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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7160 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 73 of 77 28 April 2011 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
There are some related comments in Wikipedia's article on linguistic drift which mentions changes in word order or shift from the synthetic to analytic. One of the variations of this discussion reminds me of the thread "Most inefficient languages?" and in particular my response to the perception that languages simplify in absolute terms.
On the question of what has happened outside Indo-European, I can speak confidently only for certain Uralic languages. Estonian, Finnish, Lappic/Sammic and Hungarian among several other languages in northern Eurasia are classified as Uralic and descended from a reconstructed ancestor called Proto-Uralic. I can think of a couple of observations about how Estonian (and colloquial Finnish) show a shift in their morphological type. Estonian shows a noticeable mix of analysis, fusion and agglutination in comparison to the otherwise closely-related Finnish. This divergence arose partially as the tendency for Estonians to stop pronouncing final unstressed syllables became stronger, this meant that many of the endings critical to the functioning or being of an agglutinative language disappeared. To compensate for the rising ambiguity between uninflected words and words whose endings had dropped off, Estonians had to maintain the semantic or grammatical distinctions via analysis, fusion or creation of even longer vowels. A clear example is how Estonian possession is not indicated by suffixes as in Standard Finnish or Hungarian). - "My dog" / "Your country" - "Mu koer" / "Su maa" (Estonian - 'koer' and 'maa' are the nominative singular/"basic"/uninflected forms of "dog" and "country" respectively) - "M(in)un koira" / "S(in)un maa" (Colloquial Finnish - 'koira' and 'maa' are the nominative singular/"basic"/uninflected forms of "dog" and "country" respectively) - "Koirani" / "Maasi" (Standard Finnish - 'koira' and 'maa' are the nominative singular/"basic"/uninflected forms of "dog" and "country" respectively) - "A kutyám" / Az országod (Hungarian - 'kutya' and 'ország' are the nominative singular/"basic"/uninflected form of "dog" and "country" respectively) Without the use of "mu" or "su" as possessive pronouns/adjectives, the Estonians could not instantly deduce whether "koer" and "maa" are nominative forms or remnants of forms that once used the possessive suffixes as still seen in Finnish and Hungarian. This tendency towards analysis in Estonian may also have been supported by the fact that Estonians' habits were influenced by languages of neighbours that do not use possessive suffixes (e.g. Latvians, Germans, Russians). Another thing is that Estonian does not always indicate the illative (~ case referring to "going into" something) simply by adding a distinct suffix as is usual for an agglutinative language (in this case the suffix is -sse). Instead it is quite common to express the illative by using a form that is visually identical to the genitive but distinguishable by pronouncing the long vowel even longer. e.g. "school" ~ "of a/the school" ~ "into a/the school" kool ~ kooli ~ kooli (Estonian - "long" or "obvious" illative is koolisse) koulu ~ koulun ~ kouluun (Finnish) "train" ~ "of a/the train" ~ "into a/the train" rong ~ rongi ~ rongi (Estonian - "long" or "obvious" illative is rongisse) juna ~ junan ~ junaan (Finnish) The difference is that the last "kooli" is pronounced as if the double "o" were printed as 2.5 o's or in triplicate while the single "o" in "rongi" is pronounced as if it were a double "o". In contrast, the Finnish forms are typically agglutinative in just adding suffixes that signal obvious changes from one case to the next. There's no change in vowel length that escapes the reader's attention. You can draw your other conclusions on the evolution toward complexity/simplicity of various Uralic languages from excerpts below from a post comparing characteristics in Proto-Uralic with those in modern Uralic languages in "Finno-Ugric languages"
Basically there's evolution but assigning a measure of difficulty or complexity is problematic since some languages have for example added cases or tonal distinctions that likely weren't in the ancestral language, while others have discarded the dual or consonant gradation (if it had indeed been used in Proto-Uralic). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 74 of 77 28 April 2011 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Actually, I can give you an example of a marked increase in complexity from within the Indo-European family. Anyone familiar with Peninsular Spanish will have experienced something called "lenition", even if they're not familiar with the word. Lenition comes from Latin and means "softening" or "smoothing", and it's something that happens to consonants in many languages. In central and northern Spain, a D between two vowels (or as a single consonant at the end of a word is softened to ð (the voiced TH of English this). This process of lenition is particularly strong in past participial endings. Latin past participle endings used T, which the Spanish sound system lenited by voicing to D. But that's not the end of it, and I'll demonstrate this with cansado. People in the south and in Latin America say this with a strong D: cansado. People in central Spain say cansaðo. But there are some places in the north and in Andalucia where the D is further lenited to hiatus (cansa.o) or lenited to zero, leaving a diphthong (cansao). (Further west, you get Portuguese and Gallician and under the same stress, the D lenited away to a nasalisation of the preceding vowel.) Lenition in Spanish isn't limited to words though -- it can occur across words that are tightly bound. There is a distinction between intervocalic and non-intervocalic V, and if you say "no volveré", the first V is intervocalic because "no" acts