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The idea of language contact reducing grammatical complexity isn't absurd, especially if you approach it from a linguist's perspective, and not a lay perspectiv

The idea of language contact reducing grammatical complexity isn't absurd, especially if you approach it from a linguist's perspective, and not a lay perspective. The misconception I think most people have is that the goal is to ask if English or Mandarin is more complex than the other--and that's a fool's errand. But it's not what's being observed. Instead, compare English to other Indo-European languages, especially its closest Germanic relatives. English is lacking in the Indo-European penchant for inflection, and you can pretty narrowly pinpoint the moment it happened: the influx of first the Danelaw and the Normans and the concomitant shift from Old English to Middle English. If you then look at other languages, you can find other cases where individual languages seem unusually simple compared to their relatives. Swahili, the East African trade language, is rather simple compared to its other Bantu brethren. Malay is simpler than its nearest Austronesian relatives. Even Old Chinese does seem like it had a similar grammatical crash to English (compare it to the other Sino-Tibetan languages), just 3000-4000 years ago instead of 1000 years ago. You can also find cases like the Kartvelian languages, where the comparatively more isolated regions seem to produce somewhat more complex languages than the somewhat more easily accessible regions. There's also a believable putative mechanism. It is a common observation that adult language learners tend to have a harder time learning languages than children. It's not hard to imagine that a language being learned by a lot of adults ends up having those new language speakers shave off some of the harder bits of the language, and those adults then passing on this shaved-off language to their kids (who are of course unaware that they're learning a simpler language).

nopassrecover 3y ago
Definitely agree it isn't absurd - everything you say seems plausible, and I appreciate your excellent examples. What's your take on the article's take that they feel this plausible hypothesis is challenged by their study? In particular, their study says: "The specific claim of the “linguistic niche hypothesis” that grammatical complexity should reduce with an increased number of nonnative speakers is not supported by our results." (from the source https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704). If I'm reading their study correctly, they seem to suggest there was a somewhat arbitrary mix of complexity in root languages, and that modern languages just carry on that same complexity mix based on the languages that influenced them, which doesn't do a lot to explain why languages differ in "complexity" (except perhaps to argue that maybe it doesn't matter: any old language will do and people just speak like the people they learn from).
- jcranmer 3y ago
  > What's your take on the article's take that they feel this plausible hypothesis is challenged by their study? In short, I'm not convinced that they have the right data. They're using numbers that are relatively easy to come by or compute (e.g., current L2 speaker estimates), and it's not at all clear that this is the right set of numbers to use (see all of the comments here complaining that fusional complexity being used as a proxy for grammatical complexity).
kaba0 3y ago
Thanks, that was very informative! I really should get more into hobbyist linguistics.
pmontra 3y ago
> It's not hard to imagine that a language being learned by a lot of adults ends up having those new language speakers shave off some of the harder bits of the language, and those adults then passing on this shaved-off language to their kids (who are of course unaware that they're learning a simpler language). When adults with different languages meet in a place where there isn't a language to conform to or that's impossible to happen, their native languages merge in a very simple form: dictionary and simple grammatical rules. That's called a pidgin [1]. Then those adults get children and those children learn the pidgin, the "simpler language", and add more complex grammatical rules, because they are useful, because they make the language sound better, because of fashion, whatever. That's called a creole [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language

nopassrecover 3y ago

Definitely agree it isn't absurd - everything you say seems plausible, and I appreciate your excellent examples. What's your take on the article's take that they feel this plausible hypothesis is challenged by their study? In particular, their study says: "The specific claim of the “linguistic niche hypothesis” that grammatical complexity should reduce with an increased number of nonnative speakers is not supported by our results." (from the source https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704). If I'm reading their study correctly, they seem to suggest there was a somewhat arbitrary mix of complexity in root languages, and that modern languages just carry on that same complexity mix based on the languages that influenced them, which doesn't do a lot to explain why languages differ in "complexity" (except perhaps to argue that maybe it doesn't matter: any old language will do and people just speak like the people they learn from).

jcranmer 3y ago
> What's your take on the article's take that they feel this plausible hypothesis is challenged by their study? In short, I'm not convinced that they have the right data. They're using numbers that are relatively easy to come by or compute (e.g., current L2 speaker estimates), and it's not at all clear that this is the right set of numbers to use (see all of the comments here complaining that fusional complexity being used as a proxy for grammatical complexity).

kaba0 3y ago

Thanks, that was very informative! I really should get more into hobbyist linguistics.

pmontra 3y ago

> It's not hard to imagine that a language being learned by a lot of adults ends up having those new language speakers shave off some of the harder bits of the language, and those adults then passing on this shaved-off language to their kids (who are of course unaware that they're learning a simpler language). When adults with different languages meet in a place where there isn't a language to conform to or that's impossible to happen, their native languages merge in a very simple form: dictionary and simple grammatical rules. That's called a pidgin [1]. Then those adults get children and those children learn the pidgin, the "simpler language", and add more complex grammatical rules, because they are useful, because they make the language sound better, because of fashion, whatever. That's called a creole [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language