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

"H. S. Teoh" wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 13, 2000 at 02:41:42PM -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > "H. S. Teoh" wrote:
> [snip]
> > > Yeah, actually, now I recall my Greek professor emphatically saying in
> > > class, "Use the article with proper names!". Some manuscripts, he said,
> > > may omit the article, but as a rule, *we* were never supposed to omit the
> > > article.
> >
> > No, it really isn't.   Here're a couple examples from different authors of
> > Attic Greek in different works:
> [snip]
>
> Yes, what I meant was that the prof didn't want us (his students) to omit
> the article. We did note that many passages omit the article for proper
> names; but I suppose he wanted us to get into the habit of using the
> article for names (since it's quite a foreign idea to English-speakers).
Okay, I understand.  But what you wrote made it sound like *only some*
manuscripts do not use the article, where the general rule is in fact precisely the
opposite:  most do.  Besides, personally, telling someone to use the article *all* the
time seems just as misleading as not telling them that you can use it sometimes.
It really isn't used *that* often, in my experience.

> [snip]
> > > As for the Greek article... it's actually quite an awesome thing. It's
> > > much more flexible than, for example, the English article, especially when
> > > used as a pseudo-pronoun (which, IIRC, is where it developed from).
> >
> > No, it had been fully a demonstrative pronoun.  Nothing pseudo- about it.
>
> Well, by the time it got to Attic Greek, its use as a pronoun has been
> mostly replaced by egw, su, he:meis, humeis, and autos. (Perhaps this only
> applies to Attic Greek poetry -- I don't know enough about it to say for
> sure.)
No... IIRC there are two divergent developments in the demonstative system.
The 'ho, he:, to' system had formerly denoted proximative demonstratives
like "this" and "here" in English. From this, it diverged into on the one hand the
definite article, whereupon 'hode, hede, tode' was developed in its place.  On
the other, it came to be used sometimes as a third person personal pronoun,
somewhat like modern (dialectal?) German "der, die, das".   'Autos', too, had
been used as a third person personal pronoun in Homer, and so was not replaced
as much as kept.

The first and second person pronouns had always existed; they are in fact cognate
with other IE languages' pronominal systems.

Anyways, I'm sure Ray can come and correct all my errors here. :)

> [snip]
> > > 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.
> >
> > Not really.  If all languages simplified, that would beg the question:  "How
> > complicated would the original ancestor language have to be?"  After at
> > least 100k years of language, the ancestor would have to be virtually
> > infinitely complex to allow the kinds of complexity that we see in today's
> > languages.
>
> No, I didn't say that all languages simplified! :-) As you said, that
> wouldn't make any sense at all, since ancestor languages would have to be
> unimaginably complex.
Oh, I'm sorry.  I just totally misread you there.  I don't know what I was thinking.
Yeah, you're probably right there. (see below)

> However, from my limited observations,
> simplification often happens during the period where the language gains
> widespread acceptance. And I mean, *widespread*... as in koine Greek,
> English, etc.. I can see why this happens -- when a language becomes
> somewhat a lingua franca, people learning the language may not necessarily
> be interested in its intricate details -- they just want to know enough to
> communicate. Hence, there's a tendency to simplify.
No, I don't think it has anything really to do with *conscious* decisions not
to learn it. Rather, I think it has to do with people not understanding subtle
complexities like, for example, German's final devoicing, or the current
use of the present subjunctive in English.   When you get a lot of people from
extremely divergent linguistic backgrounds, the amount that they'll have in
common will approach the level of linguistic universals in direct proportion to
that diversity.   So, perhaps the language will begin to shed those features like
the English present subjunctive which the great mass of the newer speakers
do not internalize, *if* those new speakers are accepted as members of the
earlier speech community.  If there are high barriers to entry into that society,
there may be no trace of the new speakers' entry linguistically.  To put a face
on this, you could say that the extremely low level of Native American loan
words and grammatical features into American English is due to (a) their being
obliterated by government fiat*, and (b) by intense racial prejudice against those
who did survive. I speculate that something similar may have happened against the
Celts by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invading Britain some 15 centuries ago.
(minus the 'government fiat' bit; it was probably just an orgy of violence ;(  )
This would explain why the number of Celtic loan words in English is so vanishingly
small, indeed, smaller than the number of Native American loanwords in current
American English.   The contrary example is the conquests by Alexander.  He had
an active policy of integrating all the natives with the Macedonians and Greeks,
so as to make firm his hold on his conquests, because, so he probably
reasoned, blood is thicker than water.  Despite the fact that the Diadokhoi
(successor generals) did not carry on with his integrations, and indeed,
implemented racist policies against the native populations, they never went
so far as to completely eliminate them.  Indeed, the Rosetta stone is evidence
that the Ptolemies were increasingly reliant on the native elites, in that case,
the Egyptian priesthood, who would learn their own language for religious
purposes, and Greek for dealing with the government.

(* To be fair, the majority were killed by disease, however, before they ever
saw the "White Men")

> What I meant to say was, I know that sometimes languages do gain
> complexity, but I haven't quite figured out why it would.
Well, complexity in what?  That's the central question.  There are no
languages that are several orders of magnitude more complex than
other languages.  The figure that I saw on sci.lang some time ago was
that the most complex language is only about 1.4 times more complex
than the simplest language (I don't know how that figure was arrived at,
however).    So, if most languages are pretty close in complexity to all
other languages, that leads us to think that it is not so much complexity
of a language as a whole, but complexity of various subunits of that
language that may be compared with reasonable accuracy.  So, for
example, a language's morphology may become more complex through
the process known as grammaticalization (on which you can find many
books; search in Barnesandnoble.com for "grammaticalization").  Contrarily,
may also lose morphological complexity, exchanging this for syntactic complexity.
English, for example, used to be an SOV language, generally speaking, but it
could also have most any other wordorder, since its morphology was carrying
the grammatical load.  Today, English morphology is relatively simple, but its
syntax is incredibly complex. Two simple examples:

(a) Do-support:   interrogatives require inversion of the auxilliary, and if
there is none, one must be provided ('do').
    'I have gone to the store'
    --> 'Have I gone to the store?'; BUT
    'I went to the store'
    --> 'Did I go to the store?'

(b) Verbal particles:  Otherwise identical-looking verbs are shown to be
different by the behavior of verbal particles like "up", "down", etc.
    'Jack and Jill ran up the hill'
    'Jack and Jill ran up the bill'
   *'Jack and Jill ran the hill up'
    'Jack and Jill ran the bill up'
(In this case, 'up the hill' is a constituent, a PP, while 'up the bill' is not)

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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