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40-496: Rhinegraves are a form of breeches which were popular from the early 1660s until the mid-1670s in Western Europe. They were very full petticoat breeches gathered at or above the knee. They were worn under petticoat breeches or under an overskirt which was decorated with ribbon loops around the waist and around the knee. Where the knee was gathered, a large frill of lace and stocking tops added further decoration. During

80-400: A degradation in the quality of a language, especially when the change originates from human error or is a prescriptively discouraged usage. Modern linguistics rejects this concept, since from a scientific point of view such innovations cannot be judged in terms of good or bad. John Lyons notes that "any standard of evaluation applied to language-change must be based upon a recognition of

120-411: A hundred years' time, when the original meaning of 'wicked' has all but been forgotten, people may wonder how it was ever possible for a word meaning 'evil' to change its sense to 'wonderful' so quickly." Sound change —i.e., change in the pronunciation of phonemes —can lead to phonological change (i.e., change in the relationships between phonemes within the structure of a language). For instance, if

160-587: A particular type of dog. On the other hand, the word "dog" itself has been broadened from its Old English root 'dogge', the name of a particular breed, to become the general term for all domestic canines. Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language . Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language. Massive changes – attributable either to creolization or to relexification – may occur both in syntax and in vocabulary. Syntactic change can also be purely language-internal, whether independent within

200-516: A plural form to reflect it has two legs; the word has no singular form (it is a plurale tantum ). This construction is common in English and Italian ( brache , plural of the never-used braca ), but is no longer common in some other languages in which it was once common; e.g., the parallel modern Dutch : broek . At first breeches indicated a cloth worn as underwear by both men and women. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield , uses

240-561: A practical tool in all sorts of legal, judicial, administrative and economic affairs throughout the country. Altintas, Can, and Patton (2007) introduce a systematic approach to language change quantification by studying unconsciously used language features in time-separated parallel translations. For this purpose, they use objective style markers such as vocabulary richness and lengths of words, word stems and suffixes, and employ statistical methods to measure their changes over time. Languages perceived to be "higher status" stabilise or spread at

280-483: A sliding window approach, they show that, as time passes, words, in terms of both tokens (in text) and types (in vocabulary), have become longer. They indicate that the increase in word lengths with time can be attributed to the government-initiated language "reform" of the 20th century. This reform aimed at replacing foreign words used in Turkish, especially Arabic- and Persian-based words (since they were in majority when

320-701: Is a double plural known since c.  1205 , from Old English brēc , the plural of brōc "garment for the legs and trunk", from the Indo-European root *bhrg- "break", here apparently used in the sense "divide", "separate", as in Scottish Gaelic briogais ("trousers"), in Breton bragoù ("pants"), in Irish bríste ("trousers") and brycan or brogau in Welsh. Cognate with

360-462: Is a "descendant" of its "ancestor" Old English. When multiple languages are all descended from the same ancestor language, as the Romance languages are from Vulgar Latin , they are said to form a language family and be " genetically " related. According to Guy Deutscher , the tricky question is "Why are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all

400-446: Is a spelling variant, not a corruption , dating from the 17th century. Currently, britches reflects a common pronunciation often used in casual speech to mean trousers or pants in many English-speaking parts of the world. Breeks is a Scots or northern English spelling and pronunciation. The singular form of the word has survived in the sense of the part of the body covered by breeches, (i.e., posterior, buttocks ); paradoxically,

440-596: Is available to cavalry and other historic reenactors . There are four main types of riding breeches: Color is important in selecting breeches for competition. Sanctioning organizations and tradition both dictate that show clothing is to be quiet, classic and conservative in design. White is common in dressage , and is also seen in show jumping . Beige is seen in most hunt seat -style equestrian disciplines, though light grays, "canary" (a dull yellow), rust, tan, and an olive-greenish colour are periodically popular with hunt seat competitors. Eventers wear classic colours for

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480-521: The French Revolution , breeches ( culottes in French) were seen as a symbol of the nobility and more prosperous members of the bourgeoisie (including professionals such as lawyers, bankers, and physicians). Lower-class revolutionaries became known as sans-culottes ("without breeches"), as they could not afford breeches and wore pantaloons or trousers instead. The spelling britches

