rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo) (10/21/84)
> From: Rick Briggs <briggs@RIACS.ARPA> > > > Why do languages move away from case? Why did Sastric Sanskrit > die? I think the answer is basically entropy. The history of > language development points to a pattern in which linguists write > grammars and try to enforce the rules(organization), and the tendency > of the masses is to sacrifice elaborate case structures etc. for ease > of communication. You may want to read Otto Jesperson, "Language: it's nature, development, and origin", chap 19, "The origin of grammatical elements". He has some very lucid discussions of how language changes. He argues quite well that yes, of course, language changes towards shorter and shorter forms. However, he argues against the assumption that languages start out as having so-called synthetic syntax (i.e. use of word roots with prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, e.g. case endings) and evolve towards a so-called analytic syntax (i.e. use of separater words, etc. , e.g. English and Chinese ). There are numerous examples, even in English, where a full word root has evolved into a prefix or suffix, showing the reverse trend exists as well. For example, the suffix 'ly' comes from a noun meaning 'body, appearance, form'.The suffix 'ful' obviously comes from the adjective 'full'. So now we have a so-called synthetic form 'truthfully' sort-of meaning 'having the form of being full of truth'. Another great example is the future tense in moderm Romance languages (this is my example, not Jesperson's). Due to phonological changes in Latin, the traditional future tense got confused with other tenses and dropped out of use. For example, in classical Latin, "I will love" is "amabo". This so-called synthetic form (a verb root plus suffixes ama-b-o) was supplanted by analytic forms: Eo amare (lit. I am going to love) Habeo amare (lit. I have to love) Debeo amare (Lit. I ought to love) The form using 'habere' (to have) with the infinitive is the one that stuck, and as the forms of habere got shortened and ADDED TO THE END of the infinitive,a new set of verb endings resulted: Classical Common habeo ==> ajo habes ==> as habet ==> at habemus ==> emos habetis ==> ete, etis habent ==> ant Hence we get the following as the future tense in the following languages: Spanish French amare aimerai amaras aimeras amara aimera amaremos aimerons amareis aimerez amaran aimeront Similarly, the Conditional tense of moderm Romance languages arose from the PAST tense of 'to have' (in shortened form) added onto the end of the infinitive. > Why do languages move away from case? Why did Sastric Sanskrit > die? I think the answer is basically entropy. The history of > language development points to a pattern in which linguists write > grammars and try to enforce the rules(organization), and the tendency > of the masses is to sacrifice elaborate case structures etc. for ease > of communication. So please beware of jumping to obvious conclusions and applying some quasi-Marxist political theory to language change. > Current Linguistics has begun to actually aid this entropy by > paying special attention to slang and casual usage(descriptive vs. > prescriptive). Without some negentropy from the linguists, I fear > that English will degenerate further. I seriously doubt that what linguists pay attention to very much alters the course of evolution of a language. It is not obvious that language change even when from synthetic forms to analytic forms is "degeneration", since languages change to fit the communications needs of its speakers. -- Rob Bernardo, Pacific Bell, San Francisco, California {ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!pbauae!rob
steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) (10/25/84)
** Rick Briggs seems to feel that English is degenerating. > Current Linguistics has begun to actually aid this entropy by > paying special attention to slang and casual usage(descriptive vs. > prescriptive). Without some negentropy from the linguists, I fear > that English will degenerate further. Most linguists would not say that langauges degenerate, but that they change or even evolve. English has case marking on the nouns 1000 years ago, but lost them during the years of the Norman conquest from 1066 for a couple of hundred years until Chaucher. Chinese has no case markings either. It also has no tense (we have two), no number (singular or plural), and no gender. Chinese clearly did not degenerate from Sanskrit. I believe there is written Chinese that is as old as any Sanskrit. Case marking indicates the relationship between the nouns and the verbs. In some languages; for instance Latin, Sanskrit, and Russian; this relationship is indicated by suffixes to the nouns. In English we indicate these same relationships by using word order and prepositions. The English system of prepositions is rich. The prepositions serve a similar function to endings that indicated indirect objects in languages that have case marked endings. Since prepositions are words and not endings, there can be more distinctions. It is easily argued that since there are more ways of incicating specific relationships in English that English is more precise than languages that uses suffixes. In France, the French Academy trys to preserve the purity of French. They are down on loan words. They have not mangaged to hold back the changes in the French language, and they have to revise their standard periodically. Hitler tried to purify German. Unambigious Languages The whole idea of languages that are unambigious was throughly explored by the logical positivists, notably Carnap. The postivists explored a procedure pioneered by the early Wittgenstein (and later abandonded and belittled by Wittgenstein). They believed that philosophical problems could be solved by determining the reference of