LL-L "Grammar" 2005.11.17 (04) [E]
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17 November 2005 * Volume 04
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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2005.11.16 (03) [E]
Hello friends,
Heather wrote:
> As Ron says: older grammars were not more simple - in fact they were very
> complex and far more rigid - without room for the ambiguities of a
> relatively new language such as English.
...
> The move to an invariable form from a variable or inflected form is a
> characteristic of English - perhaps in conjunction with our
> Danish/Scandinavian forebears?
Reinhard/Ron wrote:
> Latin and Greek
> were considered *the* models for "sophisticated" languages.
> Morphological complexity was seen as an indication of just such
> "sophistication." It should therefore not come as a surprise that
> "dialects" like Low Saxon (which do not morphologically distinguish
> datives and accusatives) were considered all the more inferior, that
> Dutch was considered simple and crude in comparison with "High" German,
> that Old Norse (and in extension Modern Icelandic and Faeroese) was
> considered superior to Modern Scandinavian, etc.
And then there's the general belief that 'it weren't like this when I
were a lad'...everything's been going downhill since forever and all
change is for the worse.
Inflectional complexity doesn't necessarily mean a complex grammar and
inflectional simplicity certainly doesn't mean grammatical simplicity.
The loss of inflections in nouns is usually paralleled by increasing
rigidity in the placement of sentence elements but the same grammatical
roles in the sentence are being expressed by different mechanisms:
inflection versus position in the sentence. Likewise when a language
loses verbal inflections, it tends to make more use of auxiliary verbs
and adverbs to express the same distinctions such as 'mood'. In modern
grammatical thinking, inflections have less significance than they had
in the old Latin-based prescriptive grammars.
The same process happened in the development of Latin into French,
Spanish et al (so your Italian lecturer was just a degenerate Roman (and
they were pretty degenerate in the first place) in his own view). In
some ways it is not surprising that highly inflecting languages should
become less inflecting as time progresses - presumably it's unlikely
that they will become more inflectional (though Icelandic is in terms of
morphology almost unchanged with respect to the Icelandic of the sagas -
that's islands for you).
The modern Indian languages have shown the same general developments as
the Germanic and Romance languages, having lost most inflectional
endings. (Sanskrit had a genre of literature which was two independent
stories presented as one text: the literary language had a lot of words
with more than one meaning, and so by choosing the right words, a
sentence could have two independent meanings - for a whole book and two
consistent tales. aargh - can you imagine trying to read such a beast?)
There are examples of languages developing inflections - Finnish shows
some case endings that look like that they were once independent
postpositions that have become fused onto the ends of their nouns,
increasing the number of cases. Spoken Chinese shows signs that it is
becoming more inflectional than classical Chinese.
Ron also wrote:
And there you have opened another can of worms, I'm afraid ... I can
*not* understand why in German this is still called _Indogermanisch_. I
would have hoped that that had bitten the dust along with certain people
at the end of World War II. And why is even *Dutch* still using
_Indo-Germaans_? What's up with that, dude?
I also think that 'Indo-germanic' is a dreadful hangover from the early
days of the German pioneers in comparative linguistics, but really
'indo-european' doesn't seem much better to me when you consider the
modern distribution of these languages- 'Amerindian' would be better if
it didn't already have a meaning ;-). How about Anglo-Spanish?
Yours, etc. Paul Tatum.
----------
From: jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2005.11.16 (03) [E]
Dear Heather and Ron,
yes - I had been on one of these mentioned
> "better"
> schools with concentrations in the humanities (= Latin & classics)
and it really wasn't a bad one, I know today.
But obviously our teachers for Latin and Old Greek there yet hadn't got the
newer theories or failed to bring it down to the pupils, though, as far as I
remember, our younger German teacher did mention it.
About Celtic languages in France Heather answered:
> Did they vanish?
>
> When I first visited the Dordogne I was immediately struck
> by the use of 'Mas' to denote a smallholding/ small farm. The
> Welsh/celtic word for the same is 'maes'
Sorry, Heather- I'm quite aware of that, and therefore I wrote:
>> why did the old *Celtix Languagex* nearly vanish...
By this way there's another open question for me: didn't English grammar
change at all in the times of great French influences? I think just over
there, without having had a destroyish 30-years-religious-war and being well
equipped with busy writing and well educated monks, it could be easy to be
found out.
Ron:
> It should therefore not come
> as a surprise that "dialects" like Low Saxon (which do not morphologically
> distinguish datives and accusatives) were considered all the more
> inferior,
At the moment we watch vanishing genitives in Standard German, being
substituted by datives. A famous proverb: 'Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein
Tod.'
> And there you have opened another can of worms, I'm afraid ... I can
> *not*
> understand why in German this is still called _Indogermanisch_. I would
> have hoped that that had bitten the dust along with certain people at the
> end of World War II.
Languages don't change that fast ;-)!
GOOGLE (Search in Germany only): 9,000 hits for 'indo-europäisch' and 45,000
for 'indo-germanisch'. I think it's not so bad, because many publications
are old ones.
Greutens/Regards
Johannes "Jonny" Meibohm
----------
From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.11.16 (06) [E]
Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
>How much French syntax got
adopted and words too, but everything on an old Germanic base. <
Not everything! We use ( in the main - when not being hyper-correct)
French emphatic pronouns It's me! It's them! It's him!
When using a sentence to describe an idea with a direct and an indirect
object we can choose to follow French structure
I gave the book TO him
or German
I gave him the book
But convert both sentences to pronouns only in French & German and the
word order changes Je donne le livre à Jean je le lui donne Ich
gebe Johann das Buch Ich gebe es ihm
English unlike its parent languages keeps the orginal word order and
doesn't bother to change! I give the book to John I give it to him I
give John the book I give him it
I see a difference between a creole developed out of 2 or more languages
that have suddenly come into contact with usually one language dominant
and those examples where ( like Welsh and [dare I say it???] Irish) the
grammar shows characteristics of a non-Indo-European language but its entire
(nearly entire?) lexis comes from IE.
The former usually has dialects that reveal the original mother tongue: the
latter v few if any?????
Heather
----------
From: David Barrow <davidab at telefonica.net.pe>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.11.16 (06) [E]
> From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
> Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2005.11.16 (03) [E]
>
> Hey Guys, (Heather, Ron, Jonny) re: speaking the words of one language
> and
> using the syntax of another: Is this a case of not being able to see the
> trees for the forest? Just look at English. How much French syntax got
> adopted and words too, but everything on an old Germanic base. It may
> not be
> a perfect change-over. But talk to my English speaking students about how
> much trouble it causes them! Jacqueline
What syntax feature of English is of French origin?
David Barrow
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