A question for the linguists

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It feels to me like every time I read about the evolution of a language over time, the general pattern is one of it becoming grammatically simpler. They go from having lots of cases to fewer or none at all, shed moods or aspects or dual forms, even (on the phonological rather than grammatical end) give up on more difficult to pronounce sounds in favor of easier ones.

Which leaves me wondering: when and how do the complicated features develop in the first place? Are there particular conditions (e.g. isolation) under which a language is likely to make itself into a more elaborate system?

Or is this just sample bias, and the pattern I think I’ve been seeing isn’t really a pattern at all?

7 Responses to “A question for the linguists”

  1. Aidan

    I’ve wondered that myself several times over the years. I think you’ve got the shape of it: it’s partly sample bias and partly isolation. I’ll work on marshaling my thoughts and data.

    • swantower

      Thanks! Someone on the Dreamwidth mirror of this post has suggested that people are more prone to noticing what’s gone away in language change rather than what’s been added, i.e. a bias in our perception of such things. I’d believe that, and would love more examples of languages adding grammatical genders or cases or declensions or other inflectional complexities.

      • Aidan

        Yeah, that should always be the null hypothesis, that it’s an artifact of our biased perceptions 🙂

        But in this case, there is some good evidence for a shift in the kind of complexity. There really is more examples of loss of grammatical case, etc. than there are examples of adding it.

        One possible example of adding: Proto-Uralic is reconstructed with 6 cases, Proto-Finnic is reconstructed with 13 cases, modern Finnish has 17 cases.

        It’s pretty well documented that creole languages have very low morphological complexity. And it turns out to be a fairly reasonable position that many of the, for example, Romance languages are creoles between Vulgar Latin and various Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages. Even if they aren’t, it’s reasonable to speculate an extrapolation that language contact leads to reduction of morphological complexity. Especially a language being learned by a large number of adult non-native speakers leads to reduction of morphological complexity.

        Due to the nature of shifting social circumstance from development of technology, there is more opportunity for language contact and languages with large number of non-native speakers more recently than there is less recently. It’s a one-tail circumstance, where you start out with everyone in more or less the same place (low language contact), with only one direction to go, so languages inevitably gradually spread out in the direction of the open tail (though many remain in the original situation as well).

        Further, languages with written records tend to correlate with languages with large numbers of non-native speakers. Especially before the modern period, written languages tend to be imperial languages.

        Oh, here are some sources:

        http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1597/1829.short
        Number of speakers correlates with various dimensions of linguistic complexity, but some dimensions are positively correlated and other dimensions are negatively correlated.

        http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1871/20172586
        Structural properties, such as morphological complexity, “require long interactions in small, close-knit societies. […] But an apparently opposite pattern appears to be observed in relation to non-structural properties language: languages with large linguistic communities tend to have larger vocabularies of content words.”

        “One possibility is that structural and lexical aspects of language might diffuse through different mechanisms. For example, adult–child interactions might be the primary vehicle for regularizing morphology or syntax (see [17,18] for contrasting perspectives) and adult–adult interactions might be the primary vehicle for lexical innovations. Moreover, there may be differential impacts of language contact on structural and lexical aspects of language: lexical items diffuse across languages more readily [19]. Such effects might be amplified to the extent that structural and lexical aspects of language share a fixed communicative burden, so that, for example, simple morphology must be compensated by a larger vocabulary.”

        • swantower

          Thanks, that’s very helpful! I found myself thinking that it might make sense if the more speakers a language has, over a wider area, the less morphological complexity it might have. I’m reminded of McWhorter’s suggestion in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue that English lost most of its verb endings due to contact with Norse speakers; the ones we kept are the ones that were the same in Old Norse, i.e. the ones that were easy for the newcomers to remember.

          adult–child interactions might be the primary vehicle for regularizing morphology or syntax (see [17,18] for contrasting perspectives) and adult–adult interactions might be the primary vehicle for lexical innovations.

          And that raises a new, fascinating possibility in my mind: would demographic changes have any effect on language change? i.e. as the birth rate for a given population declines, you’ll have many fewer interactions between adults and children, and many more between adults and adults. If the idea you quoted there is correct, then that means the force regularizing morphology is weakened, and the one driving lexical innovation is strengthened.

          It’s a recent enough shift that I don’t know whether there would be very much evidence one way or the other, much less any substantial effect. But it did make me wonder!

          • Aidan

            Yeah, that’s an interesting sci-fi idea!

            I’m not sure if it would actually weaken the adult-child interaction force or not; there would still (presumably) be as much adult-child interaction per child, but not as much per adult. It will almost certainly continue to drive the adult-adult lexical innovation.

            Then there’s the speculation that those forces are sharing a fixed communicative burden, so even if the structural force isn’t weakened, a strengthening lexical force could still shift weight in that direction.

  2. Aidan

    “Further, languages with written records tend to correlate with languages with large numbers of non-native speakers. Especially before the modern period, written languages tend to be imperial languages.”
    (So attested languages tend to be in the process of becoming morphologically simpler, relative to reconstructed languages.)

  3. Anthony Docimo

    “it is” -> “it’s” -> “its” -> “(word)-its” -> (word)ts”/”(word)tz” = yes the ts/tz changes the meaning of the word, but its never had its own separate meaning. 🙂
    (in other words, the prefixes and suffixes stick and meld into it)

    better examples than mine can be found in the book _the unfolding of language_.

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