Firstly, I am not a linguist, but I figured I’d put this in GD, because it is surely open to quite a lot of debate…
Well, I’ll just start out with what I was thinking about. Granted it is based on very little knowledege of linguistics, (outside of an entry-level class), but I thought of this idea the other day, and it fascinated me.
I’m starting from PIE (proto-Indoeuropean)
When you read about the development of languages over time you get a lot of languages trending towards simplicity. For instance, English retains very very few of the inflections, etc that PIE was supposed to have originated. We have our inflections, but in no way near that of German, Spanish, or French, etc. There are languages that have kept some of these inflections and others that have kept a LOT of them. I can think of slavic languages and Finnish for examples.
But from what I have read, some people believed that language evolved at one point in time as a single event for humans. I don’ t think whether this is true is important or not.
But why would it be more complex than necessary. My old teacher always told me that natural changes in languages were okay, because they have a function, which is almost always aiding in communication. An example he gave is the sentence, “Who hit who? or I hit who?” In that sentence there is no doubt of what is being asked. You don’t need to say, “who hit who?” or “I hit whom?” The question of who is the subject and who is the object is clear by the context, so what is unnessecary is dropped.
So I have to ask, is the evolution of language similar to the evolution of life? For instance, humans aren’t the ideal, certainly we could concieve of better ways to have our bodies function. There are obviously certain things that we would find unnessecary that would make life easier (maybe facial hair, or unwanted body hair, or maybe you guys have an example) but we evolved that way for some reason that people who know more about evolution could say.
But did language evolve in pieces that needed to be complex in terms of structure so they could convey meaning? It seems to me that it suggests there was a point where humans couldn’t speak (at least the way we do now), and the end point, I believe is what we have today, where all languages are percieved to be equally as expressive on the whole. That’s what I was taught, anyway.
So how do you guys think this happened. We went from not being as expressive (not even speaking at some point, but communication was always there, as communication is common between even the most simple of animals), to extreme complexity with full expression, to further simplification with no loss in expression.
Are languages continuing to become more expressive?
I get your point, and I really wish you’d tell me what you think about that.
Do you honestly think that Modern English is just as complex as Old English because we now have a stricter word-order? I mean, did people just randomly spit out words because the case system allowed it to make sense any way?
I would think that even though it wasn’t needed, that people speaking Old English wouldn’t say a sentence like that. Take a language like German. It has many things that would allow you to mix and match words wherever you want to and still make sense, but I think that some word order would have always been necessary for people to understand what the verb is in a sentence. Take, for example, the German bracket structure that must always be followed. If you were to say, “Ich bin dort geboren,” You could just as easily say, “Ich bin geboren dort” The particple forms of the verbs are more different than they are in english.
Also… What about genders? What possible purpose could they serve? In learning German, I learned that you simply have to memorize the genders. Germans would get along splendidly with no loss in information if they reduced all three genders to one. It seems completely arbitrary to me, and since actual germans themselves don’t know why one thing is masculine or feminine or neuter, it doesn’t seem to me that this complexity lends itself to any kind of information that would be lost by simplifying them…
Or take irregular verbs. All of the older languages had more irregular verbs, but later on, as new verbs were formed, they became more standardized. This seems to follow the same pattern to me.
But back to the word order thing, I have heard that some languages like Chinese have no word order, or that it is very loose. I don’t really know if this is true or not, but it seems to me that in Middle English people would change the order of the words for emphasis. Want to emphasize the object? Stick it in front.
Sure there is the argument that word-order makes up for lost information in some ways, but I don’t see how English’s loss of the other two genders could have been compensated for in some other aspect, considering how most other Indo-European languages still have them, but they offer no information that a single gender couldn’t convey.
Did the chair fall on the cat or did the cat fall on the chair or was the fell cat on the chair or the cat was on the fell chair or cat on the chair was fell or…
The word gender is a misnomer. Although grammatical gender is identified with physical gender, it’s really more a grammatical classification of nouns and adjectives. In other words, nouns that are classified as “feminine” have certain characteristics (most notably in the form that their adjectives use), while “masculine” or “neuter” nouns have other characteristics. Identifying a noun by its gender is mainly just giving you grammatical information about how the noun is used, in the same way that classifying a verb by its infinitival suffix tells you how to conjugate the verb.
