Re: Future of English (was Re: Degrees of volition in active languages (was Re: Chevraqis: asketch)

Hi, all,

AFAIK, the idea that languages consistently evolve in the direction of
greater overall simplicity is a myth.

Languages do get simpler in certain ways, but these simplifications can give
rise to new complexities.

a)    I have never forgotten what a native German-speaking German professor
told me about this.   Conversational English, he said, was easy for him
because there were fewer flexional endings to remember.   But learning to
understand long English sentences, especially the kind found in writing, was
hard for him at first because of all the constructions that English uses to
compensate for its having fewer flexional endings.

b)    You don't have to know German to know that languages don't get simpler
just because they lose some bound morphemes.   English verbs aren't
inflected for future tense, conditional mood, perfective aspect, or passive
voice.   But with all those auxiliaries doing the same work as all those
inflections, where's the simplicity?

It is most important to remember that the number of bound morphemes,
including flexional endings, that a language has is not an index of that
language's overall complexity.   Chinese is an isolating language, but its
system of noun-classifiers is no less complex than any classical
Indo-European gender system.

c)    What's to prevent our English auxiliaries from contracting?   It's
already permitted in informal speech, and it's creeping into fiction.   Many
long years from now, some descendent of English may become known as a
language that marks perfective aspect, future tense, and conditional mood by
inflecting the subject:    "I'd've gone." = I would have gone.   "The
buffalo'd've gone." = The buffalo would have gone.   "The man I married,
that man'll've gone." = The man whom I married would have gone.    & so on.

d)    It's conceivable that a language could lose cases, whose functions
would be delegated to adpositions, which in turn could be contracted to make
them and their objects into single phonological words, which could then
constitute nouns in a brand new set of cases.

Jim



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Chang" <Zhang2323@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, August 13, 2000 2:55 PM
Subject: Future of English (was Re: Degrees of volition in active languages
(was Re: Chevraqis: asketch)


> In a message dated 2000/08/13 05:55:01 PM, hsteoh@QUICKFUR.YI.ORG wrote:
>
> >English apparently also used to be highly inflected, but today
> >there are only traces left (such as in who, whom, whose). And even who,
> >whom, and whose are starting to collapse into just "who" in colloquial
> >English.
> >
> >My theory is that widespread acceptance of a language usually causes it
to
> >"degrade" or "simplify", losing a lot of old constructs in the process.
> >But I've yet to come up with a plausible explanation for languages
> >becoming *more* complex as they evolve.
>
>     Be interestin' to see ideas regardin' possible evolution(s) in the
> English language.
>     What do others on this list think?
>
>     Z
>