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Re: evolving languages

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 15, 2003, 15:01
En réponse à Florian Rivoal <florian@...>:

> > i have a vague idea of how sound change can occur, and borrowings is not > so difficult for me to comprehend. but appart from that, i hardly know > how grammar and sintax is likely to change. >
The trick is: we don't know :(( . But there seem to be tendencies: from concrete to abstract (e.g. Latin "de": out of became French "de": of), from aspect to tense (the Latin perfect became the French simple past, and in French this evolution happened even a second time, with the compound past, originally indicating perfect, came to be used to mark punctual past), from mood to tense (see English "will", which originally meant "want" and still has remnants of that meaning, but most often simply marks plural). But very often, rather than an evolution of features, we see a renewal of features (for instance, in Latin the future of "amare" was "amabo". In Vulgar Latin the synthetic future was dropped in favour of an periphrastic construction "amare habeo". In Modern French the periphrastic construction merged into a new synthetic form "j'aimerai". From Latin to Modern French, the future tense was never abandoned and kept more or less the same meaning, but its form changed completely. In short, syntax evolved pretty much as it wants. When it does, it's usually by a secondary meaning which acquires priority (like the IE subjunctive which could be used secondarily to mark future, and became a true future tense in Latin). But when and how, that's to anyone's guess ;)) .
> about phonetics, i am not asking for lots of sound change rules sample. > tendencies would be more usefull to me (simplification or > complexification, apperance/ disapearance of tones , ...) >
I think it was John Cowan who gave already good tendencies. A point to remember is that sound changes often works like erosion: clusters simplify, intervocalic consonants weaken, vowel hiatus are resolved into diphtongues, finally full words lose a word boundary, often recreating clusters and the like (the evolution of French is one of the best example of those phenomena) while through borrowings the language reintroduces intervocalic stops and otherwise weakened sounds which don't weaken anymore because the sound changes that provoked that are no longer active. Then again, remember that a tendency may actually be absent for millenia. French has weakened intervocalic [p] down to [v]. Spanish stopped at [b]. But in Italian intervocalic [p] just carried on unharmed! In short, there are plenty of tendencies. But languages tend to be more or less willing to follow them, and the less willing ones seem to resist quite well ;)))) . Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

Replies

Tristan <kesuari@...>
Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>