This is interesting, to be sure. I see in many of these struggles, though that is far from a formal study, the human resistance to change. I see the forces pushing toward more uniform speech and behavior as including the increase in ability to travel and communicate far afield.
All of this drives a need to be more on the same page, and since people don't want to change, they insist, "coalesce around what *I* do, that would be fine, thank you". Because that way *I* don't have to change.
I also find it interesting that, it seems to me, Lao Tse's <em>Tao Te Ching</em> (The Book of Changes) also addresses this issue from the perspective of a Chinese bureaucrat, who would surely have to deal with these sorts of personal issues as the bureaucracy is High Culture, which also erases any idiosyncracies a nascent bureaucrat might have grown up with.
This is interesting, to be sure. I see in many of these struggles, though that is far from a formal study, the human resistance to change. I see the forces pushing toward more uniform speech and behavior as including the increase in ability to travel and communicate far afield.
All of this drives a need to be more on the same page, and since people don't want to change, they insist, "coalesce around what *I* do, that would be fine, thank you". Because that way *I* don't have to change.
I also find it interesting that, it seems to me, Lao Tse's <em>Tao Te Ching</em> (The Book of Changes) also addresses this issue from the perspective of a Chinese bureaucrat, who would surely have to deal with these sorts of personal issues as the bureaucracy is High Culture, which also erases any idiosyncracies a nascent bureaucrat might have grown up with.