Some myths

We saw in the last chapter that languages are always changing. A rather more complex question is: ‘why?’ People have been speculating about this for about as long as they have been aware of language change. Some ideas are unlikely, perhaps even absurd, however. Sadly these regularly turn up in popular discussions of language change.

One idea is that languages change because their speakers have particular physical characteristics: short tongues, or thick lips, or gappy teeth, or something else in this vein. This is of course nonsense: the size of your tongue has no more to do with the way you speak than has the size of your feet. But that doesn't stop people making this kind of argument.

Several decades ago, an enthusiastic scholar named L. F. Brosnahan became obsessed with dental fricatives: the hissing and buzzing noises produced by putting the tongue onto or between the teeth. There are two dental fricatives in English, both spelled <th> the one in thin, for which the phonetic symbol is [θ], and the one in this, for which the symbol is [ð]. In contemporary Europe, dental fricatives occur in only a few languages, all of them curiously spread out around the watery margins of the continent: Icelandic, English, Welsh, Castilian Spanish, Albanian and Greek. In addition, these sounds were formerly present also in the ancestors of German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, among others.