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It is interesting how much more complex ancient languages were. Just look at Greek and Latin. So many tenses, aspects, time, etc. It doesn't seem odd that thing

It is interesting how much more complex ancient languages were. Just look at Greek and Latin. So many tenses, aspects, time, etc. It doesn't seem odd that things become simpler over time. People are inherently lazy and if they can get by with nicknames, abbreviations, fewer syllables, simpler syntax and grammar, they will. Though this does beg the question, why in the world were language so much more complex the farther back you go? You would think languages would have been simple from the start.

codehalo 4y ago
> Though this does beg the question.... You are raising the question, not begging it. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-question https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-questi...
- BalinKing 4y ago
  From the first sentence of that article: > Begging the question means "to elicit a specific question as a reaction or response," and can often be replaced with "a question that begs to be answered."
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I have all but given up on this one. It's now notable when I hear someone use the phrase in the "correct" way. Usually the person ends up being someone who majored in philosophy. This progression is likely due to the fact that people raise questions much more often than they beg questions. Once the phrase started being used in the former sense, it was bound to overtake the latter.
- sethrin 4y ago
  "Begging the question" is a mistranslation of a mistranslation. Saying that it means something other than what people use it to mean is the worst form of pedantry.
jackbravo 4y ago
Probably latin wasn't the start ;-). We are not 2,000 years old hehe.
snarkconjecture 4y ago
Disclaimer: not a linguist. Languages don't really become systematically simpler over time, or they would've had to start out incredibly complicated. They have some tendency to cycle between lots of grammatical forms (like Latin) and few grammatical forms with lots of helper words (like English). ("Simple" and "complex" is debatable; English's snarl of helper words is infamously hard to learn.) It's obvious how you go in the "less inflection" direction, but how do you go in the "more inflection" one? The answer is that you start with helper words, which evolve into enclitics (fragments of words attached to other words, like the n't in 'can't' and 'shouldn't'), and eventually those become suffixes and prefixes, and then merge into the words they're attached to, creating grammatical inflections! This process is where all(?) of the grammatical forms in Greek/Latin/etc are thought to have come from, afaik. Proto-Indo-European, one of the earliest languages we can reconstruct, seems to have been pretty close to the apex of this process, having just consolidated a bunch of enclitics into grammar. So the goofy internet 'verbn't' trend is actually a possible glimpse of how English could acquire a negative verb form like Japanese has!
- FabHK 4y ago
  From what I gather, languages don't necessarily get simpler over time, but they do tend to get simpler as the number of speakers increases, particularly if the speakers learn it as a second language. Russians tend to drop articles in English, Indonesians don't really distinguish between "he" and "she", many learners forget the -s in third person singular verbs ("he make"), irregular forms get regularised ("teacher teached me"). Some of the most complicated languages are spoken by small groups in Africa or Papua Guinea, with features such as an evidential aspect (different verb endings depending on whether you saw something with your own eyes, heard about it, concluded it, etc.) [1], or Mother-in-law-speech, where the language you use changes when you speak to your in-laws [2]. Pidgins tend to be very simple and regular, by contrast. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech
  - not2b 4y ago
    That's because the Russian language doesn't have articles, but other complexities of the language that don't exist in English convey the distinction between, say, "a boy" and "the boy".
bradrn 4y ago
This isn’t really true — in fact, it’s exactly the same fallacy as in Swift’s article. Certainly at a glance Greek and Latin look a lot more complicated than English does, and certainly this is true with respect to their morphology (how words are created from smaller parts), but morphology is far from the only part of language. For instance: word order is pretty much entirely unconstrained in Latin, but English has much more rigid rules about word order, which are nonetheless often fairly subtle and complex to delineate. Or: we can distinguish no less than 11 different tense/aspect combinations in English, but this is non-obvious because they rely on combinations of verb form and auxiliary verb(s), and the auxiliaries themselves nearly all have several different interpretations depending on where and how they are used (see Dixon’s A Semantic Approach to English Grammar for more). Besides, even when you just look at morphology alone, ancient languages are no more complex on the whole than modern ones. Thus consider Russian, which has more cases than Latin (IIRC). Or Hindustani, which uses an entirely different case system depending on the aspect of the verb. Or Swahili, where the verb inflects for both direct subject and object (but not always!), which have no less than 18 irregular genders, as well as for 28 tense/aspect/mood forms (if Wikipedia is to be trusted) — amongst other categories. What happens, it turns out, is that languages can grow more complex over time as well as simpler. People do tend naturally to simplify, delete and abbreviate syllables in words — but they also tend to merge words together and elaborate simple constructions to more complex ones, in order to retain the expressive capabilities of their language. I’ve already mentioned Deutscher’s bool The Unfolding of Language; I will recommend it again here, since it has a great summary of exactly how these processes work and interact with each other in order to generate complexity in language.
Tagbert 4y ago
The main process by which languages become simpler (when they do. It is not a universal rule) is when large numbers of adults have to learn the language. This usually happens during mass migrations involving intermarriage. The newcomers don’t learn all the complex rules and nuances. They tend to leave out some of the more complex parts. If there are enough of these newcomers, then their children start speaking a version of the language that has been simplified by their parent. English went through this when the Norse invaded England and controlled up to 3/4 of it for several hundred years. As they did not have a large social separation from the English, they tended to intermarry with the English, and because their own language was similar but not the same, it was easier to speak a simpler kind of “pidgin” based on Anglo-Saxon but dropping things like gender and declensions that didn’t match the Norse versions. When the Normans invaded, they stayed socially separated from the English for much longer and didn’t try to learn English, so there was no repeat of the simplification process. In contrast, the Norman French vocabulary migrated into English and seriously complicated the spellings in English.
graderjs 4y ago
My idea about that is that people had far fewer fields of endeavour to express themselves in, and yet they had the same cranial volume and brain complexity as we do today, and societies were also relatively similar in patterning (but I guess smaller in size and complexity than today), basically we had similarly complex mental and emotional lives back then as now, but Language was one of the few ways people could actually express all of that "stuff" that now comes out in so so so so many creative ways: the trillion fields of formal and informal endeavour we now have (actuarial science, chemistry, TikTok creators, professional YouTubers, e-sports, parkour, commenting on HN, creating RFCs, creating web standards, programming, East Asian studies, film, music composition, sports medicine, comparative mythology, life hacking, race studies, and so on and so on and so on....) As a result Language was heavily over-engineered back in the day when it was one of the few ways people could get all that "out".

