I think one of the issues is that those of us who speak analytical languages like English as our first language fail realize how complicated it can actually be. The question as I see it isn't "which is more complicated", but "which type of complication are you more familiar with". Edit: spelling
Oh yes. I am a native Polish speaker (a highly flexional language) and, when speaking English, I often find it very difficult to express complex thought with putting extra importance on some words when I cannot rely on inflection and need to stick to a strictly defined word order.
Really nice, thoughtful video. I am learning Polish (my family's ancestral tongue) and didn't realize until I started the course how rigid word order and inflection actually are in modern English and how that sort of replaces a lot of the required declension in various Slavic and other languages. Swapping out one complication for another, I suppose.
Yeah, when he said the train was coming, I was waiting for a loud noise that would've made it impossible for him to be heard but it was barely picked up by the mic. I think if he'd continued speaking he would've been heard over the train noise and only a few people would've noticed the background noise at all.
Hey Simon. I'm a Polish native speaker. The switch from inflectional morphology to word order in modern English makes total sense. You gave the example "The dog eats the cat" is different from "the cat eats the dog". When I heard that I laughed, because in Polish there is a famous short poem: Bociana dziobał szpak. A potem była zmiana i szpak dziobał bociana. Potem były jeszcze trzy zmiany. Ile razy szpak był dziobany? Which translated by google: The stork was pecked by a starling. And then there was a change and the starling was pecking at the stork. Then there were three more shifts. How many times has the starling been picked? The answer to the last question ZERO of course. However, the pun in the original Polish version is that the word order in lines 1 and 3 are changed, which may confuse a child maybe. But because the case/inflection/conjugation did not change, the situation remains the same. It was always the starling pecking at the stork, never the other way around. The power of case/inflection/conjugation. I love cases. Learn Polish! :)
@@xibokamania, No, the Google translation is correct. Notice that the first sentence has been translated in passive voice whereas in the original Polish is in active voice.
The consonant cluster I have always enjoyed is in the Russian: предткновение - pryedtknovenia (stumbling). So glad to have found a place to share this!
@@annemcleod8505 if you take them out of context they frequently look completely unpronounceable. And of cpirse they get conflated sometimes into one letter - like the Russian combination shtsh, as in Krushtshov. One letter in Russian, many in Latin script.
Unlike any other personality on CZcams at the moment, Simon Roper delivers complex musings on linguistic topics in an informed, intelligent, yet powerfully relaxing nature. Unconfined by the usual (and grotesquely obnoxious) vlogging structures that are seen so very often these days, Simon is able to reach directly through the screen and touch your heart with his infectious passion for language. Simple actions such as pausing to take a sip of tea as a train passes, or showing little clips of his serene backyard, allow the viewer to relax completely and dive deeper than ever before into thinking about the intensely human art of language.
No one other than Simon Roper can bring a somewhat abstract concept such as spoken languages to life, making them more tangible and understandable to someone who is not a scholar, but is keenly interested (such as myself).
I like to think about how Simon considers his videos and his style. I don't think he is trying to do anything other than effectively convey the information, but the result from our perspective feels so much more intentional.. it's interesting to think about..
It's also important to remember that while a language may get less complicated in certain areas, it generally compensates for that loss in other areas. English, for example, has developed much stricter word order and a range of auxiliary particles which can be as 'complicated' as extensive verbal conjugation in, say, Spanish or Finnish (Edit: I see you just mentioned that in the vid. I'm validated!). Inflexion tends to be the most visible marker of 'complexity', though that's a subjective term, in languages, particularly from an Indo-European language speaker's perspective. I hear Mandarin being labelled as a language with 'no grammar', or in milder terms, 'simple grammar', merely because its words don't inflect. That's obviously far from the case; its abundance of particles, measure words, and the like contributes just as much to its complexity as any agglutinative language with a thousand suffixes.
Mandarin, and all the Chinese languages, follow a strict SVO grammar. Not sure where you're getting this nonsense about 'no grammar' but that's not the case. Its grammar is similar to English in a lot of ways.
@@gary_rumain_you_peons when they mentioned that mandarin had 'no grammar' they were saying thats what a lot of people online believe about mandarin, they weren't giving their own opinion about it they even clarified it at the end: "That's obviously far from the case; its abundance of particles, measure words, and the like contributes just as much to its complexity as any agglutinative language with a thousand suffixes." Show less
@@1DMapler18 Marcas de Barun said "I hear". He was the one who also said "That's obviously far from the case; its abundance of particles, measure words, and the like". Chinese does NOT have an abundance of particles. Not sure what he means by "measure words" but these might be Chinese classifiers. These are the same as collective nouns in English but Chinese makes heavier use of them with every noun. Not really a big deal, just a part of their complex grammar. Chinese has no gender (they use the same word for he/she/it but they write it slightly differently to denote he or she) and has no real tense. They do use a particle to denote that something had already happened but it's only one character and nothing like what you'll find for tenses in PIE languages.
Are you familiar with the theory that, over long periods of time, phonetic decay causes languages to run in cycles from agglutinative to inflexional to isolating and back to agglutinative?
It depends on what you mean by 'phonetic decay'. Is this the proposition that gradual loss of information at the end of words causes languages to re-innovate strategies to convey information? Generally sounds in words to not 'decay' but do change over time, however their change is not often so one-directional that the entire grammatical system needs to be re-analysed. Lithuanian, for example, has had extensive sound changes from Proto-Indo-European, but retains a relatively similar grammatical structure because these changes haven't prompted grammatical reanalysis, and Lithuanian hasn't changed its grammar much for other reasons (as also happens in languages). This idea would also not work for, say, African languages that put extensive morphology on prefixes rather than suffixes. This idea also becomes problematic when we consider Egyptian, a language we have a phonologic history for lasting thousands of years. Whilst its vowels experienced fairly significant change over the roughly 4000 years we have attested, its consonants remained fairly stable, and whilst it did lose some vowel quality on the end of words, these seem not to have affected the grammar at all as these terminal vowels were not grammatically relevant. Most of Egyptian grammar changes appear focused on changes in use of Egyptian's grammatical particles, and Egyptian if anything shifted from more inflectional to more aggluntinating.
I'm a Polish linguist specialising in English. If I recall correctly, the idea is that the more speakers a language has over a large area, the more likely it is to become analytical rather than predominantly inflectional or inflectional-agglutinative. Thank you for mentioning Polish: it has also become "simpler" as time went by. Old(er) Polish used to have long vowels, a Slavic yer system with empty vowel slots or reduced vowels (I've never been able to understand it fully, tbh), the aorist mood and dual number, with only a few words showing traces of it currently. It also had a handful of letters which are not used at all in Polish Slavic-derived words today, like , and . Of course it isn't true that inflection makes the word order of a language "free" in any real sense. In Polish it's SVO and if you show other combinations to Polish-speaking respondents, they will say they understand them but would never use them because e.g. OSV would sound ridiculous or like a parody of Yoda-speech.
