The Time Course of Language Change

摘要

This paper presents a numeric and information theoretic model for the measuring of language change, without specifying the particular type of change. It is shown that this measurement is intuitively plausible and that meaningful measurements can be made from as few as 1000 characters. This measurement technique is extended to the task of determining the "rate" of language change based on an examination of brief excerpts from the National Geographic Magazine and determining both their linguistic distance from one another as well as the number of years of temporal separation. A statistical analysis of these results shows, first, that language change can be measured, and second, that the rate of language change has not been uniform, and that in particular, the period 1939-1948 had particularly slow change, while 1949-1958 and 1959-1968 had particularly rapid changes.