Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 April 2

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April 2

Why are grammars of ancient languages more complex than those of modern languages

Latin has a more complex grammar than modern Latino languages, Sanskrit a more complex grammar than Hindi, and the Wikipedia articles show that the same holds true for Ancient Chinese, Ancient Greek, and possibly Arabic. Why are languages getting simpler. Naively I assume that languages must have evolved along with humans and would have spent a lot of time getting more complex. Is this right? If so why and when did the process start reversing? -- Q Chris (talk) 09:55, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

2 potential reasons: Many modern languages are creoles that have become mainstream (French is latin spoken by a Celt people with a strong Germanic influence. English is a Germanic language mixed up with loads of French/Norman vocabulary), and creole grammars tends to be far simpler. They would become more complex over time, given 2 or 3 millenia. The second reason which I find less compelling is that modern languages are not spoken by a small tribe, but by a very large population. So you don't just interact with people who are related to you in this language. This means you have to be able to understand and assimilate different accents etc. and some linguists think that a complexe Grammar makes this more difficult, so the language's grammar gets dumbed down to ease the communication. My reference for this is only the book "The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention" by Guy Deutscher--Lgriot (talk) 10:08, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Is this really true, though? Ancient languages seem a lot more foreign because they are different from modern languages, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were more complicated. Why is Latin complicated? Because of the declensions and conjugations? The syntax? The vocabulary? But all that would have been natural for the people who spoke it, not unusually complicated. (Also, I can't speak to the other languages, but at least for Latin, what we learn today is a somewhat artificial literary language, different from what people actually spoke.) What about French? If you transplanted someone from classical Rome to modern France, would they find French easy to learn? It's not simpler, it's just different. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:43, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Exactly. Modern Indo-European languages are just different from older ones. Latin used endings to clarify the meaning, with the word order being essentially quite free (especially in poetry), but modern languages rely more upon word order, which is just as complex a device as endings. A roman in modern London would be completely misunderstood if he translated 'te amat puella' as 'you loves girl, [sic]' when it actually means 'the girl loves you.' Plus, we have things that Latin did not have. We have definite and indefinite articles, which must be used, whereas although Latin did have these words, using them multiple times in a sentence would have been excessive to Roman ears. So, where and when do I use them, a Roman might ask himself. What about the use of modal verbs in modern languages? Compound tenses? "Ego habeo paratus cena" would be gibberish to a Roman (should be 'cenam paravi'), but "J'ai préparé le dîner" would be fine in French, as would "I have prepared the dinner" in English. We have everything Latin had. We just do it a different way. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:11, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

See also Deflexion (linguistics). Deor (talk) 11:22, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

I was reading once about two conflicting assumptions about language evolution: the first is that languages get "simpler" over time (the premise of the OP's question), and the second is that the earliest stage of language (the language of the Neanderthals if they had one, or the Cro-Magnons, or whoever) must have been an extremely "simple" form of language. The proponents of neither of these hypotheses ever bother to define what precisely they mean by "simple", and in order to believe them both, you have to believe that language evolution looks something like a bell curve: it started out very "simple", evolved to become more "complex", peaking out at about the time of Proto-Indo-European (or any other proto-language you care to mention), and then become increasingly "simple" ever since. As it happens, though, neither of these hypotheses has any evidence to support it. As others have said above, as languages evolve, they become simpler in some ways (e.g. losing inflection) but become more complex in other ways (e.g. requiring strict word order, acquiring modal verbs, acquiring politeness forms, and so on), not only in morphology and syntax but also in phonology. For example, a language may "simplify" a consonant cluster by reducing it to a single sound, but that single sound may be very difficult to pronounce, as happened in Czech, where the cluster /rj/ "simplified" by becoming the infamous Czech alveolar fricative trill ř. So languages don't really become simpler over time, they just shift their complexities from one area to another. Angr (talk) 12:17, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

The OP is not assuming that the modern languages are simpler, only that their grammar is. Complexity may very well be much higher in the vocabulary, morphology, semantics etc. --Lgriot (talk) 13:53, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, it stands to reason that vocabulary will be much richer in more modern languages, as we have more things to talk about, plus we can borrow from other languages now that we have more access to more of them. A Roman (who also speaks Greek) may be forgiven for thinking that a 'mobile phone' meant the sound coming from a ventriloquist's dummy. As for grammar, it is just as complex, but done in a different way - less endings, yet different ways to express them, including the implentation of new tenses which were not present before (present perfect vs. preterite, for example), or compulsory use of pronouns (in most, but by no means all, modern IE languages). KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:17, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

The viewpoint of Jehovah's Witnesses is at http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200002680?q=complex+languages&p=par.

—Wavelength (talk) 15:04, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

But why has there been a trend in most (all?) Romance languages to lose inflection and fix the word order? Has a similar change occurred in other Indo-European languages? Aa77zz (talk) 16:21, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

All of the Germanic languages (with the exception of Icelandic) lost their endings and moved to relying on word order. Icelandic has kept its endings, but also has a strict word order. The Slavic languages have also retained their endings, and have strict rules on word order. Same with Farsi. Modern Greek has also retained its endings, but word order is free-ish. With verbs, the endings are retained in most languages. It's not really as common as you may think. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:53, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Farsi has no declension. Structurally it's much closer to English than to Slavic or Icelandic.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 06:04, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, my post was not clear. I was talking about endings in general - both for verbs and nouns. Some languages have retained verbal endings, I should have said. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 07:54, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

It has been pointed out by some linguists that your point about Romance languages may not be true. French is an excellent example of this. Consider the sentence "Moi, j'pense", for example. Ordinary personal pronouns are already quite far in the process of becoming verb prefixes indicating person, genus and number (something currently only rudimentarily indicated by verb endings in French); at the same time, emphatic personal pronouns are slowly taking over the role of ordinary personal pronouns. This process is of course not reflected in standard French orthography, which is very conservative. To see what's going on, you must ignore the spelling.