One counter-example to "language is getting simpler" is how English negatives now require the word "do". In the old days "I know not" would have been perfectly grammatical
You can still use the old style negative and be well understood, and in common speech we still keep it in pop lyrics and poems. And of course there are grandfathered basic phrases like cannot.
This reminds me of a study which looked at how people process information as they read. Apparently Chinese characters encode more information on average than Latin characters in English text, but when a person reads a text in Chinese they process fewer characters at once. These facts balance perfectly, so that whatever language you read, the amount of information you process per second is the same. So perhaps if a spoken language really did get simpler we would simply speak more quickly to compensate, since brain power is the real limiting factor in communication?
There have also been several experiments that compare the rate of syllables per second in languages (which can vary quite a bit) with the actual transferred-information per second in languages (which seems to be pretty constant). The hypothesis is that in slower-spoken languages each individual syllable contains a bit more information and vice versa. I haven't looked into these studies to see exactly how much evidence they have for this, however. Also, since we read whole words at once rather than analyzing the individual letters, you could interpret the Chinese-English study as both Chinese and English reading roughly the same amount of words per second, it's just that English words are physically wider on the page so our eyes move more. Same conclusion worded slightly differently.
Chinese characters do not "encode more information". There are 6 types of Chinese characters - from simple pictograms to ideograms. Try reading Wieger's book Chinese Characters to get the details on this. Modern Chinese uses a lot more characters than Classical Chinese. The reason why has to do with sound shrinkage (Mardarin is probably the best example of this since it has lost the most sounds). So what would have been said with one word/character in Classical Chinese is now said with two words / characters in Modern Chinese - with both of the words / characters used taken from words in Classical Chinese with the same meaning. Basically, Chinese is simple and can be short but throw in classifiers and more more complex ideas which uses more words / characters and it doesn't remain short and simple. As for general language vocabulary, I like to compare product instructions when they are given in various languages. Invariably, English is one of the shorter ones and inflected languages are usually the longer ones. Chinese is a mixed length one. Depending on what the instructions say, it could be shorter than English or it could be longer if there is a lot of technical jargon.
"apparently Chinese characters encode more information on average than Latin characters in English text" Lol. That's an understatement. I particularly like the "on average" part. Exactly when do they not?
@@gary_rumain_you_peons "Chinese characters do not 'encode more information'." I think you must of misunderstood, especially since your reply didn't address the core issue at all. We are comparing Chinese and English (modern in both cases, no doubt, but that really doesn't make a difference). We are counting the number of characters, not the physical size of the text. Since there are more Chinese characters to disambiguate between, they are more complicated on average, and thus are usually drawn larger for visibility. When they aren't very much bigger, as they often aren't on computers, it can be hard to see all their details. We are also not counting the number of strokes, radicals, words, syllables, or morphemes, nor the temporal length of time it takes to say thing. These are all very different. English has 26 letters. ASCII has less than 100, and other characters are very rare in English, except maybe a few altered letters like and which are only rare. Chinese regularly uses thousands of characters. Any reasonable mathematical definition of information content* would assign more information to a single Chinese character than to a single English letter. That is why, no matter whether you translate English to Chinese or Chinese to English, the Chinese almost always has fewer characters than the English. Each Chinese character usually represents a one-syllable morpheme "word", so it's more comparable to information content of a single English morpheme than of a single English letter. *"Information Entropy", or "Shannon Entropy" would probably be what you want. (I actually kind of got that from XKCD: what-if.xkcd.com/34/ , though I also encountered the concept on Wikipedia while trying to understand entropy in physics, though that was probably after the first time I read the XKCD.) However, just the number of possibilities a character could be is a crude overestimate of the information content.
The Old English example for "the dog ate the cat/the cat ate the dog" is interesting because Late Old English started to lose noun inflections, but Early Old English had them, so you could change the word order completely and still understand who ate who. What really separates Old English from Middle English isn't so much the Norman French influences, but the loss of noun cases and the erosion of grammatical gender.
Funnily enough, there is a Polish nursery rhyme titled "Był sobie król" (eng. there was once a king) that my grandmother used to sing to me when I was little, that ends on an enumeration which courtier was eaten by what animal told in an object-verb-subject order, with the meaning made clear by inflections.
I have some suspicions myself: -Rate of mutation might increase as the number of speakers increases -Language stability is tied to social stability, and social mobility increases the rate of mutation -Non-native speakers strain the grammar of the language, and assimilating foreigners increases incentive for the language to change to more easily integrate them(and in general language contact promotes compromise between languages, which often takes the form of cancelling out their differences) This might have the effect that as the population grows, and especially if the context of the population is chaotic, that it will develop an analytic grammar as a "path of least resistance". You can completely dismiss this idea, but I get the impression that smaller populations can better afford having more convoluted grammar because of having a more cohesive community, while other languages may have to communicate information between wholly unrelated people across large distances. Different registers for social statuses and regional identities etc. will also develop and weigh down the common language, which demands compromise, which is usually going to be interpreted as simplification. I get this impression from the fact that ancient languages seem substantially more grammatically complicated than their descendants all around, and it seeming oddly coincidental for the two dominant languages Chinese and English to have so many key similarities.
I also want to add that there clearly are simpler languages vs more complex ones. Pidgins really have very little to say in their defense, and the common similarity of pidgins reveals that there is clearly an "intuitive human" grammar that languages can be closer or farther from. Word order seems more consistently tied to this than "amount of inflection", but I would say that inflection and syllabic structure do play a part(consonant clusters are simply objectively harder to pronounce than consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel structures).
@@Supahdenning tell me that "shatasharengakathas" is easier to pronounce than "strengths" (which most English speakers pronounce /ʃtʃɹeŋkθs/ since "tr" tends to be "tʃɹ" and that sound palatalizes the initial s). It completely depends on what you're used to. There may be something to your point that word order and auxiliary/phrasal verbs are easier to remember than expansive conjugations, but your second point about "objectively easier" pronunciation is false
@@evan-moore22 >tell me that "shatasharengakathas" is easier to pronounce than "strengths" Yes, it is? At worst it's confusing to read, but this is trivial to pronounce in practice. It's not even a tongue twister or anything.
@@evan-moore22 It's very easy to pronounce the first word but it's too long which makes it easier to stumble, you picked a long word to compare to a short one so your comparison is very bad. I think you live in an Anglo speaking bubble because Strenghts is a hard word to pronounce for many people since in many languages you don't even compress syllables that much, it is however very common to see consonant vowel. I am French and I can tell you it would take years to get it right for a Frenchman. For an Italian it would be almost impossible to say it correctly since they always use vowel with their consonants (which explain their funny English accent since they can't help adding a vowel after a consonant.