as a clitic. In Spanish, this hasn't added any real complexity, in fact, it has arguably reduced the phonemic complexity of the language. But this is all background to the main point. This lenition is something that the Spanish (and the Gallicians and Portuguese) seem to have inherited from Celtic, and its effects can be seen in the evolution of the Goidelic languages. Lenition was a non-phonemic distinction in early forms of Gaelic. In the earliest writings, lenition was not marked, as it was (like in Spanish) something that happened to certain single consonant phonemes between vowels. But at some point Gaelic started experiencing syncope -- the dropping of vowels from some unstressed syllables. However, even though the vowels were lost, lenited consonants remained lenited. The number of phonemes in the language increased. But that's not all. As with Modern Spanish, lenition in Old Common Gaelic/Old Irish could occur over word boundaries. In the Celtic languages, attributive adjectives come after the nouns that they're bound to. Originally, masculine nouns ended in a consonant and feminine nouns ended in a vowel (-a). So a masculine noun didn't lenite the following adjective, but a feminine noun did. So far, so simple. But due to syncope, the feminine noun lost that unstressed final -a. But syncope left the lenition behind, and what was once a simple by-product of pronunciation became a new grammatical rule. This is only one example -- there are several places where lenition occurs because of (or is blocked by) a sound that simply isn't there anymore. Once the missing sound was well and truly forgotten, things got even more complex, because where lenition caused by the final phoneme of words previously only affected the next word, in Modern Scottish Gaelic and in Modern Irish, lenition can affect a whole string of words. So the rules of Gaelic are now very intricate, with some grammatical situations causing "single lenition" (only affecting the next word) and others causing "jumping lenition" (affecting the whole string). In certain circumstances lenition can be "blocked", but blocking only ever affects one word, so jumping lenition can carry on from the following word. So yes, languages can and do become more complex. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5385 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 75 of 77 28 April 2011 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Same in French: in many dialects, nasal consonants merged with the vowels to form 4 extra nasal vowels. Final vowel lenition made it impossible to guess whether a noun is masculine or feminine just from looking at it. The dropping of s after vowels created additional long vowel phonemes as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 76 of 77 28 April 2011 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The groups that have been mentioned were actually quite isolated when they evolved. To keep a language complicated you need stable families, few chances to move to and fro and respect for tradition. But small societies of this kind are vulnerable, and we'll se thousands of languages spoken by isolated tribes disappear in the coming time because the young generations switch to more prestigious languages - ie. because of communication with the outside world. In fact we wouldn't have known about them without having disturbed them. If we look at the situation in the Middle East 4-5000 years ago or Europe 2-3000 years ago there were of course commerce and sometimes also warfare. But the general population would normally live in in monolingual communities without much communication with the outside world - and a passing merchant now and then couldn't change that. Only periods of major unrest could do that, and in some cases we can see a direct effect on languages - such as the general 'tightning up' of Protonordic during the Migration period in Europe. The resulting Old Norse had shorter words, less sometimes vowel changes instead of endings, etc - in short a crisper, 'faster' language than the one attested on the oldest runic inscriptions.
Russian may be conservative, but it did drop its simple past and the finite part of its compound past. And from the time of Peter I and onwards it has been fairly open to loanwords. I would say that it has adapted. But it might have been driven to faster changes if the general population had had more contacts with the outside world, and if the nobility and zarfamily - who had such contacts - had not abandoned Russian for languages like (German and French.
I totally agree. We can discuss tendencies, but there will always be exceptions. And the further back in time we go the less evidence we have. As far as I know the earliest recognized writing was the cuneiform of the Sumerians around minus 2900, and they only wrote terse accounts of goods. Everything we can say about things that happened before the advent of writing can only be more or less wellfounded guesswork based on later stages which were documented ... and to add to the complexity of the problem: the things we deduce from written sources may be misleading. Edited by Iversen on 29 April 2011 at 9:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Haukilahti Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4968 days ago 94 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Polish | Message 77 of 77 29 April 2011 at 9:25am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Even in Finnish you see, I think, a change leading to a loss of inflection and more use of prepositions (or better: adpositions) in the so-called "marginal cases". For example the use of abessive is almost confined to fixed expressions, with ilman + partitive expressing the neutral connotation of "without something". Comitative is replaced by genitive plural + possessive + kanssa (with his houses), instructive is limited to a few adverbial meanings: "jalan" = "by foot". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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