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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

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".

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".