I've seen a couple of CZcams language channels argue that immigration / cultural exchange reduces cases and inflection etc. It seems to me that children and adults have different ideas of what is difficult to learn (I.e. adults can deal with putting the words in a different order than what's common in their native language, but new cases is very difficult). So when adults need to learn a foreign language (in order to trade, say) their languages will become more "adult-friendly" by reducing the number of cases and inflections so that the adults can talk to each other. Whereas isolated languages can retain them, because in that situation everybody who learns the language, does so a as children, and children understand different cases but may have a harder time with word order.
We see this in the case of Latin. Cicero's speeches were delivered 2000 years ago to much less educated native speakers, to persuade them to condemn or acquit a client, yet they were enormously complex in their syntax, as viewed on the page by a modern schoolboy. Whereas Pope Benedict XVI had an audience of second or third language users, so despite having been a university professor his Latin was simple and direct.
The linguist John McWhorter has a number of books on this thesis. He's most directly focused on creoles and how they form, but he argues that a much less severe form of the same thing occurs when large numbers of adult second-language speakers raise new first language speakers, especially in a pre-modern environment. It's fairly persuasive, at least to me, and he's able to line up large shifts in language evolution with geopolitical/historical correlates such as the shift to Middle Persian following the rise of the Achaemenid Empire, etc. In his case, he argues that languages, left to their own devices, actually tend to become more ingrown and byzantine, because smaller local speech communities are able to diverge due to language change and proceed to hyperadapt to tinier and tinier nuances of their language. Obviously, there are still neurological and phonotactic limits to where that process can go, but within those, there's always room for complex morphologies or tongue-twisting phonemes.
If you look at Sweden, most Swedes are speaking modern Swedish with a grammar that is just a bit more complicated than the English. Though in a very sparsely populated part of northwestern Dalarna a few thousand people are speaking Älvdalian, which is considered an own language grammatically similar to Old Swedish like it was 6-700 years ago. Also, the [w] sound is extinct in most of Sweden but also still exists in some very sparsely populated parts of the country. On the other hand, in the major cities, young ethnic Swedes are speaking Swedish with a grammar and accent similar to that of immigrants. So yes, I think it's obvious.
@@francisdec1615 Immigrants (second language learners) are not the only force towards simplification. Local dialects of English often simplify things like verb conjugation: e.g. the principal parts of "to go" are "I go, I went, I have gone" in standard English, but colloquial speech may have "I have went" or "I gone," or erase distinctions of person and number such as "I go, he goes, they go." These are creeping into paper and especially on-line writing and also textspeak. This is greatly reinforced by the linguists' dogma that native speakers are never wrong, which seems to have extended into "children are never wrong," so the forms and structures of old-fashioned written English are no longer taught. Another external force is the mass media, which tend to favour American Vernacular English: pop music familiarises us with forms such as "Ima do (this or that)" meaning "I'm going to or will do ..." While I am typing I am inevitably made aware that Microsoft and Google constantly try to enforce the spelling changes that Noah Webster invented in the 19th century to separate US from British English. A countervailing influence is the ubiquity of keyboards. Back in the days of dictation, shorthand and typists, secretaries usually stripped out features like subjunctives and gerunds, which we are free to use now.
I think the belief in language-simplification is partially due to an over-reliance on Indo-European for historical language examples, in combination with a sort of "regression to the mean" by PIE: from what I've read on PIE, it was a pretty unusual language both in grammar and especially in phonology (at least compared to languages we know about). It would make sense, then, that through random evolution the daughters would all tend to become more "average," and this general trend happening independently in the different branches of IE is misinterpreted as the languages getting 'simpler.' I also think the spread of global languages killing off a lot of linguistic diversity and affecting smaller languages could also be at play - since there's less linguistic diversity and languages have a lot more contact with one another, it's a lot less likely for a certain language to go down it's own really screwball path - in essence, the standard deviation has decreased. So, when looking back at historical languages, we misinterpret this diversity as languages having been 'more complicated.' Just an anecdotal (possibly wrong) example of this: Central Yup'ik is technically a very polysynthetic language, but I've heard that speakers tend to prefer more analytic grammatical phrasing (I don't actually know any speakers of this language so I can't confirm this) and that this trend has only really been seen in the last century. The reason given is that almost all Yupik speakers are are raised bilingual in English, the dominant language of literally everything, so even without borrowing any words or phases English indirectly changes the other language to be more like it. Now, I could easily see someone looking back at polysynthetic Yupik and thinking "oh, it got simpler" when i reality it just more familiar.
Most pidgin languages tend to be grammatically simpler than the parent languages. If you increase contact between languages (as we've done over the past centuries), the number of pidgin languages is likely to increase, possibly leading to a similar effect as what you describe.
I'm Lakota and from what I know of my language and the languages from my in-laws' tribes words are added to update the language such as ice cream but fundamentally the language does not change. You have to know and speak with people who are from the culture and know the language. You can't learn this in a book or from a tape. There is a lot of cultural impact that is within the language.
@@gnostic268 thank you for speaking on this topic! I love falling down these linguistic rabbit holes on CZcams, but I rarely hear anyone mention First Nation languages. You have such a rich history that is generally ignored by most content producers I am exposed to.
You forget that the people setting the standard for English used to judge the language by its ability to be like Latin. Latin was considered the perfect language.
A few comments on languages that I know a bit about: Classical Latin poetry messed about freely with word order to suit the metre because inflection kept the syntax clear. Some inflectional endings in French are preserved in writing but usually lost in the spoken language. Modern German has considerably more inflection than modern English but also fairly rigid word order. English has a vestigial instance of the "verb comes second" standard in German in expressions such as "Never have I heard ..." My Grandmother, born in 1895, would say such as "five-and-twenty to ten" for a time of day, preserving a structure once usual in English and still in German, but I don't thnk she used that word order in any other context.
As a native Russian speaker. We have six cases and it looks scary to a non Slavic speaker. On the other hand: English words bad, bat, bed, bet sound exactly the same to me. So I think there are no simple or complicated languages. They are each complicated in different ways.
I am a native Portuguese speaker and sometimes I hear about the supposed complexity of Portuguese and others romance languages verbal conjugation but words in Portuguese are so easy to pronounce and so distinct from one another that I somewhat think our language is easy to learn but like all languages have things that are tricker to some
@@jimmg4585 I really like the music genre bossa nova and I really would like to sing along to some of the great songs within that genre, but the pronunciation of Portuguese is so complex I find it difficult to rap my head around.
