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In linguistics, a conservative form, variety, or modality is one that has changed relatively little over its history, or which is relatively resistant to change. It is the opposite of innovative forms or varieties, which have undergone relatively larger or more recent changes. A conservative linguistic form, such as a word, is one that remains closer to an older form from which it evolved, relative to cognate forms from the same source. For example, the Spanish word ''caro'' and the French word ''cher'' both evolved from the Latin word ''cārum''. The Spanish word, which is more similar to the common ancestor, is more conservative than its French cognate. A language or language variety is said to be conservative if it has fewer innovations (in other words, more conservative forms) than related varieties do. For example, Icelandic is, in spelling, more similar to Old Norse than other languages that evolved from Old Norse, including Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish, while Sardinian is regarded by many linguists to be the most conservative Romance language.〔Contini & Tuttle, 1982: 171; Blasco Ferrer, 1989: 14〕〔''Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction'', Cambridge University Press〕 Therefore, Icelandic〔 and Sardinian are considered relatively conservative languages. Likewise, some dialects of a language may be more conservative than others. Standard varieties, for example, tend to be more conservative than non-standard varieties, since education and codification in writing tend to retard change. Writing is generally said to be more conservative than speech. That is to say that written forms generally change more slowly than the spoken language does. This helps explain inconsistencies in writing systems such as that of English; since the spoken language has changed relatively more than the written language has, the match between spelling and pronunciation is inconsistent. A language may be conservative in one respect while simultaneously innovative in another. Bulgarian and Macedonian, closely related Slavic languages, are innovative in the grammar of their nouns, having dropped nearly all vestiges of the complex Slavic case system; at the same time, they are highly conservative in their verbal system, which has been greatly simplified in most other Slavic languages. English, which is one of the more innovative Germanic languages in most respects, is nevertheless conservative in its consonant phonology, retaining sounds such as (most notably) θ and ð (''th'') which have been altered in other Germanic languages except Icelandic, which is the most conservative modern Germanic language. Conservative languages are often thought of as being more grammatically (or at least, morphologically) complex than innovative languages. This is largely true for Indo-European languages, where the parent language had an extremely complex morphology and the dominant pattern of language change has been simplification. On the other hand, a number of Arabic varieties commonly considered innovative, such as Egyptian Arabic, have developed a complex agglutinative system of verbal morphology out of the simpler system of Classical Arabic. == See also == * Historical linguistics * Linguistic purism 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Conservative (language)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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