bsg (07/16/82)
I've read somewhere that the OLDER a language is, the more regular it tends to be. This seems to support the notion that as civilization (or at least time) advanced, humans developed the ability to do more complex language processing. I think--although I'm not sure--that I read this in an interview with Anthony Burgess in which he was discussing the language which he developed for the film "Quest For Fire." What little I know supports this, in that the only foreign language that I speak is Hebrew; that is both a great deal older and a lot more regular than English. (Although it has been modernized somewhat, the modern version is firmly rooted in the biblical language.) I'm not sure quite what this proves, except maybe that attempts to regularize language are probably doomed. I don't know if this applies to spelling reform as well. Two other comments-- I say Mary, merry, and marry three different ways BUT I can't distinguish (in speaking or hearing) ferry from furry--tho I've been laughed at for saying them the same, I honestly don't know the difference. (P.S. I'm originally from Philadelphia, if that has any bearing.) If the Irish did such a magnificent job of spelling reform, why is it that the name (of a town) "Dun Laoghaire" (I may have a few letters off, but it's something like that) is pronounced as "Done Leery?" And for that matter, why is it that driving thru Ireland, when you see signs that say "X 10 miles" then "X 5 miles" then "X 2 miles" etc., X of course a variable, X is spelled differently on each of those signs? This occurs repeatedly--or did when I was last there, in 1974. Billie Goldstein Bell Labs Neptune NJ ...!npois!bsg
miker@sri-unix (07/19/82)
Billie Goldstein's suggestion that older languages are more regular is quite an interesting one. I'm not sure whether it is because our brains are evolving. One might think that over the years some of the rough edges get knocked off by the process which we often call "bad grammar". 1.) Are our brains evolving? There is a seriously proposed theory that human brain processing underwent a profound change at a few thousand years B.C. Legends prior to that time feature almost continuous contact between man and gods, while after this time men tend to have more control over their own actions. The theory is that early man internalised the structure of society in the form of an distinct personality or separate conscience/god, that is, what we would call today a schizophrenic. Later, the ego (in Freudian terms) came to dominate or mediate between the id and the superego to produce a much more self-aware personality. But I don't see how this would affect the regularity of language, except perhaps that the Version 1 brain would not accept language changes so rapidly. 2.) Are older languages more regular? I don't know very much about Hebrew except that it wasn't really used as a spoken language for about 2500 years until just recently. What I mean is that it was learned by people in connection with their religious duties, and so could be spoken as a lingua franca by educated Jews from different countries, but stayed relatively unchanged because its use was always related to the scriptures. I'm sure this is probably an over-simplified version, but this would discount the "knocking off the rough edges" theory. I have heard that Arabic is fairly regular, so perhaps this is a characteristic of Semitic languages. I spent some of my misspent youth trying to learn ancient Greek, which is not particularly regular but is certainly just as old as Hebrew. 3.) Do languages get more or less regular with time? There is certainly a simplifying process going on, as in the dropping of the person/number endings of verbs. However, there is a contrary process going on simultaneously with the formation of forms such as "I'm" (which was probably how all those endings got there in the first place). (Before people were literate there was no need to have very specific rules about how to divide speech into words.) In many cases today's irregularities are the decayed remnants of yesterday's regularities. For example, there is a theory that grammatical gender is the result of the decay of a classificatory language like Bantu. Even with the most ingenious linguistic analysis we can only trace languages back a few thousand years, whereas people were probably using speech as far back as the Neanderthal era. So assuming that brains have been working in much the same way as ours do now for a while, all languages would have gone through many complication/ simplification cycles. There are even some cultures in which, for religious reasons, words which resemble the name of somebody who has just died must be dropped from the language. Imagine the poor anthropologist returning after thirty years to discover a completely different language is being spoken! Michael Robinson