An example of English being more complex than we native speakers may realize is to compare a simple statement in German with possible translations in English. Although German has a very complicated grammar (3 genders; 4 cases; subjunctive 1 and 2; prepositions that demand accusative, dative, accusative or dative, or genitive; verbs that demand accusative, dative or genitive; 8 ways to construct plural; and so on and on), it can be surprisingly simple in other ways. If we take the simple sentence "Es hat diese Woche viel geregnet" (the simple preterite form is virtually never used in daily conversational German and has the same meaning) and translate it into English, we get the following, each with a subtle difference in meaning readily understood by the native speaker: "It rained a lot this week." "It was raining a lot this week." "It has rained a lot this week." "It has been raining a lot this week." Try to explain the nuances to a non-native speaker.
There are 2 reasons why Germans shouldn't worry about their English: 1. I estimate that significantly less than 5% of native speakers nowadays could correctly describe the differences between these four sentences. 2. Your English is significantly better than their German. I only understand train station ;)
I cant , and they all seem to have the same meaning to me. Can you please explain the nuances to me, an ill informed native speaker. To me, they could all be seen as being a bit vague, about the rain, that has occurred in the last week. If I wanted to be more precise I would mention dates or times. For example, It rained lot this week, but its been dry since Thursday.
@@TheEggmaniac That's just it - I can't explain the differences completely either other than to say that the use of present perfect and pp progressiove imply it is either still raining or might rain again this. The preterite and preterite progressive say that it is no longer raining.
@@rojbalc77 I dont think German people in general should have to worry about their English either. All the German people Ive met, are amazingly fluent in English. I feel quite envious of their great understanding a language that is foreign to them, and Im always impressed by this. However I would like you to 'describe the differences between these four sentences.' As I said in my reply to michaelswisher8630, I cant see any real differences in the meaning of the four sentences. Perhaps Im missing something. Im really curious.
9:40 In Norwegian, even though we've lost the cases (except for some remnants of the dative and the accusative in a few dialects), we can say "Katten spiser hunden" (the cat eats the dog) and "Hunden spiser katten", and have "katten" be the subject either way, just by changing the stress and pitch. We do this a lot, but usually when wanting to emphasize the object.
Wouldn't you need a comma between the "dog" and "eats", in the second case, when it is written! Could it not then be understood the same in English: "The dog, eats the cat!" Isn't it like: "Eat grandma!" VS "Eat, grandma!" Edit: Or more like: "Grandma eats" and "Eats, grandma"
@@aa-zz6328 : There is in CZcams a Video in english language about german Humor.In this Video you can see a sign in german language: Dieses Areal wird video überwacht um Verbrechen durch die Polizei zu verhindern! Does it mean ( excuse my bad english): a) This area is observed by cameras, that police can prevent crime? Or b) This area is observed by cameras, to prevent crime done by the police? The forgotten Komma (,) changes the sense of noted sign totally. A sidenote: Der Schild- the shield. Das Schild- the sign.
@@brittakriep2938 punctuation is so important, when one doesn't know which syllables or words are stressed, and the time duration (plus many other things, of course)!
I found it really fascinating the first time I discovered that there are languages that have become more inflective over time, given that I am a native English speaker and that the Indo-European languages have generally moved in the opposite direction. Up to then I mostly still felt that becoming less inflected is the natural evolution of language over time. Though that never sat right since it followed that there should never have been any inflected languages in the first place if analytic languages were, in fact, simpler/easier. The specific example of a language that became more inflected that I came across was Finnish, which gained of a number of noun cases in the process of its evolution from Proto-Uralic. I also seem to recall coming across a language that is moving from being analytic (like English) to synthetic, though I don't recall which language or any specifics beyond that it was evolving in that way.
@@marcasdebarun6879 This may be an imposed rather than a 'natural' development. In other words, I think it may be the result of a deliberate attempt to create gender-free constructions for ideological reasons rather than a gradual linguistic evolution. (This is quite understandable in the current cultural climate and I have no wish to create a divisive debate here over the 'rights' and 'wrongs' of such an attempt - but it does raise another interesting point in the development of languages in general: sometimes specific and deliberate changes can be established, either by fiat or by general consensus, for political, religious or cultural purposes. Finding examples of such 'artificial' manipulation in various languages throughout recorded history might make an interesting topic for research. )
I think it's important to consider the effect of written language. It's easy for a language to become analytic, but to go back to agglutinative or fusional, you need to have words becoming attached as endings, and I think that's tougher if everybody knows that something is a different word. There could be some counterexamples such as the clitics in romance languages.
Technically speaking, you only need two different symbols to express any meaning, akin to the binary representation of numbers. The only issue with this approach is that your utterances would need to be enormously long most of the time.
This makes me think of traditional Hawaiian languages where there are relatively few syllables so you end up with longer words and lots of repetition and homonyms
@Aspiration Cul-De-Sac Not necessarily hard to remember; if you know Morse code, it wouldn't be hard to tell me the weather forecast using just two phonemes (a long vowel and a short vowel). Learning the 256 8-bit symbols used to write binary text isn't a lot harder. I'm pretty sure it's a lot easier to learn to "speak binary" than it is to learn any natural language. However, here is that amazing fact that among all the natural languages in the world, the amount of information they convey in a given time is about constant, even if the number of syllables per time can vary a lot. So the reason that no natural language uses something like Morse code isn't that it's hard to learn or remember, it's that you just can't use Morse code fast enough.
Most folk think fusional or polysynthetic languages are 'complex', and analytic languages are 'simple', and that languages somehow always drift from fusional and/or polysynthetic to analytic. However, what the casual observer doesn't see right so well is the fact that language is more than words, it's syntax, it's pragmatics, it's also extra-linguistic, somehow. Pretty much every tongue has the tools of every other, only that some meanings are relegated to longer or shorter expressions, or to more or less words, or to more or less affixes, so on. Phonetic changes between cases and morphemes or whatnot are also aplenty in every language, only they may seem more or less obvious to the casual observer. Take, for example, Mandarin Chinese. Old Chinese, it seems, had a whole bunch of (unwritten) case endings and conjugations and such that were dropped over time in favor of analytic structures and pre-/postpositions. However, it most likely will be the case that Mandarin will develop case and conjugation once more. I've heard from more than a few papers that northern Mandarin varieties are developing case. We might even see the completive aspect particle 了 le, amongst other particles, be fused to verbs as verb endings (which will likely make writing the language even harder, lol), even in the standard variety. But either way, it won't be more or less complex than before, only its 'tools' have taken different shapes.
As a Mandarin speaker myself, I don't know if my language is developing case, but I certainly feel the development of a definite article, from the demonstrative 那个 /nəɡ̥ə/ "that". One of the papers that talk about this is "The emergence of a grammatical category definite article in spoken Chinese" by Shuanfan Huang.