I also doubt that it is true that a native German wouldn’t be able to identify the gender of a word they are familiar with. All a native speaker would have to do it hear or say the word in context with an adjective or article to know how the noun is expected to be used.
This is different from being able to predict the gender of a noun you’ve never seen or heard before, though. In some cases, it is possible. For example, in French, any noun ending in -tion is feminine. Similarly, any noun referring to a body organ is masculine. In many situations, though, you might have to go look it up, much like we have to look up the spelling of unfamiliar words in English because our spelling system is completely unpredicatable.
If you look carefully at any spoken language, the irregular verbs are the ones that are used the most. This is because people learn the forms of words in their native language(s) in context, rather than by memorizing verb charts. In other words, a child learning English hears normal sentences like “the dog is big” or “the cats are meowing” on a frequent enough basis that s/he can develop the internal rule that if the subject is singular, use is, but use *are * if the subject is plural.
Words that are not used frequently tend to be subjected to more standardized rules. For example, English has the rule to add /d/ or /<schwa>d/ at the end of a verb to indicate an action in the past. At some point in the last 25 years or so, the irregular form dove has been replaced by the form dived (Has anyone else noticed this???), pretty much for this reason. I guess that few enough of us spend time diving in the water that our children don’t hear the word dove frequently enough for them to realize it’s supposed to be an irregular verb. At any rate, it’s generally considered a Good Thing by speech therapists when they hear kids with speech problems normalizing verbs by saying “He runned to the store” or “She rided his bike yesterday,” since it means that the child is actually starting to analyze the language and apply predictable rules to it.
The technical term for this is Topic First word order, and many languages use it as a regular syntactic rule. German is one of the foremost examples, in that the main idea of a sentence is presented at the beginning of the sentence, whether it is a subject or object. The Topic is then followed by the conjugated verb, and the rest of the sentence pretty much flows from there on. Since German is a case language, it seems easier to handle sentences where the object comes at the beginning, so there is no way to misunderstand sentences like “The ball threw the boy.”
However, Topic First syntax is also very common in non-case languages as well. Spanish (which has very few remnants of case left at all) is one example of a heavily Topic-First language, as is American Sign Language (which has absolutely no way to represent case at all). This kind of evidence leaves even die-hard linguists shrugging their shoulders at trying to figure it out… English tends to use stress to imply the same idea (“I had to read THE CATCHER IN THE RYE last year.”), but when we do change the word order, the rest of the sentence has to change, too (It was “The Catcher in the Rye” that I read for English class last year.").
English has actually adopted gender in a way that few other IE languages have done–where gender actually represents the physical gender of the object the noun refers to. Gender-based languages really don’t do this to a great extent. For example, in French, tortoises are always feminine (la tortue), but in children’s stories, no one blinks an eye if the tortoise happens to be male. In other words, for the story of The Tortoise and the Hare, pronouns that refer to the tortoise are always feminine (elle), even though the character himself is male.
In other words, we still have a sense of gender in English, but it is completely different from that of other IE languages. In fact, English has at least three genders, and even arguably four. We definitely have male and female (not the same as masculine and feminine, though), as well as neuter, but we are also trying to develop a gender that is more neutral than neuter. As a result, we not only have the sets he/she/it and him/her/it, but now we also find he/she/it/they and he/she/it/them, where “they” and “them” refer to a single person whose gender is not determined.
When I used to teach French, I explained the difference between *beau * (masculine beautiful) and *belle * (feminine beautiful) as being very similar to the difference between *handsome * and pretty. In standard American English, it would be very unusual to hear something like “She is handsome” or “He is pretty”. However, the analogy isn’t perfect, since the words “handsome” and “pretty” carry sexual connotations that simply are not present in *beau * or belle in standard French. In French, it simply is not possible to say “Il est belle” or “Elle est beau”, with sexual connotations or not.
