Language complexity

The thing is that pidgins and creoles are probably the only languages that one can at all call "simple" in the first place, whereas most other kinds of languages, as much as they may be simple in one aspect, are usually more complex in other ways. One example of this is how simpler morphology lends itself to more complex syntax, which, for example, is why one cannot actually call English "simple" even though its inflectional morphology is probably less than all other Germanic languages save Afrikaans.

That said, one thing one must remember about pidgins and creoles is that besides superficial aspects, such as what words are used, they often are quite different from their "parent" languages, in ways that would not have arose easily simply through change within any of the given "parent" languages alone. Consequently, a English-based pidgin or creole may actually have quite un-English-like features even if it superficially looks or sounds like English. However, usually pidgins and creoles tend towards expressing things via analytical means, even though it's not unusual for them to use agglutinative-like constructions, which is probably what you (Bardioc) are referring to. Of course, though, truely inflectional constructions are rare in pidgins and creoles by their basic nature, even though it would probably not be surprising if they arose in creoles in the extended long term, due to phonological erosion and consequent deregularization of formerly agglutinative constructs.

>"Is anyone aware of a language that had just one or two cases but then developed six or seven within historical times (not merely adopted them from another language but developed them)?" [Gjones2]

The answer still seems to be no. Many modern languages have moved towards having less inflection, but no obvious example of a non-isolated language going the other way comes to mind. Even Russian, a notable modern example that's highly inflected (six cases), has one fewer than Proto-Indo-European (seven). This movement towards less inflection couldn't have been going on since the beginning of language because we have to assume that the beginning was extremely simple (just a few signals such as we see with birds and other animals). Also language is extremely old, so if there were a strong universal tendency away from inflection, it would have done away with all the highly inflected languages long before historical times.

Instead, what we observe is the continued existence of many highly inflected languages several thousand years ago, but during historical times a movement within nearly all of them towards fewer inflections. Why? Maybe because of the dramatic change in the way most persons lived. In prehistoric times they lived in small isolated groups who had relatively little contact with speakers of other languages. Under such conditions a people could develop a highly inflected language, and with nearly all the speakers being native not have a serious problem learning it.

The introduction of agriculture, though -- right before historical times -- caused a great increase in population. Large groups of people who spoke different languages interacted and produced "hybrid" languages that tended to have fewer cases, especially when the alien influence came from a dominant minority group (as suggested by Easterner). This process seems to produce less inflected languages. On the other hand, with the loss of isolation there has been little or no movement towards the development of more highly inflected languages.

I'm mostly just speculating about the likely causes, but so far the ones I've mentioned seem to be the best explanation.

The matter of the status of the alien speakers is probably very important. In prehistoric times the isolation wasn't total. There was some contact for the purpose of trade. Flint tools, for instance, spread far from their place of origin. Also warriors would have carried out raids and abducted women to serve as mates and men as slaves. These alien persons, though, would have had little status in the society. We wouldn't expect them to have much influence on the language.

Also when a group of warriors conquered and settled in a sparsely populated area, they wouldn't become a minority learning the language of the majority. They would either wipe out or drive out their enemies, except for a relatively small number of captives, who -- as with the persons abducted in ordinary raids -- would lack the numbers and status to have much effect on the language.

With the large populations produced by agriculture, though, it became more common for alien warriors to conquer large agricultural peoples. Rather than wipe out or drive off the more numerous conquered people, the conquerors became a dominant minority. In such a position it's to be expected that they'd have difficulty learning the highly inflected language of the majority. Because of their dominant status, though, they'd be able to influence it. So in historical times we see a tendency towards less inflection that apparently didn't exist in prehistoric times.

The reason why you see few languages that move from being isolating (analytic) to being fusional (inflecting) in a direct fashion is because the general trend is not for isolating languages to become fusional but rather to become agglutinative, via cliticization and then the subsequent grammaticalization of cliticization-based constructs, and fusional languages tend to instead be the products of agglutinative languages being worn down over time by phonological changes, until the original agglutinative morphemes are no longer recognizable as being individual separate morphemes, but instead are just indivisible fusional markings. An example of a language that is agglutinative but is showing a long term move towards fusional-ness is Estonian, where phonological processes have made many of the originally purely agglutinative word endings not quite as predictable and not quite as clearly separate from the words that they attach to as they once were.

