Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

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
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