When I was in college, I took a course in Ancient Greek from a professor who claimed to be able to speak Indo-European. The topic of noun case came up, and someone in the class asked why there were more cases in earlier languages. (Ancient Greek had six cases, while Latin had five, for example.) While there’s no really good answer for that, it really boils down to the fact that ancient peoples apparently had a much stronger sense of what role each word played in a sentence than modern people seem to have, even if it was due strictly to what “sounded” good in the context. Of course, the only written records we have were given to us by literate people who knew how to read and write, so we don’t really have any sense of how the “common” person spoke the language. For all we know, everyday-people said things equivalent to “There ain’t none eggs today” (a sentence that was actually overheard in our college cafeteria by another instructor), without regard for case or gender.
It’s far from clear whether there has been any trend for isolating languages (i.e., languages where there are no prefixes or suffixes or any other inflections) to change into inflecting languages or for inflecting languages to change into isolating languages. There are examples going each way. Nor is there any clear difference between isolating languages and inflecting languages in whether we should call one or the other “simpler.” Languages without inflections tend to have more complexity in their grammar, which may make up for the lack of inflections. Children seem to learn the two sorts of languages equally well.
So the assumptions in the OP seem to be incorrect. Furthermore, there is no tendency toward simplicity in evolution either. It’s just not true that evolution tends to produce more simplicity in later evolved creatures.
Linguistic change is indeed driven at least in part by a need for clear communication. But that doesn’t always mean it moves towards simplicity, by any means. Chinese tones, for example, came about (if I recall correctly) in part to help differentiate between words that previously had been homophones. This would be a complexification of the language.
Evolution in my experience is a really bad analogy for language change. Barring a few exceptions (pidgins) of which English certainly isn’t one, languages don’t evolve. They just change. That is to say, in evolutionary terms English today has just as much fitness with regards to communication as it did a thousand years ago. And just as much fitness as any language spoken ten or twenty thousand years ago as well. So while our linguistic ability has been basically very stable since its initial appearance, its expression, actual languages, are very much in a state of flux. Not evolutionary change.
It’s a shame we have such short lives, because it makes it difficult to get a sense of the natural state of languages not being one of equilibrium. Even if the majority of instances of language change resulted from a desire to communicate more clearly (which is not the case generally), the fact is simplying one aspect of a language just tends to lead to a recomplication of another part in the long run.
If you like, think of it as you smooth out an air bubble in one spot, another pops up somewhere else. But even this is a bad way of thinking about it, because it presupposes that complex or inconsistent aspects of a given language are blemishes or flaws when really given the wide range of human experience language is expected to be able to express it is a folly to devote energy to fixing some discrete aspects with the goal of perfecting the whole thing. I’d say that given the hardware (human brain and physiology) that our language ability is already operating at maximum efficiency. We’ll need to upgrade the hardware before we can cook up any language more perfect than the ones we’re using now.
There are also many aspects of English that make it a bad single example for thinking about how languages might evolve naturally over time, if they did. Two things in particular that come to mind are English’s long literary tradition and status as a world language. Don’t mistake the clear evolution in our writing ability with a corresponding evolution in language ability, and also consider that literacy is a very effective brake on language change. Also remember that a contributing factor for English’s “simplification” is that for many English speakers it is not their first language. So we’re used to speaking English with non-fluent speakers. This is another brake on English having fiendishly complex grammars and sound inventories that we find in languages spoken by more isolated groups of people.
Okay, like I said, I don’t know if I am correct, but I have a couple of pieces of evidence for my assumptions. Old English was more inflected that Modern English. Whether that is simpler or not is up to debate, although I think that Old English was more complex. But if you look at the disappearance of grammatical genders and the increasing use of regular verbs, you have to admit that it has to be simpler than before.