Likewise, an language which is clearly analytic today (besides its word grammar, which is already agglutinative in the way typical for Germanic languages in general) but which may become more agglutinative in the future today is English, due to everyday spoken English having become highly cliticizing (unlike the classical language, which is more clearly isolating), despite with having an underlying syntax which is still analytic. Due to grammaticalization, it is likely that many cliticized constructs will lose their underlying analytic syntax and thus become more agglutinative in nature. Examples of such grammaticalization include:

1. Pseudo-modal verbs ending in -/t@/, which have been shown to have been grammaticalized by the phonological characteristics of such words. For example, one can constrast "was to" with "has to", as in many dialects the former has [z] or [z_0] but the latter has [s].
2. -/@/ and -/n@/ (negative) perfect endings on true modal verbs, which have been shown to have been grammaticalized due to having lost their lexical connection to "have" and "-n't have" as shown by said classical "have" being replaced in writing by "of" in some informal writing.
3. "Kinda" and "sorta" being used as adverbs with adjectives, adverbs, and nouns, as oppoesd to being used with only noun phrases.

Travis: >>An example of a language that is agglutinative but is showing a long term move towards fusional-ness is Estonian, where phonological processes have made many of the originally purely agglutinative word endings not quite as predictable and not quite as clearly separate from the words that they attach to as they once were.<<

Another example could be that of Finnish (to which Estonian is closely related). It has several examples of the inflection influencing the root. For example, "kaupunki" (town) becomes "kaupungin" in the genitive case (the "rule" behind this is that the voiceless /k/ becomes /g/ in "closed syllables, i.e. those ending in consonants). Also, the plural of "ihminen", "man" is "ihmiset", the same rule applying here. This is why the plural for the name the Finns use for themselves, "Suomalainen", has "Suomalaiset" as the pural form.

> In Latin America, as you probably know, the Spanish conquistadors rarely learned Indian languages; it was much easier for them to have the Indians they captured or conquered learn Spanish instead because Spanish was considerably easier to learn.

I don't agree here. They were the conquerors so they didn't have to learn or assimilate anything. That is a sign of weakness for an empire. That role was assumed by the people that they dominated to the point that it's hard to know today how many things got lost during la conquista. A clear example is Europe with all the variations of languages with high influence from latin. The strongest one is the one who influences strongly to the rest not the contrary.

>>Even Russian, a notable modern example that's highly inflected (six cases), has one fewer than Proto-Indo-European (seven). <<

Russian language has 9 cases (6 cases is simplified varient):

Nominative
Genitive
Partitive ("some tea" for example)
Dative
Accusative
Instrumantal
Prepositional
Locative
Vocative (used only in spoken language, considered to be non formal, thus foreigners don't know about it, though it is in high demand).

Une locution nominale telle que Fr <le père de la mère de sa sœur> peut être prononcée [l@pERd_lamERd_sas9R] d'un trait, c'est-à-dire comme si c'était Fr *<lepèrdlamèrdsassœur> qui était écrit. Cette réalité phonétique montre bien que l'agglutination peut s'envisager sous plusieurs angles dont :

1/ l'agglutination graphique : Al <Oberammergaueralpenkräuterdelikatessenfrühstückskäse>

2/ la quasi-agglutination graphique : An <motion estimation search range settings>

3/ l'agglutination phonétique : Fr <le père de la mère de sa sœur> = [l@pERd_lamERd_sas9R] où [d_la] & [d_sa] peuvent s'envisager comme de simples infixes (mais pas tout à fait) ; comparer avec Fr <la mère du père de son frère> = [lamERdypERd_sÕfRER] : [dy] / [d_la] & [d_sÕ] / [d_sa].
L'agglutination phonétique est d'autant plus "voyante" en français que sa prononciation est généralement "plate" (pas d'accent d'intensité).