codehalo 4y ago

> Though this does beg the question.... You are raising the question, not begging it. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-question https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-questi...

BalinKing 4y ago
From the first sentence of that article: > Begging the question means "to elicit a specific question as a reaction or response," and can often be replaced with "a question that begs to be answered."
gnicholas 4y ago
I have all but given up on this one. It's now notable when I hear someone use the phrase in the "correct" way. Usually the person ends up being someone who majored in philosophy. This progression is likely due to the fact that people raise questions much more often than they beg questions. Once the phrase started being used in the former sense, it was bound to overtake the latter.
sethrin 4y ago
"Begging the question" is a mistranslation of a mistranslation. Saying that it means something other than what people use it to mean is the worst form of pedantry.

jackbravo 4y ago

Probably latin wasn't the start ;-). We are not 2,000 years old hehe.

snarkconjecture 4y ago

Disclaimer: not a linguist. Languages don't really become systematically simpler over time, or they would've had to start out incredibly complicated. They have some tendency to cycle between lots of grammatical forms (like Latin) and few grammatical forms with lots of helper words (like English). ("Simple" and "complex" is debatable; English's snarl of helper words is infamously hard to learn.) It's obvious how you go in the "less inflection" direction, but how do you go in the "more inflection" one? The answer is that you start with helper words, which evolve into enclitics (fragments of words attached to other words, like the n't in 'can't' and 'shouldn't'), and eventually those become suffixes and prefixes, and then merge into the words they're attached to, creating grammatical inflections! This process is where all(?) of the grammatical forms in Greek/Latin/etc are thought to have come from, afaik. Proto-Indo-European, one of the earliest languages we can reconstruct, seems to have been pretty close to the apex of this process, having just consolidated a bunch of enclitics into grammar. So the goofy internet 'verbn't' trend is actually a possible glimpse of how English could acquire a negative verb form like Japanese has!