I mean, what possible information could grammatical gender have carried? And yes, Kiminy, I know that Germans can recognize which nouns are of which gender. I didn’t think that I had to say grammatical gender. What other word could I use? A German’s ability to determine the grammatical gender of a noun is equivalent to my ability to determine the past participle of the verb “to be” its something that is simply learned since birth. That has no bearing on what function it has to do with conveying information.
I submit that grammatical genders have absolutely NO purpose in conveying information. If someone can show me otherwise (In Indo-European Languages) I’ll be astoundingly impressed. There’s your example right there. From unnecessary complexity to a more streamlined version. It’s common in Scandinavian languages as well where they have the common and neutral genders. The common gender is the combination of masculine and feminine.
To me, this is proof enough alone that languages evolved in a way that was unnecessarily complex. Unnecessarily complex means that it has parts that aren’t essential in conveying information. You don’t need to know that the sun is feminine to convey any bit of information. To me, the redundancy of the grammatical gender of languages also means that it is POSSIBLE that there could also be other redundancies that were deemed later unnecessary.
Sure, English retains gender when it makes sense–when it has logical connections to something tangible. Male are masculine and females are feminine. No big deal.
You also state that you had a professor who could speak Indo-European. You stated that it could be because of the thought processes of earlier civilizations? Certain people had different ideas of what sounded good in certain contexts? That is exactly what I’m talking about. It works the same way for us. To say, “I eated an apple”, sounds bad to us. But it is also simpler in the overall scope of the language. To have the preterit form of the verb, “to eat” being “ate” provides us with no more knowledge than eated. And you would surely know that irregular forms of verbs have been replaced with regular forms of verbs throughout the history of English. If changes in language are always at least equally as expressive, and we are moving towards more simplicity, then to me it means that we have moved from unnecessary complexity. We could honestly make English much simpler by making all verbs regular without losing any sense of expression in the process. How is it that irregular verbs aren’t unnecessary? We have gotten rid of them before now without consequence (along with grammatical gender) and have lost no information in the process.
There must be some instances of words sounding identical, or very similar, for which a gender specifies which meaning is being referred to. This would have been more important, of course, in times when a language was mainly spoken rather than written.
These words were not pronounced the same in olden days; not a good example.
I concur with gender for nouns being useless. The handsome/pretty example is disingenuous. Why need two words for tall, or fat, red-headed? French has this.
Handsome/pretty only seems useful because we’ve been trained since birth to apply the “correct” adjective where appropriate. The world wouldn’t be remarkably different if we used the same word to describe handsome/pretty; actually we have such a gender-neutral word - attractive. And wouldn’t you know it, adjectives like that in French have different word endings “ive”, “if”.
Well, it’s speculated that in Proto-Indo-European, they did have a purpose, in that animate things tended to be masculine, and female animate things tended to be feminine, and inanimate things tended to be neuter. The complexification comes when inflectional patterns were established for those genders, they over time lost their relation to gender per se and just became various ways of declining nouns and adjectives. As for why they stuck around after they had progressed past their original purpose, linguists have found that all languages have a certain degree of redundancy built in, for the purpose of correcting errors in sound transmission that may occur. The redundancy may be provided by word order, noun declension, verb conjugation, tones, or repetition of ideas (“I don’t see nothing” / “Ya ne vizhu nichevo” / “Je ne vois rien”; in the latter two examples both the concepts of “I” (in the pronoun and the verb ending), and “no/nothing” are being repeated). As one type of redundancy disappears in the course of language change, like English losing case endings, another type of redundancy will spring up, like English now having a very strict word order. So grammatical gender doesn’t really have a purpose in conveying new information, but it does have a role in making sure that the information that is conveyed comes across correctly.
But it’s not enough for your theory to just think Old English is more complex just because it’s inflected. As a native speaker of Modern English, your objectivity in making complexity comparisons between your own language and other languages is highly suspect. In this case you really want to have the evidence in hand before you proceed.
