Just so you know, both “assualt” and “battery” come from Norman French.
Good post. English grammar is not “simpler” than other languages; it’s more analytic than some, less than others.
Analytic languages accomplish the same ends as synthetic ones, but using different tools. Pueri puellas amaverat and “The boys had been loving the girls” are identical in meaning, more or less, but one accomplishes its purposes with noun and verb endings, the other with syntactic positioning in the sentence and auxiliary verbs.
Sorry to continue the highjack, but I agree. I was considered a gifted student in English, but my understanding of it increased by an order of magnitude when I studied Spanish and Latin.
I agree with this. The auxiliary words in English can be much more confusing than than affixes, since they are used as verbs themselves. So a speaker of German could have a hard time with a sentence like “I still had the apple, but the orange I had given away.” Also, an expression like “I burning your dog” is impossible to translate faithfully.
German uses auxiliary verbs as well; in fact, it uses have (or rather, whatever the German translation is - I don’t speak German) for pretty similar purposes.
As an ESL teacher I can assure the OP and anyone else that English grammar is by no means easy to use nor to explain to non-native speakers. It just seems easier because we grew up speaking it.
I’d just like to point out that in post #10, I rephrased my OP in a way that captures what I was trying to get at. I removed the generality, and focused on the specific parts which are simpler.
I do not think English grammar is generally simpler than that of most other languages. I beleive its reliance on strict word order makes it much less formulaic and intuitive for non-native speakers (and most native speakers).
I clarified my question by focusing on why English lost its case morphology, why it lost noun gender, and how verb conjugation became so relatively simplistic.
Please don’t rely on my thread title, as I had to water it down to make it an appropriate length.
In Language Myths (a book I recommend), there was a passage about Tarzan:
Are there any linguists here who might be able to tell us why “more analytic” and “simpler” seem connected to most people?
And like I said, it’s an excellent question. I think the best hypothesis around - judging by what people have been tossing around the thread and what little I know about English - is that there were a lot of other languages in contact with English during the Old English period, and because of that, inflection got simpler.
One rough generality is that languages spoken by large, mixed groups of people tend to lose some of their inflectional complexity. That fits well with the hypothesis that mixtures of people speaking Danish and Old Norse within England led to the decline of English’s inflectional morphology. It’s languages that are spoken by small, isolated populations that really tend to maintain complex inflection - a lot of American Indian and Australian Aboriginal languages, for instance, maintain incredibly intricate systems of inflection or agglutination (which describes languages that add suffixes or prefixes, one after the other, rather than single inflectional endings that contain multiple meanings.) Same goes, actually, with other unusual grammatical traits: I’m not aware of any language outside Australia that uses true syntactic ergativity; the only tripartite languages that I’ve heard of are Native American or Australian. You don’t see trial number (that is, a separate grammatical category for groups of three; quite a number of languages have dual number and obviously many languages have singular and plural numbers) in any language spoken by a large group of people.
There’s definitely a tendency for really exotic traits to show up only in small, isolated languages; English is, of course, on precisely the opposite end of that continuum in most ways, and that probably reflects the language admixture that characterized England during the Old English period.
Excalibre, my last post wasn’t really directed at you…just the people who are jumping on the “English is complex” bandwagon. I was trying to make them see they missed my point. Your answers have been exceedingly helpful.
Yeah, I got that. I was just sayin’ . . .
The Germans also use “sein” (to be) as an auxilliary verb for the past tense, when the main verb is intransitive and indicates motion or change of state. I think French might do this as well — but I only had one year of French, too many years ago, and my memory might be off.
I’d be curious to know if this is another simplification that English underwent. Did Old English use “to be” as an auxilliary?
More recently than Old English, the King James Bible: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. (John 10)
Interesting! Yes, French and Italian, and Old Spanish - and at least some of the minor Romance languages, but I don’t remember which - use be for compound past tenses of motion (etc.) My Romance Linguistics prof alluded to English once having done so as well, but I’m not familiar enough with it to know exactly what the circumstances were, though Dr. Lunn said it was comparable to French. In French at least it’s related to transitivity, as you mentioned - the transitive verb “to have” was largely used with transitive verbs, and the intransitive “to be” with intransitives.
