Some Diachronic Implications of Fluid Speech Communities

A S LINGUISTICS on the American scene is passing, at this very moment, through one of its most violent convulsions, there is every reason to expect that the long-endangered balance between the static and the dynamic approaches to language will in the end be restored. In their quest for a fairer hearing, students of evolutionary, especially of genetic, linguistics must remind themselves that, almost by definition, they have tended, to their own lasting detriment, to scatter their talents and energies on factual details devoid of broad implications. While the complexity of historical processes, by its nature, demands unremitting attention to minute intricacies, the recognition of major trends-mutually interwoven, hence, as a rule, difficult of strict isolation and direct inspection as they areseems no less imperative. There may be some point in drawing a line between, on the one hand, free-wheeling and adventurous glottodynamics, if we agree so to label the study of constants or even universals abstracted from concrete speech developments, and, on the other, straight historical linguistics, firmly tied to painstaking (if need be, downright pedestrian) philological inventories. Unavoidably, the former, if it is to be proffered in a persuasively realistic key, must feed on the accurate findings of the latter. The present considerations may seem and are, in fact, intended to be glottodynamic in essence and tone, but happen to rest on scrupulous sifting of diversified specimens of Romance material known for their comparative abundance and reliability.