I also wonder if your analysis of English grammar isn’t a bit superficial. You’ve taken an introductory linguistics class, now take a class in syntax. You may think transformational grammar is pointless, but one thing it is certain to do is give you a real appreciation for how incredibly difficult it is to draw up a systematic set of rules that governs all aspects of your language. You’re suggesting making changes to discrete parts when you don’t even understand how the whole system works together yet. I don’t mean instinctively, either, but explicitly.
Add to that the fact that we still don’t clearly understand how our brain processes language. You’re taking a very top-down approach to your optimization of the language, but you haven’t yet considered the fact that things like grammatical gender may be a necessary outcome of how we learn and process language at a deeper level.
While you can pick and choose which aspects of the language trouble you and attempt to reform them, our brain has to handle the whole shebang. As useless as you deem grammatical gender to be, the fact is that it exists in languages all over the world. Instead of deciding it’s useless and trying to stamp it out, you might be better advised to ask yourself why such a seemingly useless construct turns up so frequently, and what clues it might give us about the inner workings of what is still very much a black box: our evolved language ability.
Russian, which as an example of that error-correcting I was talking about requires that when a statement is negated, every word that can be made negative is made so, so “Ya nikogda ne sdelal nichevo”, “I never didn’t do nothing”. If I’m yelling this statement to you across a ravine, you might miss the “ne”, but the “nikogda” and “nichevo” help ensure that you will get the point of the sentence.
Also, the usefulness of redundancy means that even highly inflected languages such as Russian or Latin will have a standard word order, that may be deviated from for emphasis in ways that English or Chinese cannot, but when combined with the case endings and verb conjugations makes it much more difficult to misunderstand a sentence.
I’ve heard this theory before. Languages that are linguae francae over large areas tend to simplify - thus contrast the simplicity of English, or French, or Persian, with the wacky complexity of, for instance, the Australian Aboriginal languages, or Native American languages. According to that theory, it’s natural that languages spoken by isolated groups should remain complex while widespread second-language usage tends to simplify other languages. Another example is Mandarin Chinese, which, as the long-time language of government in China, has fewer tones - four - than most of the Chinese languages as well as fewer sounds than many of its sisters.
You submit wrong. Don’t get me wrong, no one knows for sure exactly what purpose grammatical gender serves, but if it were useless, it would disappear, wouldn’t it? Distinctions disappear when they’re not useful: Brazil, with its more informal society, has lost the three levels of grammatical formality still present in Continental Portuguese. So if gender was no longer useful to the Germans, the French, or any of the other (many, many) speakers of languages with gender, it would probably go away.
Gender marks adjectives, which can clarify in complex sentences which noun they belong to. Gender provides a way to distinguish between similar words or, from another point of view, to create new words that are related to old ones. Sometimes there’s a certain regular correspondence between a word’s gender and other traits. In Spanish, a door is “una puerta” while a port is “un puerto” - two words only distinguished by gender. There’s a vague tendency for these pairs to reflect differences in size - male nouns are bigger than female ones.
Though we call it gender, and associate it with “male and female” as do many familiar languages, some African languages have 8 or 10 noun classes that are considered by many to be the same thing as genders. They correspond roughly to the physical shape of the object. If two or three genders is bad, shouldn’t 8 or 10 be out of the question?
Language is immensely complex, and it’s only begun to be understood. But all languages have features that seem “redundant”, and it’s true that human language tends to be much more redundant than imagined “ideal” communication paradigms. But this redundancy is what makes it possible to talk in a noisy place, or from far away, and still understand each other.
And if you want a fair comparison, study a non-Indo-European language. Chinese, for example, ought to please you: no grammatical gender, and in fact very little to no inflection at all. But word order is all-important; the fewer inflections a language has, the more that small changes in word order effect the meaning of a sentence. So in many cases, “simplifying” a language is just trading one distinction for another.
Except that as counterexamples we have grammatically complex languages that were or are quite widespread, such as Quechua, Aztecan, Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic, and Swahili. On the other hand, the Austronesian family has approximately one zillion little languages, and the family as a whole is known for having a comparatively simple grammar (which isn’t to say the languages as a whole are any simpler than Greek or Latin).
