What determines how language in a particular country evolves?

Why is French for

example, so different from German?

You know, there's there's no simple measure of how different languages are from one
another. In fact, if you look at the languages, structurally, the way a linguist
would look at the French is different from the other Romance languages in a variety
of ways, which are, which make it more similar to the German and other Germanic
languages. There are a number of features of French which are sort of Germanic and
character, incidentally, Old French, middle France, a French in the medieval period
was not it was like the other Romance languages. So something happened to it that
made it less like the romance languages and more like the Germanic languages,

how does language change over time? How did 18th century French change compared to
12th century French, but you

know, when we talk about language change, that's very misleading. I mean, up until
the the turn of the century, you could find people in nearby villages in France
with virtually could not understand when the idea of a national language is a
pretty modern phenomenon. It has to do with the rise of nationalism, and
communication, and so on. And when we talk about language changing, what's actually
happening is that it's kind of like species changing. There's a mixture of all
sorts of dialects, and the mixture of these things changes over time. And, you
know, you take a look at it a few centuries apart, it looks like there's a
different language. I mean, within a couple of generations, the language can change
structurally in quite dramatic ways. And of course, it's a lexicon, you know, the
words of the language, well, that's a different matter altogether. So when
technology develops, you get a whole new vocabulary.

But if you were in France in the 12th century, and you understood all the nuances
of language, could you have predicted how these various languages would have
evolved over time is a partially random,

it's not actually random. For all we know, it might be completely deterministic.
There's just too many factors involved. speakers of English can be misled by this
English is relatively homogeneous. You know, I mean, I just came from Boston. And I
understand that everybody in Portland, but that's not true most of the world, most
of the world language that you can get very different languages pretty close by.
And much of the world is what we would call a multilingual, with the rise of
national states, and especially international communications, and national
education systems, and all these things, which is a pretty modern phenomenon, then
you get what we call national languages. Now, as I say, English is unusual. You're
a pre colonial times, there were just hundreds of thousands, probably of different
languages spoken and what's now called United States well, through the destruction
of the indigenous population, and the conquest by speakers of basically one group,
you ended up having a large homogeneous language, some French

theorists, for example, who argued that they must work very hard to keep the French
language pure. What does that mean?

doesn't mean anything, virtually every national language, every national culture,
or at least the European ones, maybe others, has a mythology, that that's the only
real pure language and all the others are corrupt. But what does it mean for the
language to be pure? First of all, there is no such thing as a language. There are
just lots of different ways of speaking that different people have which are more
or less similar to one another.

Why is pronunciation and intonation so important to language? Why aren't words

themselves sufficient to convey meaning?
Well, you have to understand somebody else's words, they're part of your knowledge
of language is a way of decoding noises that you hear and converting them into a
system that matches your own representations. Not knowing that decoding system to
work, the systems have to be close enough, you and I can do it. But again, that's a
little artificial. That's because of the artificial unity of the English language
spoken in the United States. I happened to be in England last week, and I can find
myself in places in England where I don't understand what they're saying. If I
listened to them for a while, we can establish communication, but you have to kind
of return your system and some manner that's not understood so that you can begin
to decode what you're hearing.

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