520-687: The Proto-Germanic word * brōk- , plural * brōkiz , itself most likely from the Proto-Indo-European root; whence also the Old Norse word brók , which shows up in the epithet of the Viking king Ragnar Loðbrók , Ragnar "Hairy-breeches". Like other words for similar garments (e.g., pants , knickers , and shorts ) the word breeches has been applied to both outer garments and undergarments . Breeches uses

560-480: The 1670s as the longer coat and long waistcoat became popular, these very full breeches became less full and by the late 1670s and early 1680s they were replaced by more tight fitting breeches with the stockings worn over them. This fashion -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Breeches Modern athletic garments used for English riding and fencing , although called breeches or britches , differ from breeches. Breeches

600-407: The 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional accents in media may also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the widespread adoption of language policies . Can and Patton (2010) provide a quantitative analysis of twentieth-century Turkish literature using forty novels of forty authors. Using weighted least squares regression and

640-497: The 1960s. The balloon legs were there to accommodate the riders knees as they sat in the saddle, but fabrics that stretched in all four directions made such excess material unnecessary and the form-fitting and much thinner modern breeches and jodhpurs became normal. Fencing breeches are worn in the sport of fencing to permit fencers to extend their legs more than they could wearing normal jogging trousers or tracksuit bottoms. Fencing breeches are also used as protective clothing for

680-455: The alliterative expression "bare breech" thus means without any inner or outer breeches. This also led to the following words: The terms breeches or knee-breeches specifically designate the knee-length garments worn by men from the later 16th century to the early 19th century. After that, they survived in England only in very formal wear, such as the livery worn by some servants into

720-428: The dressage and stadium phase, but less classic colours may be seen on the cross-country course (especially at the lower levels) to match the "stable colours" of the rider. Saddle seat riders, whose riding clothing styles derived from men's business suits, wear Kentucky jodhpurs in dark colors, usually black, navy blue, or a shade that matches the riding coat. Breeches may be front or side zip. Some competitors believe

760-413: The early 20th century, and the court dress worn by others, such as King's Counsel , down to the present day on formal occasions. Riding breeches are specifically designed for equestrian activities. Traditionally, they were tight in the legs, stopping about halfway down the calf, with buttons or laces in the calf section, and had a pronounced flare through the thighs that allowed freedom of movement for

800-606: The expense of other languages perceived by their own speakers to be "lower-status". Historical examples are the early Welsh and Lutheran Bible translations, leading to the liturgical languages Welsh and High German thriving today, unlike other Celtic or German variants. For prehistory, Forster and Renfrew (2011) argue that in some cases there is a correlation of language change with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not with female mtDNA. They then speculate that technological innovation (transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, or from stone to metal tools) or military prowess (as in

840-421: The legs. Corruption (linguistics) Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language , or of languages in general, across a period of time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics : historical linguistics , sociolinguistics , and evolutionary linguistics . Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change: systematic change in

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880-509: The main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm can also provide clues to earlier phonetic and phonological patterns. A principal axiom of historical linguistics, established by the linguists of the Neogrammarian school of thought in the 19th century, is that sound change is said to be "regular"—i.e., a given sound change simultaneously affects all words in which

920-418: The meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change include: After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has undergone pejoration . Conversely,

960-459: The norm." The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in the American resort of Martha's Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes. Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and

1000-657: The pronunciation of phonemes , or sound change ; borrowing , in which features of a language or dialect are introduced or altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect; and analogical change , in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more closely resemble that of another word. Language change usually does not occur suddenly, but rather takes place via an extended period of variation , during which new and old linguistic features coexist. All living languages are continually undergoing change. Some commentators use derogatory labels such as "corruption" to suggest that language change constitutes

1040-516: The pronunciation of one phoneme changes to become identical to that of another phoneme, the two original phonemes can merge into a single phoneme, reducing the total number of phonemes the language contains. Determining the exact course of sound change in historical languages can pose difficulties, since the technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century, and thus sound changes before that time must be inferred from written texts. The orthographical practices of historical writers provide

