4 ms·
> Many linguists have claimed that languages with more non-native speakers tend to simplify their grammars I think this misses the confounding variable. What
by jmyeet 3y ago
> Many linguists have claimed that languages with more non-native speakers tend to simplify their grammars
I think this misses the confounding variable.
What maintains grammatical complexity seems to be centralization. There's an age-old debate about whether grammar is prescriptive or descriptive. I'm in the latter camp, which is to say that if enough people say something "wrong" then it's not wrong anymore.
Education however tends to be prescriptive. It teaches and maintains an existing way of using a language, so much so that in some places the colloquial and "official" versions of a language are esentially two different languages. The "many linguists" here ascribe this to a "society of strangers". I think the reality is that absence of a central authority means languages tend to change faster and thus lose unnecessary complexity.
English is a great example of this. English is a Germanic language. Old English and Old German are very similar languages. After the Norman invasion in 1066, hte official language of the English court became French and remained so for ~300 years. This was the period of MIddle English.
After this came early Modern English (eg Shakespeare). While Old English is essentially unintelligble to the modern English speaker, a lot of Middle English can be understood.
But that 300 year period made English grammar much simpler. Most cases disappeared. Word order became fixed. Noun gender mostly disappeared (other than pronouns for people). The subjunctive mood mostly disappeared (eg "If I were king" instead of "if I was king" is about the extent of modern English subjuntive mood). The last vestige of genitive is mostly just adding "'s" to things (with a few exceptions of course).
English spelling and phoentics is of course a complete mess. So are tenses. But absent central authority we stopped having to know that a table was "he" and a chair was "she" (made up examples; I don't know their gender in Old English). Isn't that interesting?
- codr7 3y agoYeah, we're still suffering from that mess in Swedish; ett bord (table), en stol (chair). And there are no viable heuristics, it's all arbitrary. I'm all for simply picking one and running with it, it's basically line noise.
- eru 3y agoGrammar in language can act like registers in a CPU: it allows you to use simple pronouns like 'he', 'she', 'they', 'we', 'it' to quickly refer to previously introduced entities. Grammatical gender gives you a quick way to assign the entities to different slots. If you want to optimally hash your entities to the different slots, assigning gender approximately random would be the efficient strategy. Btw, you might like Turkish: they don't have any grammatical gender. And in general it's a very regular and systematic language.
- tlb 3y agoIt's annoying, though, that certain sentence structures work or don't work, depending on whether the gender of the objects happens to be the same or not.
- midoridensha 3y ago>Grammar in language can act like registers in a CPU: it allows you to use simple pronouns like 'he', 'she', 'they', 'we', 'it' to quickly refer to previously introduced entities. What if your language has dozens or even potentially unlimited number pronouns like xe/xim, ye/yim, kitten/kittenself, etc.? And you're expected to memorize the preferred pronouns for every person you've ever met, even if those pronouns are unique to that person?
- eru 3y agoThose are not pronouns in the grammatical sense, then. They are just a second set of names.
- midoridensha 3y agoYeah, that's what I thought too, but apparently a lot of young English speakers these days disagree.
- eru 3y agoWell, they are something they call 'pronouns'. Words shift in meaning. Just like many people these days insist on using 'you' in the singular, even when perfectly adequate 'thou' already exists.
- sorokod 3y agoNorman French, the official language of the English court became Norman French. Different from say Parisian French. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language
- davidktr 3y agoIf I understand your hypothesis correctly, the obvious counterexample is German. Germany had a very weak central authority for most of its history, a steady influx of non-native speakers, and still maintained its complexity.
- euroderf 3y agoThat was due to the bad luck of inventing the printing press early on, and congealing a grammatical mess before it had a chance to chill out and simplify.
- mcswell 3y agoMark Twain tried, but failed. As you probably know, he said he'd rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.