@@samgyeopsal569 He's probably talking about the Hezhou language, which is a creole with Mandarin-rooted words and Turkic grammar. It has six noun cases, agglutinative morphology and an SOV word order. There are a few other creoles based on Mandarin and other languages, for instance, the Tangwang language (Mandarin + Dongxiang language, a Mongolic language), the Wutun language (Mandarin + Amdo Tibetan), the Dao language (Mandarin + Khams Tibetan), etc. For the case endings of Old Chinese, as far as I know, there's only some traces in the first person pronouns of Old Chinese (Maybe there's a case system in proto-Chinese). And because Chinese has barely had a clear case system ever since it started to be written down, Chinese has always been developing its prepositions and grammatical particles. Nonetheless, Old Chinese used to have plenty of affixes that realize various grammatical functions, say, converting transitive verbs to intransitive ones, verbs to nouns, and vice versa. However, during the first millennium BCE, Old Chinese underwent a dramatic simplification in its phonological system and therefore the word-forming system too as consonant clusters where affixes reside disappeared or fused into single consonants.
@@user-ck1kx5ie6t I don't know if that can really be taken as the definitive article. If, for example, you were talking about a book, you could say 'a book' (one book) or 'this book' or 'that book'. None of which really denotes 'the book'. Perhaps the easiest why to do it would be to introduce a new word for 'the' and a new character (or repurpose an old one or add/remove a stroke or two). Then you could say, for example, 'da shu' to refer to 'the book'.
@@gary_rumain_you_peons But the word for "the" usually comes from "this/that". Not only are they related in Modern English, but, for example, in the Romance languages, the article comes from Latin "ille/a/um", which means "this". So it makes sense that the word for "this" in Mandarin is starting to mean just "the".
Thanks Simon, fascinating as usual. As you say, complexity can lie in the eye of the beholder. English verbs for example are often held to be much simpler than they are in French, German, Spanish and so on. But in fact English has more verbal forms than any of these languages once you realize it uses forms such as, e.g.: we see, we saw, we shall see, we are seeing, we were seeing, we have seen, we have been seeing, we shall have seen, we are seen, we are being seen, we would be seen (if), we were being seen, we would have seen (if), and more!! A Chinese or Vietnamese person trying to learn English has to get his head around all these forms given that in their language they have none of them. So the issue here is less that of the existence of complexity than it is of the kind or form of complexity: in Spanish it is more in the endings of verbs whereas in English it is more in the combination of auxiliaries. If we take nouns, German and Russian (and even more Finnish and Hungarian) use case endings like Latin and Old English to express things like of, to, with, etc. Modern English uses prepositions instead, but every person trying to learn English as a foreign language will tell you how bewilderingly hard and complicated the correct use of English prepositions is! Not to mention when to use « the » and when not to, which is probably as hard as using Chinese classifiers. In the end, humans are humans (homo sapiens species) and, potentially at least, we all have similar brains and minds, so that each language, no matter how different in appearance, will at the end of the day be able to express the same thoughts and emotions as any other, with some exceptions due to culture. In that sense, every language roughly has the same amount of complexity as any other, even if the shape and appearance of that complexity vary hugely. Just my twopence worth… and happy to be corrected where I get it wrong! I was also struck by your point on the speaker / listener tension. I wonder if the kind of optimising that goes on between the two has ever been modelled or understood in terms of Shannon’s theory of communication. Would you know anything about that? Cheers.
I understand what you're trying to say, but Spanish was a poor example. It has all of those verbal forms... and more (future perfect, a whole host of continuous tenses plus subjunctive tenses). And unlike in English, the future isn't built with a particle, but rather it comes from the grammaticalisation of the verb have, tacked onto the infinitive
@@rlou4386 Exactly. Spanish has verbal conjugations yet it's still richer in tenses. That's why I love my language so much. English speakers can't tell the difference between "yo estaba saltando" and "yo estuve saltando". In English it is "I was jumping". They can't understand the difference between "yo caminé" and "yo caminaba" either. English: "I walked" (if you say "I used to walk" in Spanish we can say "yo solía caminar" and the verb soler can also be used in the present tense for example).
I'm interested in the 'multiple consonants' idea. It came to me that English pronunciation is developing some. One example is the word 'Platinum,' which is plat-i-num - three distinct syllables. However, I have noticed that younger people are pronouncing it more like 'platnm' with only 2 syllables and the 't' sound as a glottal stop.
I think it's worth pointing out that while case as we think of it in a language like Proto-Germanic doesn't still exist in English, English nouns are not completely case free, and the example of Old English "cattes", in the genetive singular, still exists in modern English in the form "cat's", which is also the case for pretty much every other noun.
the possessive 's isn't a case inflection, it's a clitic. that is, it's a separate word but one that is phonologically dependent on a host noun phrase, rather than being an inflection on the noun itself. eg, for 'the man standing over there's coat', if it were case, it would be the noun 'man' that has an inflected ending, but the 's is tacked on to the whole phrase 'the man standing over there' instead because it's a separate word.
@@daarioforel in the example you gave I can see where you're coming from, but the ('s) ending is the evolved form of the (es) ending from OE. The example you gave is just a modern use of the ending, but the idea of "the man standing over there" is almost a big noun in itself. In that phrase you're not trying to communicate anything other than the identification of the subject. It's all one idea, so in a sense you could argue that it is a noun with an inflection. But regardless of that usage, it definitely is a case inflection, because it is cognate with the way it is used in modern German, ie "der Hund des Mannes", where the article changes from "der" to "des", but also the noun "Mann", is inflected with "es", meaning "the man's dog".
@@marcussessford1313 Adding on to this, being a separate word doesn't make it not a case marker. It's not inflection then, but still is case. There are languages that mark many cases through a separate word. And languages such as Basque where case is marked on the final word of a noun phrase, just like the possessive in English
@@miamc4602 The status of 's within English grammar is disputed. Some analyses describe it as a case ending (analogous to possessive forms of personal pronouns), while others as an enclitic postposition
I hope you won't be disappointed to hear, Simon, that the first thing that came to mind for me on watching the bit about how there has to be some sort of balance of "power" if you like between the simplicity of expressing something and the capability of understanding what's being expressed was...the Smurf language. It suddenly struck me that that cartoon had ridden a line. Because when I was 8 years old and watching the Smurfs, sometimes I wouldn't understand what they were talking about, but often a sentence like "I tried to smurf the smurf, but when I smurfed it, it just smurfed and now I can't get it to smurf any more" made complete and utter sense in context.
So that got me thinking...just how many words of that particular sentence I just made up could be replaced with "smurf/smurfed/smurfing (etc.)" before it would cross the line into unintelligibility? Fairly certain linguists must know the answer to this. I'd be interested to know what the current idea on this is. :)
Great video and makes a clear point. I think what’s also interesting is getting into how we need to think differently if we are speaking a language with multiple cases and inflection like for example, the way that Classical Latin was spoken (which is well attested) versus its descendant modern Italian or the other modern Romance languages.