1080-467: The properties of earlier, un attested languages and hypothesize sound changes that may have taken place in them. The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology . The ongoing influx of new words into the English language (for example) helps make it a rich field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately

1120-437: The reasons in the world why society should never let the changes through." He sees the reason for tolerating change in the fact that we already are used to " synchronic variation ", to the extent that we are hardly aware of it. For example, when we hear the word "wicked", we automatically interpret it as either "evil" or "wonderful", depending on whether it is uttered by an elderly lady or a teenager. Deutscher speculates that "[i]n

1160-441: The reform was initiated in early 1930s), with newly coined pure Turkish neologisms created by adding suffixes to Turkish word stems (Lewis, 1999). Can and Patton (2010), based on their observations of the change of a specific word use (more specifically in newer works the preference of ama over fakat , both borrowed from Arabic and meaning "but", and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate that

1200-597: The relevant set of phonemes appears, rather than each word's pronunciation changing independently of each other. The degree to which the Neogrammarian hypothesis is an accurate description of how sound change takes place, rather than a useful approximation, is controversial; but it has proven extremely valuable to historical linguistics as a heuristic , and enabled the development of methodologies of comparative reconstruction and internal reconstruction that allow linguists to extrapolate backwards from known languages to

1240-416: The rider. Before the invention of the fly front , they were made with flaps, 5 inches (13 cm) to 8 inches (20 cm) wide, called falls . However, with the advent of modern stretch materials such as spandex , many modern breeches have no flare and fit skin-tight. In some cases, zippers and velcro fastenings have replaced laces and buttons at the calves as well. The flared style is seen at times, and

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1280-480: The same token, they may tag some words eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete". Standardisation of spelling originated centuries ago. Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the manuscripts that survived often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference. Semantic changes are shifts in

1320-471: The side-zip to give a cleaner appearance and to be more flattering. Styles are also developing to parallel trends in street clothing, including low-rise breeches and brightly colored and patterned breeches & jodhpurs that are aimed primarily at children. Riding breeches were formerly made of thick cavalry- twill and had flared thighs (balloon legs), until the invention and use of multi-stretch fabrics like Nylon and Spandex became widespread for riding in

1360-450: The syntactic component or the eventual result of phonological or morphological change. The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring in the context of linguistic heterogeneity . She explains that "[l]inguistic change can be said to have taken place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by other members of that community and accepted as

1400-527: The various functions a language 'is called upon' to fulfil in the society which uses it". Over a sufficiently long period of time, changes in a language can accumulate to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as the same language. For instance, modern English is the result of centuries of language change applying to Old English , even though modern English is extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The two may be thought of as distinct languages, but Modern English

1440-415: The vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history , English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words . Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By

1480-468: The word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in colloquial contexts, shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one as of 2009 of 'brilliant'. Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For example, "hound" ( Old English hund ) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it denotes only

1520-467: The word breech as a synonym or perhaps a euphemism for anus in his letters. In the latter 16th century, breeches began to replace hose (while the German Hosen , also a plural, ousted Bruch ) as the general English term for men's lower outer garments, a usage that remained standard until knee-length breeches were replaced for everyday wear by long pantaloons or trousers. The difference

1560-520: The word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors. Kadochnikov (2016) analyzes the political and economic logic behind the development of the Russian language. Ever since the emergence of the unified Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries the government played a key role in standardizing the Russian language and developing its prescriptive norms with the fundamental goal of ensuring that it can be efficiently used as

1600-588: Was that hose were in principle separate garments for each leg, requiring the tunic or a cod-piece to cover the private parts; whereas breeches were sewn together as a single all-enveloping garment. Until around the end of the 19th century (but later in some places), small boys wore special forms of dresses until they were " breeched ", or given the adult male styles of clothes, at about the age of 6 to 8 (the age fell slowly to perhaps 3). Male and female children's styles were distinguished by chest and collar, as well as other aspects of attire, such as hairstyle. During

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