propostions and determining the truth value of those propositions (as determined by sensory experience). Propositions about such things as "good" were "sensless" in this system because "good" does not refer to anything in the world we can verify with out senses. This approach is find for something like "good", which we can easily do without. It runs into problems with words like "chair." When I use the word "chair" I may not have any specific chair in mind. They solved this problem with reference to "concepts", a fuzzy solution at best. This idea was trounced by Wittgenstein (in the Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations). Since ambiguity can be phonological, syntatic, semantic, or pragmatic, to name a few, the term "amgiguity" is very ambigious. Were we to select a formal language (say Sasitic Sanskrit or a language developed by Carnap or Russell), we would find (courtsy of Kirk Godel) that that language was incomplete. Ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. -- scc!steiny Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382 109 Torrey Pine Terr. Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060 ihnp4!pesnta -\ fortune!idsvax -> scc!steiny ucbvax!twg -/
ir44@sdcc6.UUCP (Theodore Schwartz) (10/31/84)
There are some ideas around on why languages become simplified over time as well as why they arrived at some initial point of complexity. It has been suggested that simplification takes place where there is contact between speakers of different languages who must communicate. Pidginization results. In Pidgin languages, and there have been many, such as current Melanesian pidgin English or current Indonesian, a language develops, sometimes to facilitate trade, sometimes where there is domination by one group over the other, or where one population is conquored or enslaved (early American slave English was a Pidgin language). Often part of the vocabulary of the language of the dominant group is combined with a simplified syntax (in the case of Melanesian pidgin, derived from Melanesian). Many grammatical distinctions are dropped, sometimes even number and gender, irregular verbs are regularized, as in "I is, you is, he is, we is, etc." Sydney Ray, early this century, argued that Melanesian languages, were already pidginized and locally developing some new complexities, when they encountered European traders and colonizers. Pidgin English grew up between them, with contributions from both sides and without much conscious planning. Pidgin languages spread wherever Europeans went but with both some carry-over and much local influence in each area, so that Melanesian pidgin includes some features from the China-coast trade pidgin and some words from Portuguese African pidgins (like "pikinini" for child, from "pequen\~a, "little.") Similarly, English is a pidginized language having lost considerable complexity in comparison to other Germanic languages. The next step is to argue that simplification will occur, less rapidly and dramatically, even in response to internal borrowing and exposure to different dialects within a language community. Especially where speech and verbal memory were the pricipal media for communication and storage, differences would develop as a language community became larger and more spread out as well as more internally differentiated by political and other cleavages. Communication across such gradients would also lead to the sort of simplification that would facilitate learning and intercommunication. Conversely, it has been suggested that the greatest phonological and grammatical complexity develops in relatively small, relatively isolated language communities, in part because internal gradients do not develop. Ancient Greek, referred to by my predecessors in this discussion, may have reached maximum complexity during a period when the population was small and relatively isolated and progressively lost this as that population spread, internally differentiated (within the language community) and entered into communication with many groups who learned and simplified Greek. I don't know this-- I'm merely fitting it to the above argument. It could be that this is all we need and perhaps a historian could test it, that complexity either develops or is conserved in relatively small, isolated language groups. Why is this degree of complexity needed in the first place? (A Melanesian language that I know, for example, not only has singular, dual, and plural, but also trial for small sets of persons or objects, not necessarily three, and distinguishes inclusion or exclusion of the person addressed in the first person pronouns). Why the complexity? Who needs it? Obviously such complexity increases the redundancy in the communication of ideas. Each distinction also implies constraints on the selection or identification of referential objects or of other terms. One suggestion for which I can't argue very far, is that for people depending entirely on oral-verbal communication and memory, the additional redundancy may be useful. Much of the grammatical complexity and referential specificity (e.g., no general set of numbers except as inflected by numeral classifiers depending on the many classes of objects counted, such as long, thin objects, animate objects, etc.) Such specificity has proformal functions, that is, the affix tells you something, narrows the range, of the object referred to. It is likely also that small, isolated language communities provide the container within which innovations can accumulate. There must be on-going complexifying processes as well as entropy or we would have nothing but pidgins around. Pidgins, by the way, as you would expect from their minimal redundancy, require extensive circumlocution to achieve the specificity of reference (not only to objects but to more complex ideas) that the more complex languages condense into words.