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Simplification=confusion
Il y a des situations en anglais où la simplification de la conjugaison des verbes irréguliers ne donne pas l'«heure juste» sur le temps.
Ex: You put the dishes in the oven (passé ou présent?) Ce qu'on ne retrouve pas nécessairement dans d'autres langues, qu'en pensez-vous?
Some languages do not mark tense at all, such as Chinese. It is not essential.
Another example of this is the Hausa language. It's spoken in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, and Togo. It's a Chadic language.
Nope,
simplication ≠ confusion simplificaton = simplification Ancient Chinese had past tense but when the language evolved to a higher stage it saw the redundancy of past tense and did away with it in order to make life easier. Then, how does the language differentiate the past and present tense? In Chinese, adverbs are usually placed before verbs. A time adverb is enough to tell you when an incident happens. Example: "Wo zuotian qu..." = "I yesterday go..." "zuotian" or "yesterday" clearly indicates that the incident happened in the past. From the example, it is not difficult to see how "past tense" is redundant and not used in many Asian languages.
All languages can express the same concepts, they just use different methods for doing it. Chinese has no grammatical tense, but uses words indicating time and manner instead, something like "I earlier run" for "I ran". In fact all grammatical markers are ultimately derived from independent words. The Romance future tense is derived from a Latin "Infinitive-have" construction, so Latin "amare habeo" became Spanish "amaró". The Germanic past tense suffix "-ed" is derived from "did". Languages are in a constant cycle of affixes eroding away, replaced by words that become grammatical markers, and grammar words fusing onto the main words as new affixes.
Languages go through a cycle of Isolating (few affixes, lots of grammar words), Agglutinating (one grammatical feature per affix, and fusional (many grammatical features per affix. Languages as examples would be: Fusional: Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Arabic Fusional-Isolating: German, Vulgar Latin Isolating-Fusional: Spanish, Old French, Dutch Isolating: English, Afrikaans, Chinese, Vietnamese Isolating-Agglutinative : French, Hawaiian Agglutinative-Isolating: Japanese, Indonesian? Agglutinative: Basque, Turkish, Quechua, Inuktitut Agglutinative-Fusional: Finnish, Hungarian, Mohawk
<<Il y a des situations en anglais où la simplification de la conjugaison des verbes irréguliers ne donne pas l'«heure juste» sur le temps.
Ex: You put the dishes in the oven (passé ou présent?) Ce qu'on ne retrouve pas nécessairement dans d'autres langues, qu'en pensez-vous? >> In general, simplification means reducing of redundancy. There may be situations where redundancy can be omitted whithout causing misunderstandings. Or if you want to be concise. But there may be other situations in which redundancy is needed to be understood. So, simplificatin can cause confusion in one situation but lead to a concise rendering of some thoughts in another. Your exemple is not a really good one, because it's application is very limited and the ambiguity is easily resolved by context.
<<Languages are in a constant cycle of affixes eroding away, replaced by words that become grammatical markers, and grammar words fusing onto the main words as new affixes.
Languages go through a cycle of Isolating (few affixes, lots of grammar words), Agglutinating (one grammatical feature per affix, and fusional (many grammatical features per affix. .>> I've already heard from that theory, but I strongly doubt that it is true, especially the second part. What is a language? Is e.g. English still proto indoeuropean? Certainly not! So you can say that withing a certain language family, there might be a tentency towards simplification in some area, e.g. morphology, but getting more complex in another, e.g. syntax, but a language itself might not fully go through that cycle during its livetime. Can you proof that languages start out being isolating? You claim that, assuming going form an alleged simple form to a more complex one is the natural way. But that might not be true. Consider that many aboriginal languages are very very complex and often even polysynthetic? Admitted, they didn't start out in recent times, too. But there're many aboriginal languages with very complex morphology spread over vast amounts of space, so one might expect to find an approximately equal distribution of languages (from a certain family) being in each of that stages. It would be very unlikely that the pace of the passing throught that cycle is similar or even constant for all these languages. BTW, how do you define the notion of word? There may be languages where this notion doesn't make sense at all.
TaylorS, the list of languages you provide shows languages in a certain state, but not the historical development of that languages. I also would not talk from a cycle rather than a spiral, because time passes and you never end up where you began.
BTW, I wouldn't consider German as fusional-isolating. German has strong compounding. (As I understand it, you even can find some incorporating tentencies.) I once read that German in a certain aspect (I don't remember which aspect, maybe using verb prefixes and even stacking them) is almost on the verge of becoming agglutinating. Of course, if you look at reformed german texts nowadays, you might get the impression that there is some isolating tendency in the language. It was one of the goals of the reformers to stop and revert the compounding nature of German. If you're a German native speaker reading nowadays texts, you are often confused and displeased because of the many torn apart words which make you feel uncomfortable in your mother tonge. The reform was imposed by the federal ministries of education by suprise two years earlier than planned without parlmentary discussion or assignement, and the majority of the people doesn't like it. There was no chance to check for the quality of that reform. They made several updates, so if you tried to stick to that whats currently assumed ''correct'' spelling -- I didn't do that --, then you must have got totally confused. If you want to use the allegedly ''correct'' form of many compound words, especially verbs, you have to memorise very long vocabulary lists. http://www.schriftdeutsch.de/info-map.htm http://www.schriftdeutsch.de/ortr-get.htm http://www.schriftdeutsch.de/orth-l13.htm http://www.vrs-ev.de/ http://www.sprachforschung.org/ There was and still is much criticism especially concerning the deletion of many compound words, which can cause severe misunderstandings, especially for foreign learners. In fact, the deletion of these compounds form dictionaries is some kind of interdiction of words. So, the classification of a language also does depend on politics!
<<Isolating-Fusional: Spanish, Old French, Dutch
Isolating: English, Afrikaans, Chinese, Vietnamese Isolating-Agglutinative : French, Hawaiian>> Could someone point out examples showing how French is agglutinative, while Spanish is fusional? |