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What causes languages to simplify?

  Tags: Morphology | History
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ReneeMona
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 Message 9 of 33
28 June 2010 at 1:20pm | IP Logged 
I just read a book called "Language Change: Process or Decay" by Jean Aitchinson for a university course about language change. Aitchinson is a little too politically correct in my opinion, thought I suppose she has to be, but it's a great read regardless.

One of her points is that languages are constantly ridding themselves of 'useless variety'. Irregular verbs are a useless variety that make the language needlessly difficult so they are changed into regular verbs over time. Basically, language change is a constant struggle between expressivity and effectively. Languages are still, to most people anyway, just a way to communicate and when they say something they want to be able to say it as fast as possible but in a way that still conveys exactly what they mean. A change that doesn't affect the expressivity of the language but that straightens out an irregularity and makes it simpler and faster for people to communicate is more likely to take hold than a change that complicates the language and makes it less expressive. That's not to say that seemingly useless changes don't take place in a language. Frenkeld already mentioned the English dummy-do as an example of this.

I'm just paraphrasing here and I'm probably forgetting some things and getting other things wrong so I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in language change. It gives a comprehensive overview of all the aspects of language change and it certainly softened my rather intolerant view of certain changes going on right now.


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Fat-tony
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 Message 10 of 33
28 June 2010 at 2:23pm | IP Logged 
My understanding is that language change (and regularization) is greatly spend up by
people learning the language later in life i.e. imperfectly. The reason English doesn't
have grammatical genders is because the Viking invaders, who spoke a very similar
language, never bothered to learn these fiddly, useless bits of grammar. You can see
the same process in Indonesian, which is a more regular and "user-friendly" version of
the surrounding languages (Javanese, Sundanese, etc).
On the other hand, many languages which are only learnt by children, such as small
tribal languages in New Guinea or the Caucasus are horrendously complex and show few
signs of undergoing simplification.
It's also worth nothing that we only know ancient languages from the most complex and
literate sources (poetry, chronicles etc) which may give an over-inflated view of their
complexity.
As we're recommending resources, most of what I've written in a poor paraphrase of Prof
John McWhorter in "The Story of Human Language" by The Teaching Company and it's well
worth the effort of getting a copy (probably through your library given the cost.)
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Cainntear
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 Message 11 of 33
28 June 2010 at 2:25pm | IP Logged 
Irregularity is a funny one -- most irregularity is introduced when two forms collapse.

Look at the French and Italian -- the conjugations of "to go" are formed from a mixture of the Latin verbs "andare" and "vadere" (NB: not a Latin scholar, so don't take my word for it on the exact spelling). As such, irregular verbs are inherently unstable. Irregularities can only stick if they're used often enough, hence which saying "dove" instead of "dived" sounds weird to the modern ear -- we don't say it enough to remember it's irregular. And it used to be regular, because of the Germanic "strong verbs" system, but that verb system has died out.

But regularity/irregularity is only a small part of language complexity, and is arguably a "transitional state" in the language.

It's the loss of inflectional systems that blows my mind -- they seem to die off at such an incredible rate that it's hard to imagine how they ever came to exist in the first place, and I would love to hear more about current theories on that, so I'll be looking out Duetscher's book when I can.
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chucknorrisman
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 Message 12 of 33
28 June 2010 at 5:22pm | IP Logged 
Fat-tony wrote:
My understanding is that language change (and regularization) is greatly spend up by
people learning the language later in life i.e. imperfectly. The reason English doesn't
have grammatical genders is because the Viking invaders, who spoke a very similar
language, never bothered to learn these fiddly, useless bits of grammar. You can see
the same process in Indonesian, which is a more regular and "user-friendly" version of
the surrounding languages (Javanese, Sundanese, etc).
On the other hand, many languages which are only learnt by children, such as small
tribal languages in New Guinea or the Caucasus are horrendously complex and show few
signs of undergoing simplification.
It's also worth nothing that we only know ancient languages from the most complex and
literate sources (poetry, chronicles etc) which may give an over-inflated view of their
complexity.
As we're recommending resources, most of what I've written in a poor paraphrase of Prof
John McWhorter in "The Story of Human Language" by The Teaching Company and it's well
worth the effort of getting a copy (probably through your library given the cost.)

I'm wondering, then, if the languages simplify due to having many non-native adult learners, why is Russian grammar still quite complex compared to many other languages?

Edited by chucknorrisman on 28 June 2010 at 5:25pm
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chucknorrisman
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 Message 13 of 33
28 June 2010 at 5:24pm | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
Irregularity is a funny one -- most irregularity is introduced when two forms collapse.

Look at the French and Italian -- the conjugations of "to go" are formed from a mixture of the Latin verbs "andare" and "vadere" (NB: not a Latin scholar, so don't take my word for it on the exact spelling). As such, irregular verbs are inherently unstable. Irregularities can only stick if they're used often enough, hence which saying "dove" instead of "dived" sounds weird to the modern ear -- we don't say it enough to remember it's irregular. And it used to be regular, because of the Germanic "strong verbs" system, but that verb system has died out.

But regularity/irregularity is only a small part of language complexity, and is arguably a "transitional state" in the language.

It's the loss of inflectional systems that blows my mind -- they seem to die off at such an incredible rate that it's hard to imagine how they ever came to exist in the first place, and I would love to hear more about current theories on that, so I'll be looking out Duetscher's book when I can.

I agree - I also want to know why inflections and conjugations simplify so much.
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Sennin
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 Message 14 of 33
28 June 2010 at 5:42pm | IP Logged 
Simplicity doesn't mean decrease in quality. If a language can transform itself into a simpler but but equally or more expressive form - then it is becoming better. It is more streamlined, less idiosyncratic.
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frenkeld
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 Message 15 of 33
28 June 2010 at 6:01pm | IP Logged 
Sennin wrote:
Simplicity doesn't mean decrease in quality. If a language can transform itself into a simpler but but equally or more expressive form - then it is becoming better. It is more streamlined, less idiosyncratic.


One can only meaningfully compare small changes. How do you compare a Slavic language with all its cases and English, for example?

Poetry is one area where endings can add flexibility. Translating Homer into English can't be easy.

Outside such special language uses, any major language seems good enough for communication needs of a modern society, but that doesn't explain how cases arose in the first place.


Edited by frenkeld on 28 June 2010 at 6:04pm
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Ulrike
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 Message 16 of 33
28 June 2010 at 6:48pm | IP Logged 
The French "aller" also carries forms which have the Latin verb "ire" as their origin. They are in the future tense "j´irai" and in the conditional.

Cainntear wrote:
Irregularity is a funny one -- most irregularity is introduced when two forms collapse.

Look at the French and Italian -- the conjugations of "to go" are formed from a mixture of the Latin verbs "andare" and "vadere" (NB: not a Latin scholar, so don't take my word for it on the exact spelling). As such, irregular verbs are inherently
unstable. Irregularities can only stick if they're used often enough, hence which saying "dove" instead of "dived" sounds weird to the modern ear -- we don't say it enough to remember it's irregular. And it used to be regular, because of the Germanic "strong verbs" system, but that verb system has died out.

But regularity/irregularity is only a small part of language complexity, and is arguably a "transitional state" in the language.

It's the loss of inflectional systems that blows my mind -- they seem to die off at such an incredible rate that it's hard to imagine how they ever came to exist in the first place, and I would love to hear more about current theories on that, so I'll be looking out Duetscher's book when I can.



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