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What causes languages to simplify? | ||
Tags: Morphology | History | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6141 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 17 of 33 28 June 2010 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Russian grammar is certainly simpler than its Slavic relatives in that, following the pattern, it has been shorn of many of the "fiddly" extras. I'm in agreement with Cainntear in that I can't understand how case systems come about never mind how they manage to survive more than a few generations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5449 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 18 of 33 29 June 2010 at 2:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I see, thank you. What I've also noticed is that nouns seem to become simplified more often than the verb systems. Is this generally true? (of course there are exceptions) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chirel Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5311 days ago 125 posts - 159 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: French | Message 19 of 33 29 June 2010 at 6:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't know about inflectional systems dying off, but here is some example why they came to be. (In which languages this change is happening?) In Finnish there are some fifteen (or fourteen?) cases, four of witch are so called grammatical cases. These four grammatical cases are used for subject, object and predicative. If the subject is in nominative then the object (usually) isn't and the other way around. Finnish has a relatively free word order, so we must separate these functions somehow. Compare these examples: Boy kisses girl. - Girl kisses boy. Poika suutelee tyttöä. - Tyttöä suutelee poika. In the English examples, the word order changes the subject boy/girl. In the Finnish ones it's the boy in both examples, because of the cases (although the word order carries other meanings and nuances). All the rest of the cases have endings that carry a similar meaning to prepositions in many other languages, for example: kaupassa - in the store kaupasta - from the store kauppaan - into the store Some of these (koiratta - without a dog, koirineen, with a dog/the dogs, käsin - by hand) are disappearing, as they are being replaced by expressions with adpositions, but the grammatical ones are very much alive and kicking. And it's difficult for me to imagine they would be disappearing any time soon (maybe one day in the future though). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5575 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 20 of 33 29 June 2010 at 8:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Languages don't always simplify. There's a theory that languages swing back and forth between using inflection and particles for grammatical structure, which are generally considered 'simpler' than inflection. I.e, particles attach to words to become inflected endings, then over time detach again and become independent words.
Generally speaking though, it is undeniable that since the invention of writing languages have been simplifying with time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5448 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 21 of 33 30 June 2010 at 9:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Languages adapt to the needs of their speakers, and that's going to mean simplification in the minds of those speakers. But what constitutes simplification is tricky. Consider:
As every Michel Thomas student knows, the future endings for French, Spanish and Italian are the same as the verb "to have." This is because the Latin future was irregular and so people started saying "I have to (whatever)." In French and Italian, they also largely gave up on the past tense, instead saying, "I have (past participle)." So take the French verb parler. I will speak: Je parler-ai. I spoke: J'ai parlé. Or finir. I will finish: Je finir-ai. I finished: J'ai fini. Here's the funny thing: With the past tense, the prepositioned "to have" stayed distinct from the participle and the tense has been pretty stable. On the other hand, with the future, the postpositioned "to have" turned into an inflection. For some reason, presumably related to stress, this meant that funny things happened to the infinitive in this construction. Take voir, to see. I will see: Je verrai. With the French, Spanish and Italian future, what we see is a case where an inflected form in Latin was replaced with a compound tense that ultimately turned back into a simple, inflected tense. In French, now, that simple, inflected tense is increasingly replaced by "to go + verb": I will leave = Je vais partir. Italian and Spanish, by contrast, have pretty much held onto their future, but they're extremely likely to substitute the present tense with a time marker. For example, in Italian: I leave tomorrow: Parto domani. Without the time marker, it would be Partirò. The Romance future provides a case study in the idea that simplification is more complicated than it appears. Now, the English verb is the most problematic of all, yet it appears to have simplified. So, is it really simplified? Let's take the verb "to come" in the past: Past affirmative: I came Past negative: I didn't come Past interrogative: Did you come? Or take a regular verb like "to paint": Past affirmative: I painted Past negative: I didn't paint Past interrogative: Did you paint? Now, imagine we wrote these as one word, the way the French did with their future: I came - I didn'tcome - Didjacome? I painted - I didn'tpaint - Didjapaint? This is, after all, what a non-native listening to a fast English speaker will hear. And yet, imaging how un-simple it would be to have to distinctly say "Did you come" when "Didjacome" comes so readily off the tongue. The difference between the French "Je verrai" and the English "Didjacome" is slight in terms of running words together in the spoken tongue. What distinguishes them is that the English paraphrases with "do" came relatively late so they're marked in writing and so we don't drift too far from them, whereas the French paraphrases with "avoir" as an ending didn't get widely written down till they'd turned from distinct words to suffixes in speech. I believe that what we really get, as was alluded to above, is a sort of back and forth. I would characterize it as shifting between grammatico-morphological simplification and euphony: First, we run words together in ways that are easier to say. Then, that simplification becomes codified as a (usually irregular) grammatical form. Then, as speech patterns shift, a paraphrase is created for clarity and to avoid irregularities that no longer feel so natural. Then the process starts again. The only thing that slows it down is the development of writing systems that make people more conscious of the speech elements they're running together. Since broad-based literacy is relatively new (a hundred years old at most), I'm not sure what will happen at the next stage: Will informal writing like texting make gonna, didja and wudja common enough that we can go through the whole codify the irregularity then seek a new clarifying mechanism process again? Or will we find a new approach to "simplifying"? The one that is clear to me is that "simplification" isn't for non-natives, alone, so much as it is a device that sometimes simplifies the work involved in speech and sometimes simplifies the work involved in grammar for native speakers. The creation of the inflected future for modern Romance from a compound structure provides evidence that you can have simplification that works differently from how we think of it, at least in a society that is not widely literate. Which makes this all rather more tricky than we'd like. Yes, language always becomes simpler for those who speak it over time, because it is to the speakers' advantage for it to do so. But the how and the why may not always be immediately apparent to those outside the evolving speech community. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6141 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 22 of 33 30 June 2010 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Technically speaking, Finnish is agglutinative rather than inflectional. The theory roughly states that agglutinative systems "decay" into inflectional system, which in turn change to isolating. On occasions (such a Ancient Egyptian) the isolating language may again become an agglutinative system and so the cycle goes on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chirel Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5311 days ago 125 posts - 159 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: French | Message 23 of 33 30 June 2010 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't quite aggree with this statement. Isn't a pure agglutinative language one where suffixes and such are added to a stem without any changes? And these words could be long and complicated enough to include subject, object and verbs? Finnish doesn't work like this. It's on the boundary of agglutinative and inflectional, but I wouldn't call it agglutinative any more. There are a lot of suffixes and endings that cause changes in the stem and even though you can do a lot with them, you can't just put everything together and call it a phrase. You can't put nouns and verbs together or adjectives and nouns etc. so there are clear limits to how agglutinative Finnish is even though it has some agglutinative traits. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| novemberain Triglot Groupie Russian Federation Joined 5845 days ago 59 posts - 87 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC1, Italian Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 24 of 33 30 June 2010 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Laziness does.
Simplification does not mean modern people are less intelligent. They just want to cut down on (at least some) of needless complexity. This trend is 100 times as visible in the technology world, although "languages" (protocols of communication is a better term in my opinion) there are pretty different and I don't think I should dive deeper into details. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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