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A very interesting look at language evolution! One effect she didn't mention, though, is that language grammar has a propensity to decrease in complexity over t

by veddox 9y ago

A very interesting look at language evolution! One effect she didn't mention, though, is that language grammar has a propensity to decrease in complexity over time. Thus, Shakespeare's English was more complicated than our own, Goethe's German more than today's German and Plato's Greek more so than Koiné Greek, which is still more difficult than modern Greek... I'm not a linguist, however, so I can't judge the relative strengths of this effect vs. the insularity she talks about...

umanwizard 9y ago
> language grammar has a propensity to decrease in complexity over time. Please provide a citation, as this seems obviously wrong on its face (if it were true, given that language has been in use for tens of thousands of years, we would all be grunting one-syllable words with no grammar at all). I suspect that your statement is very narrowly based on the fact that most of the commonly studied languages in just one language family (Indo-European) have lost just one "complicated" feature (noun declensions). This Quora answer[0] puts it better than I could: "No language is "more simple" than other languages. Old English had just 2 tenses, present and past, now there are 16 of them, future and future-in-the-past forms developed over the time, the continuous aspect appeared, the perfect appeared, so the verbal system acquired much more forms than it used to have. On the other hand, the nouns lost the gender and cases. It is always like that, if something is lost, some new features appear to compensate the loss. A good example of a language that gets more and more complicated over the course of time is Chinese. The Old Chinese had no parts of speech, no number, no tense, it was a monosyllabic isolating language. Now Chinese is developing in the direction of getting more complicated, its words are mostly two-syllable now, parts of speech appeared in it, tenses begin to appear, etc. And some languages can become more simple during some period, and then again get more complicated. Hindi is like that, first it lost all the cases which were in Sanskrit, but later it developed a new system of cases." [0]: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6399 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6399
- veddox 9y ago
  Sadly unable to find the source I got that from (an article I read several months ago). It did feature noun declensions quite prominently though, you're right in that respect ;-) My understanding was that as major languages spread and came into contact with speakers of other languages, the cross-pollination led to a net loss in complexity of the original language (due to the fact that it had to accommodate speakers from a wide range of backgrounds). Of course, this effect only applies to those languages that do attain a sufficiently large reach, so my statement above was oversimplified. Again, I am no linguist, so I cannot backup my claims with any scientific literature. My anecdotal experience would, however, confirm the general trend. (Drawing on what I know about English, German, Greek, kiSwahili and the Bantu languages.) What you say about Chinese increasing in complexity strikes me as quite intriguing. Though the self-imposed isolation of the Chinese throughout much of history might account for that, as that must have created quite a strong linguistic insularity.

by veddox 9y ago

umanwizard 9y ago

> language grammar has a propensity to decrease in complexity over time. Please provide a citation, as this seems obviously wrong on its face (if it were true, given that language has been in use for tens of thousands of years, we would all be grunting one-syllable words with no grammar at all). I suspect that your statement is very narrowly based on the fact that most of the commonly studied languages in just one language family (Indo-European) have lost just one "complicated" feature (noun declensions). This Quora answer[0] puts it better than I could: "No language is "more simple" than other languages. Old English had just 2 tenses, present and past, now there are 16 of them, future and future-in-the-past forms developed over the time, the continuous aspect appeared, the perfect appeared, so the verbal system acquired much more forms than it used to have. On the other hand, the nouns lost the gender and cases. It is always like that, if something is lost, some new features appear to compensate the loss. A good example of a language that gets more and more complicated over the course of time is Chinese. The Old Chinese had no parts of speech, no number, no tense, it was a monosyllabic isolating language. Now Chinese is developing in the direction of getting more complicated, its words are mostly two-syllable now, parts of speech appeared in it, tenses begin to appear, etc. And some languages can become more simple during some period, and then again get more complicated. Hindi is like that, first it lost all the cases which were in Sanskrit, but later it developed a new system of cases." [0]: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6399 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6399

veddox 9y ago
Sadly unable to find the source I got that from (an article I read several months ago). It did feature noun declensions quite prominently though, you're right in that respect ;-) My understanding was that as major languages spread and came into contact with speakers of other languages, the cross-pollination led to a net loss in complexity of the original language (due to the fact that it had to accommodate speakers from a wide range of backgrounds). Of course, this effect only applies to those languages that do attain a sufficiently large reach, so my statement above was oversimplified. Again, I am no linguist, so I cannot backup my claims with any scientific literature. My anecdotal experience would, however, confirm the general trend. (Drawing on what I know about English, German, Greek, kiSwahili and the Bantu languages.) What you say about Chinese increasing in complexity strikes me as quite intriguing. Though the self-imposed isolation of the Chinese throughout much of history might account for that, as that must have created quite a strong linguistic insularity.