gaining grammatical complexities

Guest   Thu Feb 28, 2008 5:48 pm GMT
Proto Indo European is an extrapolation and an educated guess, made by educated people who know what they are talking about!
Xie   Fri Feb 29, 2008 11:43 am GMT
>>So even here, simplification was at work. The first IE language must have been coming from nowhere and had the highest morphological complexity - very mysterious!

Guess what, the Sinitic language might have been inflectional even after its pictorial companions were introduced in the first centuries, in the form of different consonant clusters (which disappeared before the Tang Dynasty; my guess is conservative) and, later, different tones for the same pictogram. After its users dropped inflections, they might find it difficult to express ideas with limited pictograms, so they _invented_ a great many of them. Upon adopting them as the only script, the word order was fixed in the next two millennia.

The moral of the story for the ancient Chinese might have been: we've got to get rid of the unnecessary little words (endings); let's just depend on word order entirely and coin new stuff whenever we see fit!
Bill   Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:49 am GMT
"It's in the nature of languages to get simpler and more complex in the same time."


Those new features, are just a byproduct of simplification; they replace more complex ways to communicate the same ideas. For example, when all noun declentions were lost from vulgar latin, articles, and extensive use of prepositions, became necessary for effective communication.
Fly   Tue Mar 11, 2008 3:53 pm GMT
"It's in the nature of languages to get simpler and more complex in the same time."

I would aggree with Bill, those new features, are just a byproduct of simplification, the new features are not so complex like the replaced ones. In the summ the process is real and BIG simplification.
Rokas   Tue Mar 18, 2008 8:03 pm GMT
It is impossible to answer WHY languages tend to lose their complexity at this point in time. More thorough research is needed.

Let's be more specific, though. What you speak of is some kind of universal evolution path and at least all Indo-European languages follow it. Languages of other language families may not follow the same rules of evolution. I was unaware of the fact that Japanese has simplified its verbal system a little so far, so this might prove that simplification is not limited to Indo-European languages.

However, a few of the most progressive Indo-European languages (those spoken in India, for example) had levelled their synthetic system completely a few centuries ago and now they are in the process of acquiring new inflections from prepositions (or postpositions). This could indicate that the inflectional system of Indo-European languages follows a sinusoid curve as inflections are acquired and lost repeatedly.

Take phonology as another example. Ancient Greek had a whole lot of diphthongs (ai, ei, au, oi, eu etc.). In old English all the ancient diphthongs have been replaced by single long vowels. In Modern English, a new "generation" of diphthongs has emerged - but these appeared from long vowels and as compensatory lengthening of a syllable where a consonant was dropped (weg -> way, lag/lug -> lie [not truth] etc.). So, phonology of Modern English is readily as complicated as that of Ancient Greek, another example of sinusoid development.

The idea of sinusoid development in Indo-European was new to me. Google it by "structural variability Indo-European morphology".

As a side-note, classical Chinese was totaly analytic whereas Modern Chinese is agglutinative.
Xie   Wed Mar 19, 2008 2:31 pm GMT
>>As a side-note, classical Chinese was totaly analytic whereas Modern Chinese is agglutinative.<<

In what ways? Again, it's interesting but unsurprising to see that, well, I don't see anything difficult with Chinese as a native, but foreign learners can see how it is, and at least a couple of language enthusiasts I met claimed that Chinese has loads of cases which, as natives, they had been surprised to see. What really is it?

I don't know any rules regarding this. All I can see is most ordinary people, I mean those who don't learn foreign languages or don't feel how natural cases are, are complaining about cases, when I can see Chinese displays similar levels of complexity like highly inflected languages.
Rokas   Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:09 pm GMT
Hello Xie,

Unfortunately I cannot give you any further detail what concerns Chinese because I don't speak Chinese. I only quoted what I have read in a textbook which briefly covers all the languages of the world.

However, the fact that a language has no cases doesn't mean it is easier to learn. Any language is difficult if you want to speak it well. What we were having such a heated debate on was not losing complexity in its true sense but moving from synthetic stage to analytic stage. In analytic stage, however, a lot of particles and other small words appear and the overall complexity in grammar prevails.

German declension system is much simpler than that of Latin but German has developed a new system of

1. der/das/die + adjective + noun
2. ein/eine/keine + adjective + noun
3. [empty position] + adjective + noun (Starke Deklination)

And when I try to speak German I almost never manage to get it right ... Wee practice makes perfect as they say.
Guest   Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:36 pm GMT
<<However, the fact that a language has no cases doesn't mean it is easier to learn. Any language is difficult if you want to speak it well. What we were having such a heated debate on was not losing complexity in its true sense but moving from synthetic stage to analytic stage. In analytic stage, however, a lot of particles and other small words appear and the overall complexity in grammar prevails. >>

Very good summary. Another example of losing complexity can be observed in art: 10.000 to 30.000 years old prehistoric pictures in caves are of higher level than many pictures afterwards (Picasso icluded;-). Greek sculptures were more refined than later art....