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Yeah, Latin and Greek became somewhat more analytic during the time periods where a lot of foreign speakers were adopting them as their main languages. (That wa
by housecarpenter 7y ago
Yeah, Latin and Greek became somewhat more analytic during the time periods where a lot of foreign speakers were adopting them as their main languages. (That was during the Roman period, not the Middle Ages, for Latin; Latin in the Middle Ages was a dead language used only by learned people in non-everyday contexts, so its grammar was mostly preserved.) I don't know about Arabic.
- azernik 7y agoStandard Arabic is similar to Latin in Medieval Europe - it is a second language that is used for formal education and communication, but that no one speaks as a native language. All the Arabic languages that people speak as first languages are much more analytic. It's a similar phenomenon to Latin, where the formal written Latin used in Europe preserved things like case endings and flexible word order, while the Vulgates that later became the Romance Languages dropped a lot of that and started relying much more heavily on word order.