In another thread about language change (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=308942)
Wendell Wagner said
So I understand English is a pretty isolating language in that sense: nouns are singular or plural, but no other inflections, and almost all verbs have just two tenses and two conjugations.
So my question is: are there any examples of English becoming less isolating : with a word absorbing another word that indicates inflection so as to become one word?
O’Brien? O’Malley? Etc?
Or not related to the above but inspired by it: o’possum.
Seems to be popular, the “o”: how 'bout this: o’clock.
The "O’ " isn’t really an inflection – it’s a transliteration of the Irish word “Ó”.
“Opossum” is just an Anglicization of the original Indian form “apasum”.
More of a contraction. If at some point in the future the "o’ " started getting attached to other words to show possesssion (e.g. hair of the dog == hair o’dog), it would probably be considered a clitic, but if enough time passed and it were acting like a case marker, an argument could be made that it would be a new way of showing the genitive.
How about the prepositions they don’t want us to end sentences with?
“Get up” means arise, and it is used as a whole. Get has nothing to do with rising.
“Do in” means murder. The preposition is glued to the verb. It’s a different verb without it.
Or is the verb glued to the preposition, ie the prep is the basis and the verb is the modifier? Get up, think up, wrap up, burn up…
A real grammar maven will tell you the right word, but those aren’t “really” prepositions, but rather acting as adverbs. Auxilliaries or something? I equate them to the “two part verbs” that are common in German.
The whole construction is called a phrasal verb, but I couldn’t tell you whether the preposition has a special name when used this way.
English is not an isolating language but largely an analytic one, one which uses particles and auxiliaries and syntactic position to form nuances of meaning which synthetic languages indicate by endings.
It seems to be moving with glacial slowness in the direction of the Finnic languages, where former particles have become affixed to the modified word as endings, resulting in a re-evolution of synthetic form.
OK Poly, good explanation. Now can you think of any examples of where English seems to be in the process of joining a particle together with the word being modified?
The O’Hara example seems to be a reasonable, if weak, one. It only seems to apply to names (and the clock) , and only occasionally, but I’m guessing that’s the kind of thing that happened with the Finnic languages.
Any other exampizzles? Heck, if you have any French or Spanish examples, throw those out, too, though I may need more explanation of those.
(And feel free for optional discussions about whether widespread literacy will freeze, dramatically slow, or otherwise change the process)
The possessive 's is also an inflection.
It used to be, but now it’s a clitic – it’s not tied to the particular word that is possessing. As an example, if I wanted to say “the dog of the king of France” I could rearrange that to say “the king of France’s dog” but not “the king’s of France dog”. The " 's" is put at the end of the phrase that is doing the possessing, not necessarily only on the noun.
gonna
gotta
hafta
betcha
Great examples, OuryL (“gonna”, “betcha”, etc.).
Spanish examples were asked for. As Spanish evolved from Latin in the early Middle Ages, its future tense changed from the infinitive plus a form of the verb “habere” (to have), such as:
amare habeo (I will love, literally “I have to love”)
amare habes (you will love)…
to new endings as the “habeo” eroded and was attached to the main verb:
amare, amaras… (I will love, you will love…)
Parallel developments occurred in other Romance languages. My source is UC Berkeley linguist John McWhorter’s terrific book The Power of Babel (Times Books, 2001).
I apologize, Quercus. I see now that you were looking for current examples in Spanish, French, etc. of this phenomenon.
I have to confess that I actually use these in informal conversation. In fact someone pointed out that at times I even use “gonna” in Internet fora. [Would this get me banned from the SD if I ever do so? ;)] Although while language purists might object, languages do evolve. It isn’t rare to hear someone utter “gonna”.
One example is “pickup”, as in pickup truck, pickup line, pickup game. Still in transition. You’ll see it as pick up, pick-up, and pickup, usually depending on the conservative/progressive tendencies of the source.
The tech world is probably the curve leader in this, with standard usages such as online, login, logon, etc.
It seems to me that English is gradually replacing three words, in certain situations, with this “-a” ending: “to”, “of”, and “have”.
When it replaces “to”, as in “gonna dance” = “going to dance”, it occurs when there is a verb followed by an infinitive acting as its object. Because it necessitates the infinitive losing the “to” to which it is usually so tightly bound, I doubt we will ever process, say, “gonna” as an inflected form, but someday we might. Interestingly, certain possible verbs such as “love to” and “have to” don’t contract in this way (there is no “love-a”), because of the different final consonant.
It seems to replace “of” (as in “whole lotta love”= “whole lots of love”) mostly with set phrases that aren’t inflectional.
However, when it replaces “have”, as in “coulda” = “could have” or “shoulda” = “should have”, it does appear to be creating a new inflectional form in English.
Any linguists out there? Please correct my observations and/or terminology.
I suppose you could count the relatively recent phenomenon of infixing “fucking” and “bloody” {un-fucking-believable, fan-bloody-tastic} into adjectives as an example of English becoming less isolating, although it’s not restricted to any word or group of words other than polysyllabic adjectives, where its use is widespread, if irregularly applied.
In a way, ‘gonna’ is somewhat like a future-tense form of to go, which means it’s something like an inflection. Analogously, and with a similar ending, there’s ‘I’mma’ (in slang and AAVE). Really, it’s just a contraction of ‘I am going to’, but that amounts to a future-tense form of ‘to be’ available only for the first-person singular.