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Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Saturday, October 17, 1998, 23:29
charles wrote:
> Grammar increases until it becomes a burden. > (Same for idiomatic usage.)
What do you mean by that? An increase in the complexity of one part of a grammar is usually offset by a decrease in another. Loss of cases goes hand-in-hand with a rise in the complexity of the syntax, for instance.
> Time increases irregularities (hoary tradition).
Actually, time tends to *decrease* irregularities. For example, over time, the number of strong verbs in English has gradually decreased. Irregularities tend to come very quickly, when the grammar shifts. For example, when English borrowed a lot of words from first Norse and later French, the verbs went into the weak catagory, causing the strong verbs to become a minority (i.e., irregular), this was relatively quickly. Then, over centuries, over a thousand years now, the strong verbs were "weakened". Given a few more centuries, and perhaps English will have no strong verbs. Sometimes analogy will add one or two irregularities, such as "catch" (once regular, influenced by "teach"), or the colloquial "squoze/squozen" for the past tense and past participle of "squeeze" (analogy with "freeze/froze/frozen"). Another example is the old weak nouns (the -en plurals), once quite common, but now very rare (restricted to "children" - which is actually a double-plural, the -r is an older plural marking!, "oxen", and the now-archaic "brethren"). Of course, if history had gone slightly differently, it would have been the strong nouns (the -es plurals), which would now be rare (e.g., shoen and housen instead of shoes and houses). Over time irregular plurals tend to be lost, for example, we now say "cows" instead of "kine", "books" instead of "beech". Given enough time, and we may be saying "foots" and "childs". Some irregularities are a more gradual process, that's true. Suppletion, for instance. Sometimes it is formed from two near-synonyms that collapsed into one. For instance, the forms of the French e^tre are descended from the Latin esse (to be) and stare (to stay). Stare in Vulgar Latin was used for to be, as it still is in Spanish (where esse has become ser, and stare has become estar), but the two merged in French, and so some forms (such as the infinitive) come from stare (L. stare --> estare --> estre --> M.F. e^tre), while others are from esse (L. est --> M.F. est). Esse itself was very irregular in Latin, and I suspect that it too originated in several different verbs. On a related note, altho there are no irregular verbs in W. (regularity is common among agglutinating languages), it's descendants will have a few irregular verbs. I'm thinking of collapsing kla (ta) and yan/na in some of the descendant-tongues, with the distinction kept by case. Yan/na is used for "part of a group", i.e., "John is a human", while kla is used for identity, i.e., "John is my brother". Yan/na would take the genetive/partative. Also, I'm considering using the verb "to become" for the forms in the future. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Conlang/W.html ICQ: 18656696 AOL: NikTailor