Language Log: Where have all the inflections gone?

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Kerim Friedman contributed this article to another list:


http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000169.html

Where have all the inflections gone?

A bird's eye exercise, if we may. I will address, for non-linguist
readers, inflections , most familiar as the noisome declensional and
conjugational suffixes that bedevil English-speaking learners of,
seemingly, most foreign languages we encounter. For the record,
worldwide inflections can just as easily be prefixes as suffixes.

Based on Latin shedding so much of its inflections in becoming the
Romance languages, and English's being such an inflection-shy sister in
the Germanic family compared to, most strikingly, grand old Icelandic,
linguists are taught that it is "natural" for languages to "molt" as a
matter of course. Some languages stay heavily inflected, like Russian,
while some descendants of the same ancestor just take it all off.

The common consensus is that English's paucity of inflections just
"happened," a mere by-product of the syllable-initial stress tendency
in Germanic, an unremarkable step beyond the denuded reality that
Scandinavian and Dutch hide behind their nostalgic orthographies.

But would linguists find these developments so unremarkable if
linguistic science had happened to develop (I beg your indulgence)
among hunter-gatherers?

I present this as a genuine question: where is the streamlined,
inflection-free North American Native American language? The linguist
is accustomed to attending talks on these languages encountering
bristling paradigms of prefixes and suffixes, indicating the obviative,
the inverse and God knows what else, complete with portmanteau
morphemes (that is, where one prefix or suffix carries two meanings,
such as "me plus him"). Is it just by chance that I have never heard of
a language of this area that has shed most of its inflections and
relies largely on pronouns and free words along the lines of WILL?
Where is the Algonquian "French"?

In the same vein, which Australian language is as inflection-shy as
French or English? Has Australia witnessed the language that happened
to wend its way into streaking about naked, like some Western European
languages have? Or -- where is the Bantu (as opposed to Bantoid)
language like this? After four thousand years, if it is so unremarkable
for phonology and happenstance to shear off a grammar's affixes, then
surely we would not expect that 500 Bantu languages recapitulate the
familiar copious noun classes of this group. Where is the Bantu
"English"?

I ask these questions because my research increasingly suggests to me
that for a language to shed its inflections, rather than consistently
replace or even retain them, is less business as usual than the
unexpected case. From a global perspective, languages appear to usually
do this as the result of widespread acquisition by adults, whose
ossified language organs tend to clear away languages' "junk."

Thus the inflection-shy nature of Romance compared to Latin -- and
Romanian's remnants of case-marking are dishwater compared to Polish,
Greek or Lithuanian -- was due to imperfect renditions of that language
being passed on in the context of invasion and imposition from the
outside. English is the only Indo-European language in Europe with no
gender marking on articles or nouns -- ever notice that? -- because of
Vikings' approximation of Old English starting in the eighth century.
It is presumably no accident that Persian, with its low inflection and
gender-neutral third person pronoun, has been lingua francapar
excellence throughout much of its history.

On-the-ground accounts of these "changes in progress" detailed enough
to engage the sociolinguist are lost to history. But to require that
French and English and Persian "just happened" leaves questions. Where
is the inflection-free Slavic language? Yes, Bulgarian lost the nouns'
declensions, but get a load of the verbs!! Why are the only Semitic
languages that entirely bury the family's triconsonantal verb roots and
their attendant vowel changes and affixations the few born amidst heavy
non-native acquisition, like Juba and Nubi Arabic? Why is it that a
Bantu variety as inflection-wary as English is the brand of Lingala
spoken non-natively as a lingua franca?

The evidence suggests that the post-Neolithic "punctuations" that Bob
Dixon describes in human languages' timelines have often sheared away a
degree of languages' "mess" as they were imposed on adult speakers and
passed down in abbreviated form to succeeding generations. Mandarin's
mysteriously compact four tones would be a similar case, it having been
adopted by Mongol invaders while Cantonese and the rest of the brood
mutated uninterrupted, developing the eight and nine tones typical of
the "card-carrying" Sinitic language.

Isn't it time that structural reduction played as much a part in
theories of language change and contact as mere tradings of grammar?