As one of the folks who asked you about this on Patreon, thanks for making this video! Also jfc I think you must have the most knowledgeable commentariat on CZcams.
I loved the informal structure of the video. It felt so natural like I was having a cup of tea with you. I also appreciated the mindful moments when the train passed by! 😊
As someone who has a deep and abiding love of language, I just want to let you know that your videos are fantastic. Thank you for taking the time out to make them.
Love that your native (I assume) pronunciation of "to" comes out as "tuh", said while discussing the possibility of a language made up of only the word "tuh"
What's interesting is that most languages have complicated (formal) and simple (colloquial) versions concurrently. I suspect that formal language sheds some of its complications as colloquial becomes the norm, but then colloquial language adds new nuances that formal language has to catch up with. So maybe we are just changing out old complications for new ones. I also wonder if inflection was diminished in exchange for increased use of tense. Like say, how often was the past perfect progressive tense used (or needed) in prior history?
Language can also show status. Then to be able to use a more complex form correct can show I am better than you. Then it would be possible the language gets more complicated for just being complicated and hard. Or it can be used as "secret" language for example all different words for illegal drugs, that is used so not to many can understand it. So it is supposed to be hard to understand.
I don't know if colloquial language is necessarily simpler. Maybe some sort of approximation is simple, but if your target was completely accurate and idiomatic use of a particular dialect or sociolect or whatever, (which is ultimately the target for formal/standard versions), you'd find there were lots of tricky things to get your head around.
True. In Spanish we lost nouns declinations but we gained more complicated verb tenses compared to Latin. The other romance languages did this too but they've lost some of them afterwards. Especially French. In Spanish we've only lost two of them: future subjunctive (still used in Portuguese) and pretérito anterior (literally called previous preterite. Ex: yo hube estado = I had been).
I think it would have been interesting here to explore how you could add layers and layers of meaning to the tea and schwa language that you described for example by using the length of the vowel perhaps some variations on the t sound, tones like in Chinese, and of course all of those would apply to all of the possible variations on the order of the letters in your language: tuh, uht, tuht, uhtuh, and of course bare t and uh. One could even imagine something like Morse code where repeating the t a certain number of times makes it a different letter.... Also I love the shirt and you don't need to pause for the trains because the train noise isn't that loud
Languages follow the human mind. It's as complex and simple as we are. Some lexicon/concepts get out and other come in according to usage. Usage is moulded by culture. Some lexicon/concept are dropped and new ones are created and brought in as the culture changes in itself. I love linguistics :)
Great vid! Would love to know the details of how changes like vowel shifts, and particularly consonant shifts, actually happen. I can kind of imagine how a vowel shift might happen but consonant shifts I find a bit difficult to comprehend.
First of all, that's a great shirt. Yeah, I'm with you. It takes a change in viewpoint to see how complicated what your own language is like because you're into it. I didn't really understand that until I tried helping people with their English. What you CAN see, however, is how regular it is.
I find your channel fascinating …I’m interested in how we can now understand the form and anatomy of the proto -European languages and so its use in expression of meaning and information in every day life . I’m not a paleo-linguist but tantalised to know more. Good presentation 👍
Hey bud id love to give your audio a super quick edit for the extra noise so you won’t have to worry about it! I do a lot of audio leveling with wind, it’s quite simple and quick to edit out and I’d love to do it for you for free! Love your videos and don’t want you to worry about quality so much!
Could'a' bloody _sworn_ I'd subscribed to your channel already, so either I _was_ and it randomly fell off my subscribe list, or I'm misremembering and I wasn't subscribed at all. In either case, I'm subscribed now. Always enjoy watching your videos. We share a common interest in language and your videos are nice and relaxing - like we're all just sitting around at your place while you share your interests. Less "classroom" and more "group of mates".
In Swedish there remain no cases but the word order has remained right the same as in Old English : voice intonation alone will distinguish whether Katten ätar hunden means the cat is eating the dog, or maybe conversely.
The video and comments are, as usual, very interesting. Generally speaking, it seems the simplification of any language is reflective of the environment (time and place) of a given culture and what is socially important within that culture in a given period. The apparent 'simplification' seems to be the result of a true lack of understanding of one's own language and its potential as a means of expressing the ever-so-needed levels of nuance required to promote a healthy exchange of information. Language can and should be one of humanity's top priorities as a means of effective communication in conveying thoughts, feelings, ideas, and so on. Sheesh! This is complicated and I'm having difficulty effectively choosing my words.
Hey man - this is a very interesting topic and you make some good points. I'd also check out John McWhorter's work on this topic because his thesis is basically that languages tend to become less complicated (at least if we perceive complexity as cases and tenses with lots of inflection) as they expand and become 'lingua francas' i.e. languages which have tonnes of adult learners. Adults struggle with grammar and pronunication and may simplify the language (intentionally or just because it's the best they can do and the new speakers are too powerful to ignore and the society changes with them). On the other hand as you say I'm thinking maybe language change is just a mirage, a change to 'less complex' results in something new but also complex? Although it is hard to make this argument maybe with say dumping grammatical gender, did English dumping gender for most objects result in a change that was equally as complex? I don't think it did but happy to be talked out of it. In the end all languages are easy to native speakers/children; and so 'complexity' is probably just a judgement call an individual makes based on what languages they're already familiar with.
I think it depends a lot on whether the one language they speak happens to be spoken by the people around them as well. If it isn't, then life would be pretty difficult, I imagine. ;)
Thank you! I didn't know how a language would get more complicated if language evolution relied on slurring and making things more convenient... but thinking of it as a tug of war really helped!
Going through intense anxiety spiraling and a bad break up. Your voice and videos are one of the few things grounding me and keeping me sane. I’m sure that’s not at all what they were intended for but still. Thanks!
Simon, what you think about the role of the growing world economy over the history, connecting different places and peoples and the necessity of comunication between them, as a explanation to this sense that languages became "simpler" over time? Maybe there is also something to do with the creation of grammar, that did not exist in old languages, which were mainly oral. The grammar is probably related to the Modern States and its class dynamics
So far I only know about analytic and synthetic languages (e. g. English vs Latin). But maybe learning about other types of languages (e. g. agglutinative, isolative) which I heard of but don't know much about, could inform me more about what types of languages exist. Maybe Simon, you could make a video on those types of languages. I heard that Hungarian, Japanese and German agglutinate, for example. Maybe you could also talk about how case systems can actually arise out of nothing ("grammaticalization" if I'm not wrong).