The origin of such forms makes it clearer why that relation exists. It started with phrases like “I have dinner [sitting here] prepared” - which makes perfect logical sense. And it clearly describes a time in the past, but doesn’t mention it specifically - thus the “present perfect”, which describes an action completed (“perfect”) before the present. The verb have and the past participles of other words gradually became analyzed as compound verbs rather than a verb an an adjective; this process went the same way in Spanish and English, at least. It’s easy to see how “He is gone” gradually became grammaticalized as well (in English or any of the other languages mentioned), into meaning something akin to “He has left”.
I don’t know if this was Old English, though. E. Thorpe just cited Early Modern English, and this form was independently invented - quite possibly more than once - in the evolution of the Romance languages, which suggests that it happens fairly easily. Which leaves us with few clues as to when it happened in English - if it was a leftover from Proto-Germanic or was the result of convergent evolution in German and English.
And ‘to be’ is still retained in the phrase, “He is risen!” (which has prompted a thread nearly every Eastertide). Though that specifically might be an attempt to copy the aspect of the Greek.
Given its development, does English have relatively more ‘irregular’ forms than other languages? It seems that irregular forms would be remnants of the former ‘morphological complexity’, unless perhaps they are primarily derived from foreign words (like radius->radii). I know something like the first happened with German, where plural forms have a faint pattern dependant on gender (but the gender of 900 years ago, not the modern one).
Apologies for bringing this up again, but I’m guessing that ‘tense’ in the technical sense refers to an inflected form. Is there a linguistic term that covers how tense is used in the vernacular (e.g. what is ‘will be’?)
I don’t know that such things are easy to measure; I’ve never heard of any attempts to quantify it except to name some languages which are extraordinarily regular (Turkish is, apparently, and it’s probably in large part a result of having largely agglutinative morphology.) So I don’t know if English has comparatively more irregular verbs than other languages (we don’t have many irregular nouns, aside from Latin borrowings. I seem to remember having seen seven cited as a count.)
Irregular nouns in English do mostly stem from a previously productive inflectional process. Specifically, English has a number of strong verbs, which indicate past tense and sometimes past participle forms by changing their vowel (drink, drank, drunk; break, broke) rather than by adding endings. In Old English, there were several (five, I think) paradigms for strong verbs, plus the weak verbs (the ones that form their past tenses with “-ed”.)
Strong verbs are a feature of all the Germanic languages; the broader phenomenon of changing vowels as an inflectional process is called ablaut, and it’s found across the Indo-European family, at least in traces, although there’s lots of languages where it’s not found anymore as a productive inflectional tool. (Latin speakers: note some irregular preterit forms: ago/egi, facio/feci. Those are remnants of Indo-European ablaut.) English is among those: strong verbs are essentially a closed lexical category, which means that new verbs are not added to the category. Almost all new verbs are instead weak verbs; the only exception I can think of is the rather geeky “ping” (sometimes pang, pung in the past tense and past participle, but even that is probably more often attested as “pinged”.) Of course, a few words have snuck in and out of the strong verbs, including “sneak”; “snuck” is a relatively modern invention - an Americanism - but to me it feels more natural than the original “sneaked”.
Anyway, I’m rambling. But yeah, by examining irregular forms in English you can get major clues to how things used to be done. Much of that is done by looking for patterns - for instance, irregular verbs still tend to come in sets: drink/drank/drunk and sing/sang/sung, or take/took/taken and shake/shook/shaken. Those sets give clues as to the regular patterns of Old English.
Hey, didn’t you ever sing Joy to the World?
Excalibre and OP: John McWhorter wrote a scholarly article listing and explaining about thirteen ways in which English changed (in some sense, usually “simplified”) probably by the Danish presence. Sorry I don’t have the exact cite on hand – I’m on a slow phone connection today. He makes a string argument, but agrees with Excalibre that it’s not proven.