FabHK 4y ago
From what I gather, languages don't necessarily get simpler over time, but they do tend to get simpler as the number of speakers increases, particularly if the speakers learn it as a second language. Russians tend to drop articles in English, Indonesians don't really distinguish between "he" and "she", many learners forget the -s in third person singular verbs ("he make"), irregular forms get regularised ("teacher teached me"). Some of the most complicated languages are spoken by small groups in Africa or Papua Guinea, with features such as an evidential aspect (different verb endings depending on whether you saw something with your own eyes, heard about it, concluded it, etc.) [1], or Mother-in-law-speech, where the language you use changes when you speak to your in-laws [2]. Pidgins tend to be very simple and regular, by contrast. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech
- not2b 4y ago
  That's because the Russian language doesn't have articles, but other complexities of the language that don't exist in English convey the distinction between, say, "a boy" and "the boy".

bradrn 4y ago

This isn’t really true — in fact, it’s exactly the same fallacy as in Swift’s article. Certainly at a glance Greek and Latin look a lot more complicated than English does, and certainly this is true with respect to their morphology (how words are created from smaller parts), but morphology is far from the only part of language. For instance: word order is pretty much entirely unconstrained in Latin, but English has much more rigid rules about word order, which are nonetheless often fairly subtle and complex to delineate. Or: we can distinguish no less than 11 different tense/aspect combinations in English, but this is non-obvious because they rely on combinations of verb form and auxiliary verb(s), and the auxiliaries themselves nearly all have several different interpretations depending on where and how they are used (see Dixon’s A Semantic Approach to English Grammar for more). Besides, even when you just look at morphology alone, ancient languages are no more complex on the whole than modern ones. Thus consider Russian, which has more cases than Latin (IIRC). Or Hindustani, which uses an entirely different case system depending on the aspect of the verb. Or Swahili, where the verb inflects for both direct subject and object (but not always!), which have no less than 18 irregular genders, as well as for 28 tense/aspect/mood forms (if Wikipedia is to be trusted) — amongst other categories. What happens, it turns out, is that languages can grow more complex over time as well as simpler. People do tend naturally to simplify, delete and abbreviate syllables in words — but they also tend to merge words together and elaborate simple constructions to more complex ones, in order to retain the expressive capabilities of their language. I’ve already mentioned Deutscher’s bool The Unfolding of Language; I will recommend it again here, since it has a great summary of exactly how these processes work and interact with each other in order to generate complexity in language.

Tagbert 4y ago

The main process by which languages become simpler (when they do. It is not a universal rule) is when large numbers of adults have to learn the language. This usually happens during mass migrations involving intermarriage. The newcomers don’t learn all the complex rules and nuances. They tend to leave out some of the more complex parts. If there are enough of these newcomers, then their children start speaking a version of the language that has been simplified by their parent. English went through this when the Norse invaded England and controlled up to 3/4 of it for several hundred years. As they did not have a large social separation from the English, they tended to intermarry with the English, and because their own language was similar but not the same, it was easier to speak a simpler kind of “pidgin” based on Anglo-Saxon but dropping things like gender and declensions that didn’t match the Norse versions. When the Normans invaded, they stayed socially separated from the English for much longer and didn’t try to learn English, so there was no repeat of the simplification process. In contrast, the Norman French vocabulary migrated into English and seriously complicated the spellings in English.

graderjs 4y ago

My idea about that is that people had far fewer fields of endeavour to express themselves in, and yet they had the same cranial volume and brain complexity as we do today, and societies were also relatively similar in patterning (but I guess smaller in size and complexity than today), basically we had similarly complex mental and emotional lives back then as now, but Language was one of the few ways people could actually express all of that "stuff" that now comes out in so so so so many creative ways: the trillion fields of formal and informal endeavour we now have (actuarial science, chemistry, TikTok creators, professional YouTubers, e-sports, parkour, commenting on HN, creating RFCs, creating web standards, programming, East Asian studies, film, music composition, sports medicine, comparative mythology, life hacking, race studies, and so on and so on and so on....) As a result Language was heavily over-engineered back in the day when it was one of the few ways people could get all that "out".