"The Story of Human Language," Two

       Language is different and changes much quicker for those forest folk with only speech than for sophisticated city dwellers with a written language.  Words or forms of words can change or even disappear when they're not seen.  Once there's an alphabet, written language, and literacy, then there's something to refer to for the eyes, and language changes much more slowly.

       And then too the written language gets to be considered "the language" and becomes the standard to which "speech" is expected to adhere and thought lesser of and more informal when it veers from the "book" even though language's natural way of proceeding is to change as it is used, altered, and disused in spoken interaction with others.

       [Based on "Dialects--The Standard as Token of the Past,"  Lecture 17, The Story of Human Language.]