I always feel this blend of empathy and guilt when I hear friends, or Germanic-language-speaking natives in general, complaining about consonant clusters and hellish inflections of some language they’re learning. Therefore, as a native speaker of one such suspect, I would like to offer a few comforting words: the rest of us find the mighty vowel diversity and strict word orders of Germanic languages to be of equally questionable utility and by no means less daunting. Don’t flatter yourselves, you’re no better.
I think it might be interesting to also discuss verboseness in languages. You can certainly say more with less syllables in a highly inflected language than a highly analytical one I would think. (Hence contractions etc.)
Coming from a more phonological perspective, I could add phonological difficulty. Some languages like Thai have a lot of different vowels, combined with half a dozen tones, and about 20 consonants. If all these factors are combined (consonant x vowel(s) x tone - plus a possible final consonant), you get a LOT of different syllables. Modern Spanish on the other hand also has about 20 consonants, but only five vowels, and no tones. So, to produce distinguishable words in Spanish, speakers need to make longer words. As a result, Spanish speakers have to speak faster to produce more syllables in the same amount of time that Thai speakers produce theis (more complax) syllables. It has been measured that Spanish is spoken considerably faster than Thai. So here again, a lack of complexity in one place comes with more complexity in a different place.
A lovely video! I have often pondered these questions myself, and yes, some of my students (I teach Modern Swedish) first find Swedish very simple, compared to Slavic languages or Hungarian... but, while we have "lost" a lot of cases and verb conjugations (compared to Old Norse), there is so much that we convey with stress and prosody. Like one thing that popped up in my mind this evening, when I toughed a class: One girl had a Dracula t-shirt. This made me think of, the very huge difference between (I will just put the stressed word in capital letters here, as an easy way of marking tone, rhythm and such... and sorry... teaching three evenings in a row makes me forget all of my linguistic vocabulary 🙂): "Jag GÅR igen" = "I walk again", as in "now I am able to walk again, after being brutally mangled by a train, vs: "Jag går IGEN" = "I am risen from the dead and have come back to haunt you guys, as a draugr" (or someting else). This is just one example of a million that I can think of. I always love to watch your videos. Keep up the good work!
I am german, Brittas boyfriend, and every morning i read the newspaper. For a number of years i notice, that the journalists (?) make more and more mistakes with change of wordendings, caused by four german grammar cases. For example ,der Polizist' ( the policeman) changes for grammar reason into ,dem Polizisten', but newspaper uses ,dem Polizist', which is simply wrong. I don' t understand this phenomeon, because newspaper personal should use the language correct.
@@brittakriep2938 it is somewhat of a colloquial trend that words like 'Polizist' are used in the accusative, genitive, or dative without the standard 'en' ending ('Polizisten'), as it should as a 'weak noun'. German weak nouns normally do this, as opposed to strong nouns, which have no special ending. I cite Wikipedia in saying, "Some weak nouns have a strong inflection in colloquial speech. For example, the standard accusative of Bär is Bären, but the strong inflection Bär may also be heard." In any case I can't argue this usage is 'correct', but the fact that it exists is proof that German speakers may stop appending the -en suffix, much like how the dative -e suffix isn't used much anymore either. Once upon a time that was standard, and not using it is wrong. Do you write 'auf dem Tische'? 'dem Buche'? The -en suffix on Polizist is undergoing the same change.
@@spaghettiking653 In the Western U.S., the adverb is disappearing. Just today I saw a sign at a car dealership that said "We treat you different," rather than "We treat you differently." Coming from the East coast this just sounds WRONG. On the East coast such usages sound uneducated and ungrammatical. In the Southwest it's the norm, and saying "differently" might sound pretentious. These things don't bother me much; what bothers me is that young people speak in sentence fragments rather than full sentences.
@@steveneardley7541 That exactly bothers me as well, and I do my best to speak "properly", as it were, but our texting-speech is leaking out into the real world it seems :'). And, about the adverbs, I think I read that that usage was called "flat" adverbs, which as you said is gaining traction in some places. But, this is already the norm in German, where most adverbs are just identical to their adjective... so to me this change is alright, really. Thanks for sharing anyway, I didn't know this was such a big thing in America!
It's said that English is so analytical yet it's loaded with contractions and a bunch of verbs slowly becoming strong. Contractions at their core are very similar to conjugations. It's actually interesting to see this process unfold.
Contractions are an important way how analytical languages can become inflected. The prime example in English is "I am going to" -> "I'm going to" -> "I'm gonna" -> "I'mma". If such a contraction went on to incorporate the verb that follows it (like "I'mma eat" -> "I'mma'eat" -> "I'mmeat"), you'd have evolved a new grammatical tense.
Yes, I've thought that myself. How for future tense most speakers just add 'll to the relevant word (rather than will). Is -ll in the process of becoming a conjugation? You could, as you have said, say it already is. Same with -n't, would -> 'd. So I can see how there is this constant flux between analytic to synthetic. With a pure 100% version not really existing.
@@leod-sigefast So long as "could not" and "couldn't" are still readily understood as synonyms, these are just contractions, not conjugations. If the former falls out of use, you have a different situation, because "couldn't" is no longer a contraction of something. I don't think we're quite there yet, although I have to wonder if everybody who says "I'mma eat" actually knows that it's just a quick way of saying "I am going to eat", and if they'd understand that these are synonymous.
@@renerpho we've seen some of this process already. Think of could've. Syntax also matters , one can say" could you have done that ? "Or "could've you done that? "Both make sense to an English speaker but "could have you done that?" Just isn't right. There's also the negative contractions which also change syntax and the word can't especially. Can't and "can not" have very different meanings. Example "people can not go to church and still be religious" and "people can't go to church and still be religious". These two sentences have different meaning.
Nice discussion of this interesting question! I just want to add my perspective on the example with quantum mechanics as a physicist working in science education specializing on learning and terminology/scientific language. I am pretty sure I get what you want to say with the example around the quantum mechanics in different languages. And on the level of "looking into official dictionaries of those languages", you will find scientific terms in dictionaries of English and German and maybe not in other languages. And at the same time, terminology itself is regarded as its own language, or at least as its own register or variety of language. So one can savely say, learning quantum mechanics is in England and Germany just as hard as in Papua New Guinea in regards of language :) However, I have to say I cannot come up with a much better example for what I think you wanted to say - maybe just that standard example that Inuit have more words for snow than English? But that is such a boring example ;)
03:12 I'm not convinced that "szczęśćie" is a great example of consonant clusters-"szcz" is only two consonant phonemes. If you want to use Polish, perhaps the surname "Trzcinski" /t͡ʂʂt͡ɕinski/ or a word like "mgła" would illustrate the point better. Otherwise, Georgian is the classic go-to language for consonant cluster examples (e.g. "vprtskvni")
as a native speaker of Georgian myself, I don't think that Georgian is a good example of consonant clusters since we tend to break up large consonant clusters with insertion of short schwas so that the actual phonetic realization of a word like /vpʰɾt͡skʰvni/ would be something like [fpʰə̆(ɾ)t͡skʰə̆vni] or [ɸpʰə̆(ɾ)t͡skʰə̆vni].
