LL-L "Grammar" 2011.03.18 (01) [EN]

Fri Mar 18 17:37:37 UTC 2011

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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2011.03.16 (03) [EN]

I believe that simplification is often related to an increasingly logical,
analytical view of the world: In early times people viewed a rock that was
being thrown to be in some way a different "thing" from the same rock when
it was sitting on the ground, and the person throwing the rock was different
from the one having it thrown at them. You therefore need somehow different
words.

The idea of expressing "rock-being-thrown-ness" and
"rock-sitting-on-the-ground-ness" by simply re-arranging the same few
simpler words is a development of logic.

It is difficult to imagine the reverse process occurring, so that may
explain why grammar doesn't get more complex.

Also, the world of more ancient people, with simpler technologies, simply
didn't have the same amount of things in them to name. As bronze and iron,
ploughs and microchips turn up, you are probably less inclined give each of
them half a dozen different names according to their circumstances.

Paul

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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2011.03.16 (04) [EN]

Sandy wrote:

"If languages always simplify over time, then are the earliest human
languages the most complex morphologically?

If the earliest human languages the most complex morphologically, then why?
Why would languages be created at their maximal morphological complexity? It
seems counterintuitive. Wouldn't you expect them to develop in a reasonably
simple form then become more morphologically complex before starting to
simplify? If they could become more complex in the past, then why don't they
now?"

It depends on when we're talking about language evolving. Logically you
would expect that, and I believe it did - but not in modern humans. By the
time anything like us turns up, language has become fully developed. That
development involved, I believe, coming up with vocalisations for more and
more things, but with no real rationale or classification. Thus virtually
every thing, in every situation, needed its own word or words. That results
in an extremely complex situation in the language, that further development
of thought and ideas allows one to progressively simplify and rationalise.

Paul

Derby

England

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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>

Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2011.03.16 (05) [EN]

From: Hellinckx Luc
<luc.hellinckx at gmail.com<http://uk.mc286.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=luc.hellinckx@gmail.com>>

Subject: LL-L "Grammar"

Beste Ron,

You wrote:

I wonder if any of you can come up with examples in which languages
developed the other way around, namely by acquiring more complex
morphologies with time. I personally can think of no such example.

Did Martin Luther not go that way with his Bible translation? I thought at
the time, the use of cases was on the way back, also in German, just like in
Dutch and English (especially the genitive). He decided though to remodel
German after Latin, which made the language more complex again...for
centuries and centuries.

This sounds exceptionally unlikely to me, and there is no evidence that
pre-Luther High German was less inflected.

All older Germanic languages, including Old English, are highly inflected,
and the inflections of each can be related to the other showing a common
ancestor. If Luther had deliberatley invented modern German cases they would
directly reflect latin ones - why no Vocative or Ablative for example?

And what would induce an entire nation (actually many nations) to take this
complex system up, when the vast majority were illiterate anyway? in
particular, why would the Catholic South have inflected German, if it were
the invention of a heretical Protestant Northerner?

My interest in mediaeval swordsmanship leads me to many German
"Fechtbuecher" from the Middle Ages. The works of Von Danzig, Liechtenauer,
Ringeck and others pre-date the Reformation - and all use inflected German.

Paul

Derby

England

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From: Sandy Fleming <fleemin at live.co.uk>

Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2011.03.16 (05) [EN]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>

> Subject: Language varieties

> However, I strongly suspect that this use of initially foreign words for
grammatical marking did not arise out of a vacuum. Much rather, I believe
that the motivation was to replicate in this new intercultural medium
grammatical categories that existed within the native Melanesian languages,
categories that were considered essential in the cultures and thus in the
minds of the native population. In other words, mostly English-derived
vocabulary (with loans from German, Melanesian, Polynesian and Malay mixed
in) served to create a lingua franca that could perform all the fundamental
functions other known native languages could perform.

Having had time to sleep on it, I'm not so sure that increases in complexity
are all that rare. The Celtic languages seem to have examples of increases
in morphophonological complexity, if I'm right in thinking that the features
observed weren't in ProtoIndoEuropean itself.

Welsh seems pervaded with changes to vowel and consonant morphemes which,
although they become fixed internally to words, still show a pattern of
familiar changes throughout the vocabulary of the language, and at the
beginnings of words interact with the previous words in way that have become
tied into the grammar of the language.

Plurals in Welsh are also fairly chaotic, and Welsh has nouns where the root
form is the plural and the inflected form the singular, so we get:

plant "children"
plentyn "child" (note the change a > e, a system of vowel and consonant
changes like this pervades the whole language)
i plant "to the child"
i blentyn "to the children" (note the change p > b which doesn't occur in
the plural).

Many of these changes are hard to fathom and mainly just have to be learned
"by ear".

In the dialects of the English southwest, there also seems to be quite a bit
of grammatical complexity not found in earlier English. For example, there's
a system of gender where uncountable nouns are neuter (salt, sugar, sand),
objects that are normally stationary are masculine (clocks, houses, trees),
and objects that have a means of propulsion are feminine (cats, cars,
ships).

If these exanmples are valid, then considering the smallness of my sample
space, this sort of thing may be quite common.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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From: Sandy Fleming <fleemin at live.co.uk>

Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2011.03.16 (05) [EN]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>

> Subject: Language varieties

> With regard to my response to Sandy’s point in the previous post, please
let me add the thought that these days we are unable to witness the birth
and early development of natural languages other than those whose geneses
are those of language contact, or “linguistic confluence,” so to speak.

Not true!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Grammar

Thanks for all the interesting responses!

Let me bounce another tentative assertion off you:

Languages with simplified grammars (such as English and Afrikaans) are more
suitable as liguae francae because they do not require the foreign learner
to deal with complex morphological rules prior to acquiring a beginner’s
working knowledge.

Correct or false, and why?

Regards, and happy Purim!
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

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