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> it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. Do you have any citations for this? As far as I know (though I'm not an expe

> it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. Do you have any citations for this? As far as I know (though I'm not an expert), academic linguists disagree. https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/abiphn/has_there_ever_been_a_case_of_a_language_gaining/ed0jdv8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/abiphn/has_... Romance languages have gained inflections that Latin didn't have (from the above link: the future tense conjugations are an innovation in the Romance languages that didn't exist in Latin). Funnily enough given your example, Chinese languages have gained morphology too: Mandarin has the aspect-marking suffix 了, whereas Classical Chinese didn't. We can't reconstruct the history of language any further back than Proto-Indo-European, so there's no way to know whether it developed from some less-inflected language.

btilly 7y ago
I have read articles on the topic but am too lazy to dig them up. However https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectionality_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectionality_hypothesis indicates that there is indeed a preferred direction for language to evolve. Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Things moving in one direction wouldn’t preclude the existence of cycles. For example: a language has noun cases -> phonological changes cause the endings to merge together, requiring prepositions to disambiguate -> prepositions become more tightly bound to the words they modify and are eventually reanalyzed as case markings. Now we’re back with cases even if languages can only take each step in the given direction. > Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European. You’re right, but I meant to imply that PIE is the oldest language whose grammar we know a lot about, not that it’s the ancestor of every modern language.
- tasogare 7y ago
  Mind blowing paper: Chang, T. T.(1988). Indo-European vocabulary in Old Chinese: A new thesis on the emergence of Chinese language and civilization in the Late Neolithic Age. In Sino-Platonic Papers eds Mair, V. http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf I'm don't know enough about Indo-European reconstructions to make my own opinions on what's exposed on the this side and the paper is a bit dated but examples are very compelling.
  - knolax 7y ago
    I'm not convinced at all by that paper, he gives only by my count ~180 examples to relate two language families that by themselves have 10s of thousands morphemes. Especially since the reconstructed Indo-European rootwords and Ancient Chinese pronounciations are themselves dubious. I suspect you could probably get correlation of this level with pretty much any two language families taken at random.

btilly 7y ago

I have read articles on the topic but am too lazy to dig them up. However https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectionality_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectionality_hypothesis indicates that there is indeed a preferred direction for language to evolve. Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European.

umanwizard 7y ago
Things moving in one direction wouldn’t preclude the existence of cycles. For example: a language has noun cases -> phonological changes cause the endings to merge together, requiring prepositions to disambiguate -> prepositions become more tightly bound to the words they modify and are eventually reanalyzed as case markings. Now we’re back with cases even if languages can only take each step in the given direction. > Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European. You’re right, but I meant to imply that PIE is the oldest language whose grammar we know a lot about, not that it’s the ancestor of every modern language.
tasogare 7y ago
Mind blowing paper: Chang, T. T.(1988). Indo-European vocabulary in Old Chinese: A new thesis on the emergence of Chinese language and civilization in the Late Neolithic Age. In Sino-Platonic Papers eds Mair, V. http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf I'm don't know enough about Indo-European reconstructions to make my own opinions on what's exposed on the this side and the paper is a bit dated but examples are very compelling.
- knolax 7y ago
  I'm not convinced at all by that paper, he gives only by my count ~180 examples to relate two language families that by themselves have 10s of thousands morphemes. Especially since the reconstructed Indo-European rootwords and Ancient Chinese pronounciations are themselves dubious. I suspect you could probably get correlation of this level with pretty much any two language families taken at random.