However, there seems to be a general global trend recently that new types of inflections are produced more slowly than old ones disappear. I believe someone once proposed that this could be an effect of writing. In fact, looking at the example of French this does look plausible to me. Hans Adler 18:51, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Slight correction to KageTora: Icelandic is not the only Germanic language to retain "endings". Of course, English has a few, almost every other Germanic language has more than English (the North Germanic languages other than Icelandic or Faroese only slightly so), and modern German still retains quite a few.

As for the original question, grammar is not just a matter of endings, or inflection. It also includes other elements of morphology and syntax (as well as phonology and even semantics depending on the definition). As others have pointed out, many modern European languages replace the complex morphology of ancient European languages with complex syntax. Total grammatical complexity probably hasn't changed. Looking outside of Europe, even Old Chinese, a language more ancient than Latin, lacked inflection for case, gender, number, or person, just like its modern descendants, the Chinese languages. So there has been little or no change over time in grammatical complexity in China. In fact, to the extent that there has been change, there has been a change toward greater morphological complexity from the extremely isolating Middle Chinese to modern descendants such as Mandarin Chinese, in which sememes may no longer be able to stand alone as their parent forms did in Middle Chinese. In many cases, they must be combined to form compounds in Mandarin Chinese. Apparently, Egyptian also went through a process of increasing morphological complexity from the mildly synthetic Old Egyptian to the polysynthetic Coptic. In the case of Mandarin, one could posit that the language is evolving from the radically isolating stage of Middle Chinese through the very mildly synthetic Mandarin to a possible future agglutinating language in which the various particles and compounding sememes of Mandarin become agglutinating morphemes. Marco polo (talk) 19:07, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Guy Deutscher in The Unfolding of Language formulates the thesis that language evolution is mostly guided by erosion (simplification of words) and accumulation (when common prefix and postfix prepositions fuse into the stem word). The overall tendency to simplification is only perceived. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:59, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Stack Exchange Network has a related discussion at http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/315/why-did-early-indo-european-languages-seem-to-be-morphologically-complex.

—Wavelength (talk) 23:50, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

All these similar discussions about language "simplification" or the decline of the modern languages in comparison with the ancient ones always remind me of August Schleicher and his naturalistic theory of language development.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 06:04, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

For Aa77zz: It is generally believed that some phonetic developments in Vulgar Latin had led to the confusion of morphological endings, and grammatical relation between words became to be expressed with syntax rather than with morphology. The same is true for English where Old English endings simply became phonetically indistinguishable.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 06:17, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

• Language complexity increases through the process of grammaticalization. Pre-Indo-European did not have a feminine gender, as evidenced by Hittite; it developed by analogy. The evidence of Germanic and Hittite show the original language had a simpler verb system than found in Greek or Latin and a simpler case system. The oblique -ibus case endings developed through grammaticalization of the particle which became the word "by" in English. Latin future and past forms in -b- developed through the fusion of various forms of "to be" with verb roots. The complex verb systems including augment of Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Aryan developed by innovation when those four branches formed a common dialect continuum. This is all discussed in Gamkrelidze and Ivanov. The complex tri-consonantal root system of Semitic developed from the augmentation of an original bi-consonantal system in Afroasiatic. The -ben case ending of Hungarian was a grammaticalization of a root noun which was a separate word for abdomen in Finno-Ugric. If there weren't as much accretion as erosion, languages would dwindle down to a lone schwa, and eventually silence. μηδείς (talk) 17:52, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Etymology of "Miacoidea"

I'm interested in etymology of the word "Miacoidea". 193.189.166.94 (talk) 12:14, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, the -oidea part is very common in taxonomy; like the common suffix -oid, it comes from a Greek suffix related to εἶδος (eidos, "form, likeness"). The miac- part comes from Miacis, but I don't know the origin of that word. I can't find any Latin or Ancient Greek word that looks like that. The infobox on that page says the genus was first described by Edward Drinker Cope in 1872; maybe if you track down the original publication he says how he came up with the word. Angr (talk) 12:29, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

This page claims it come from a Greek word for "mother animal", but I can't find any word in Liddell and Scott that looks like that and has that meaning. Angr (talk) 12:36, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Here is Cope's 1872 announcement of the genus in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (top of p. 470). He doesn't say what the source of the name is. Deor (talk) 13:35, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

μαῖα with meaning of mother. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 01:48, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Cope's description focuses on the difference in dental features between this species and Stypolophus. ("The structure of that tooth is approximately that of Stypolophus, i.e., with three trihedral cusps in front and a heel behind, but the cusps are of equal height, and their point of union is not raised above the surface of the heel.") Perhaps the name is a combination of μείων, "lesser", and ἀκίς, "point", referring to the lesser height, either of the cusps themselves or of their point of union in relation to Stypolophus? Iblardi (talk) 09:11, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

That strikes me as more likely than μαῖα "mother". Angr (talk) 09:27, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Greek ei would regularly become i in Latinized spelling, as in Miohippus, Miocene. The formation without o would be somewhat analogous to that of mi-urus (mei-ouros) in Microtus miurus. (Osgood, 1901, p. 64, n. 2: "Miurus=curtailed.") Iblardi (talk) 16:17, 3 April 2013 (UTC)