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The printing press froze the written German language before natural language evolution had a chance to simplify the declensional system. So, language nuts: how
by euroderf 5mo ago
The printing press froze the written German language before natural language evolution had a chance to simplify the declensional system.
So, language nuts: how much time would have sufficed for German to simplify "sufficiently" ? Another couple of hundred years ?
A two hundred year delay in the introduction of the printing press certainly would have changed German and European history.
- elric 5mo agoI wonder how true that statement is. Dutch grammar simplified a lot after the invention of the printing press. And while I don't speak Neuhochdeutsch or Mittelhochdeutsch, I imagine the latter is a lot less streamlined than the former.
- thaumasiotes 5mo ago> The printing press froze the written German language before natural language evolution had a chance to simplify the declensional system. If natural language evolution had any tendency to simplify the declensional system, German would have been born with no declensional system. There was plenty of time. That just isn't how language change works.
- euroderf 5mo agoData point: Icelandic and Lithuanian are very conservative Indo-European languages; Icelandic and Lithuanian are grammatical nightmares.