Normanization of England

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin]

David White wrote:
        Digressing a bit, in the case of Mednyj Aleut it seems that about 30
Russians among about 300 Aleuts were enough to wholly transform the the
native language.  Actually, I dispute this interpretation, but what did not
happen was that the Russians were linguisticaly absorbed into the Aleuts.
Part of the reason for what happened seems to have been that Aleut verbal
morphology, being unusually complex, was unusually diffiucult for the
Russians to learn, so even such a nebulous concept as language difficulty
can be a factor in such situations.

Me:  The issue of language complexity has rarely been mentioned in my
experience, since, according to our axiomatic definition of "human
language", "all languages are equally complex" (in terms of considering the
language as a whole).  Yet we always talk about pidgins as "simplified"
languages which forego much morphology in favor of word order and lexicon.
There's something very powerful to be said for this.  On the Great Plains of
North America, the Pawnees held the central ground.  Much trade from the
South Plains to the North Plains passed through their hands, but Pawnee
never became a trade language or lingua franca.  The verbal morphology was
just too incredibly complex.  I've seen Pawnee verbs of 25 syllables.  The
incredibly simple nominal morphology (virtually zero) and pretty free word
order (most clauses are only one or two words long) doesn't outweigh the
highly complex verb structure.  Comanche, on the other hand, held an equally
important trade function on the South Plains and their language became a
lingua franca.  Comanche verb structure is not quite as simple as English
verb structure, but with little morphophonemic "mush", a fairly
uncomplicated sound system, and no tones, speakers of neighboring groups
with complex morphophonemics, verb morphology, tonal variation, etc. (Kiowa,
Wichita, Tonkawa, Plains Apache, etc.) frequently used Comanche in
intertribal communication.  It seems that, upon my very cursory examination
of similar situations, a simple morphological system and uncomplicated sound
system will always outweigh free word order and lexical flexibility in
language contact situations.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, English
Utah State University

Program Director
USU On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (FAX)
mclasutt at brigham.net