balkan Romance are spoken without a written language of its own, French and Bulgarian writing being used for French and Bulgarian, not for English or Romanian, and then comes a time when the language reemerges as a written language, borrowing its spelling from that dominant language (hence Anglo-Saxon Y replaced by U in early Middle English : yfel =/= uvel, then shifted to evil; GE replaced by Y : geard =/= yard etc). Similarily, earliest texts in Romanian are in Cyrillic with Bulgarian spelling.

The difference is, the spelling rules for the reboot come from a different language, the case for a language divorce is, the old spelling and the old pronunciation separate and get attached to new pronunciation and new spelling, and the new spelling for the old pronunciation comes from the spelling rules applied to the old spelling to get a new pronunciation.

A consequence of language divorce as opposed to continued diglossia is, there is a break between the popular language and learned terms in the previously written language, and while French prior to 800 developed as if non-daily terms in Vulgate Latin were a higher register, of the same language, French after 880’s has developed by Latin being kind of a foreign language to it, not completely true at first, but more and more so.