>"Even Russian, a notable modern example that's highly inflected (six cases), has one fewer than Proto-Indo-European (seven)." [Gjones2]
>Russian language has 9 cases (6 cases is simplified varient).... [Linguist]

I don't know Russian (beyond the little that I recall from studying a grammar for a week a couple of decades ago). I suppose it depends, though, on which form of Russian you use for the counting and on how often a form must be used to qualify as a case. I based my claim on sources such as these: "Russian has six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and locative or prepositional (a separate vocative case appears in a few words only, and need not be considered)." [Mario Pei, The World's Chief Languages] The Columbia Encyclopedia also says six: "The noun has six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and locative), with an occasional seventh case, the vocative." http://www.bartleby.com/65/ru/Russlang.html

Wikipedia's count is the same: "Nominal declension is subject to six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and locative or prepositional)....A vocative form is preserved for words and names of religious import...'God', etc." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_grammar

With special relevance to our forum topic, the Wikipedia article claims that although "The Russian language has preserved an Indo-European synthetic-inflexional structure...considerable levelling has taken place." If true, this fits well with the idea that even in a highly inflected language such as Russian there are signs of the tendency towards a reduction in the amount of inflection, which seems to characterize the development of language in historical times.

<a href='http://www.yahoo.com'></a> http://www.ringtones-rate.com/tones/ <a href='http://www.ringtones-rate.com'>real ringtones</a>. <a href="http://www.ringtones-rate.com ">motorola ringtones</a>: Download ringtones FREE, Best free samsung ringtones, Cingular ringtones and more. [url]http://www.ringtones-rate.com/ring/[/url] [link=http://www.ringtones-rate.com]tracfone ringtones[/link] from site .

<<Is it perhaps BECAUSE some groups have so little contact with outsiders that their language is able to develop into something so forbiddingly complex? >>

I think it's just the fact that human beings "evolve" to make things easier on themselves - even language. Unfortunately for the human, when things become easier for it, it tends to become lazy and then stupider.

This would explain the fact that modern languages are simpler than older ones. People just started to dumb down and languages became simpler.

It's unfortunate; we are evolving to our own demise...

Interesting thread -- I think "People just started to dumb down" is probably an oversimplification of the situation. As the posters here have pointed out, human languages almost certainly started out simple, got more and more complex, and then experienced certain simplifications as different languages merged together by way of migrations, invasions, etc.

In the case of English, I remember reading somewhere that the simplification of grammer occurred for purely practical reasons -- when England was a bubbling cauldron (if you will!) where Germanic/Norse influences from the north were colliding with the Latin/French influences from the south, with the Anglo-Saxon base stuck in the middle, everyday language contruction tended to simplify so that people from different parts of the country could merely mix and do business and understand each other.

I would imagine that this simplification process is actually slowing down in modern times, now that the written forms are fully developed, literacy is increasing, and most languages now have official rules. In other words, now that most languages have been fine-tuned and solidified through centuries of writings, the tendency to change (including to simplify) has slowed.

Just because concrete rules in a language are established, it doesn't necessarily govern the spoken language with an iron fist.

I know first hand of how ridiculously simplified some spoken languages are. The Japanese and Koreans, mostly in the newer generations, have become increasingly simple in their speech. From the top of my head, at least 35% of Japanese and maybe 25% of Korean nouns have become shortened and horribly mangled from their original state.

Well yes this is a good point -- the official rules of course don't always govern the spoken language. Do you think the current watering down of Japanese and Korean is the result of increased efforts toward learning English (or other langauges)? In which case you could say the simplification is the result of another type of "invasion"?

Or would you compare it more to the "text message" phnomenon, where English-speaking kids nowadays have become so relaxed with the rules that some of them don't even know that "you" is not spelled "u" and "great" is not spelled "gr8"?

Either way, I think these types of things are just small ripples on the surface of the languages and probably will not impact the official form of the languages very much, aside from maybe providing a few new slang terms or alternate spellings. Throughout history, at any time and place, it's been pretty common for the young and the less educated to take over the language to some degree and simplify it for the purposes of everyday speech. These colloquial "bastardized" spoken forms, complete with various slang terms, lazy pronunciations and/or abreviated versions of words, and idiomatic phrases, can stray pretty far from the "official" version of the langauge, at least to the naked ear.

For example I bet if you took Joe-working-class-stiff from, say, present day Los Angeles and plunked him down at a table with Joe-working-class-stiff from somewhere in the English countryside in 1850, they might not even be able to communicate, even though the official versions of their native language are almost identical.

I would say it's more like the "textmessage phenomenon", only multiplied by a lot. Spelling in English text message is changed, phonetics remain identicle. Japanese and Koreans just go out and change the entire word.