In the aspect of grammatical cases, English speakers (and us Spanish speakers as well, I guess) have been pampered by how straight-forward the English grammar is, and consequently by Germanic languages grammar too. Most of the languages I've studied/done research on, have grammatical cases at least at a basic level (I don't know if the particle system as seen in Japanese and Hungarian counts as case system). What seems to be more of a consistent trend, however, is the adoption of the Latin alphabet (or the Cyrillic alphabet in some cases) in languages that didn't use it at first or, at the very least, use it in one of their dialects, i.e. Turkish, Kurdish, Kazakh, just to name a few.
Having mentioned the complexity of inflexion of the PIE language and it being not-so-complex to a Polish speaker, you have made me recall a little fact from my Linguistic classes from collage. I do remember that Polish has a lot of similarities to Sanskrit. I vaguely remember this being mentioned as a fact rather than a topic that was thoroughly discussed, however, when I looked it up, Sanksrit, as well as Proto-Indo European, do have quite huge similarities both in terms of pronunciation and spelling of words to Polish, e.g.: numerals: dvi, tri and catur in Sanskirt are dwa, trzy and cztery in Polish.
Croatian is even more sanskrit like. We have infinitive in exactly same form plus i can recognize 20% words at first glance.sanskrit is more slavic in its origen than indian.
i have had this idea in my head for a while and, total disclaimer, im an absolute amateur when it comes to linguistics and this is all a big hunch. but. ive had this idea that perhaps the presence of a large written tradition in a language, combined with certain social attitudes toward language, might encourage certain linguistic norms that guide language away from innovating new inflectional morphology. because there is a, usually antiquated, language that casual language is measured up against, coming up with something like a new case or verb aspect system as part of the morphology might be discouraged because it's a more obvious deviation away from that antiquated 'gravitational pole', whereas say the evolution of a system that shows aspect across multiple words is a less obvious deviation so it passes more easily through the filter of linguistic conservatism. honestly im really not sure if this holds up to scrutiny. i'm pretty sure most indoeuropean lanugages that have had a large written tradition have been moving toward the analytic side of the spectrum, and i think, *think* something similar holds true for arabic, with the classical form having more intricate morphology than the forms spoken today, but i have no idea if this holds up with regard to, say, japanese. or nahuatl. or amharic. or any number of languages. so yeah, just throwing the concept out there, if anyone can give a more informed take on this idea i'd be super interested to hear it.
You may be interested in W. Ong's & J. Goody's classic "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word". In which they explore the idea that writing precipitated a paradigm shift in both human consciousness and society. Consider how much the communication medium of the Internet has changed us, I suspect the written word, even though it seems simple to us nowadays, had a far greater impact.
This is a great introduction. For anyone interested in an explanation of the processes that result in more complex languages vs simplified languages I would highly recommend Peter Trudgill’s work on this subject.
A few questions, Simon: - Did most languages throughout the history move towards having less consonant clusters? If so, does it mean some forms of easiness in languages are naturally preferred over others? - Do we have real examples of languages which “oscillated” within those fluctuations? What I mean is, this instability which comes in the form of fluctuations, is it possible that within this multidimensional space of different easiness parameters, and throughout fluctuations, can there be a convergence for a language? If some languages fluctuate less, does it mean that they are approaching their convergence state?
Japanese is one example that can be argued to gain consonant clusters recently by devoicing the vowels. French also gained a lot of clusters due to schwa deletion.
Another example for a language gaining consonant clusters is German. Old High German, written and spoken roughly 1000 years ago, had very little consonant clusters. Similarly to English,many vowels in unstressed syllables became weaker over time, being kind of slurred, and eventually got lost totally. This lead to consonant clusters in word-final syllables. One example would be the verb werfan (modern day German werfen) meaning to throw. The second person singular would be wirfist as opposed to modern day wirfst. Thousands years ago it was wirfist ['wir,fɪst], 700 years ago it was wirfest ['vir,fəst] and now it is wirfst ['vɪɐfst] with only one syllable and a cluster of three or four consonants at the end, depending on dialect. So simplification hasn't been weakening of consonants but rather vowels for German over time, leading to shorter syllables. Many languages seem to have evolved towards ease of pronunciation. But German went the way towards ease of comprehension. It may be hard to pronounce sometimes, but it is very easy to be understood as all words are phonologically distinctively marked for start and end.
There are examples even in Modern English of developing new consonant clusters, e.g. (in one of the comments above) platinum > platnm (with the t becoming a glottal stop).
I think one of the issues is that those of us who speak analytical languages like English as our first language fail realize how complicated it can actually be. The question as I see it isn't "which is more complicated", but "which type of complication are you more familiar with".
Edit: spelling
I would vote this up more than once if I could. Succinctly put
Oh yes. I am a native Polish speaker (a highly flexional language) and, when speaking English, I often find it very difficult to express complex thought with putting extra importance on some words when I cannot rely on inflection and need to stick to a strictly defined word order.
Bingo.
Really nice, thoughtful video. I am learning Polish (my family's ancestral tongue) and didn't realize until I started the course how rigid word order and inflection actually are in modern English and how that sort of replaces a lot of the required declension in various Slavic and other languages. Swapping out one complication for another, I suppose.
Did you mean to write "fail to realize"?
Simon, you can stop worrying about the trains. They are not particularly loud through the microphone.
That's true, but there's something calming about seeing Simon pause for some tea out of politeness.
@@russetmantle1 yeah
Yeah, when he said the train was coming, I was waiting for a loud noise that would've made it impossible for him to be heard but it was barely picked up by the mic. I think if he'd continued speaking he would've been heard over the train noise and only a few people would've noticed the background noise at all.
still, speaking while a train is passing by could be distracting
Nah. He should worry. It’s good
"tuh tuh tuh tuh tuh tuh tuh" - Simon Roper, 2022
Ha ha google translate
Tuh tuh tuhtuh tûh *tuh*... tuh.
@@goclbert tuh tuh?
A small but interesting example is how Latin didn't have articles but the Romance languages developed them as the cases were lost.
Good point
I love how lo-fi these videos are. Like you're in the garden just having a chat. Informative but also a bit relaxing too.
and also, trains.
Simon seems like the kind of guy that would make a fine companion at the pub on Scrabble night.
Hey Simon. I'm a Polish native speaker. The switch from inflectional morphology to word order in modern English makes total sense. You gave the example "The dog eats the cat" is different from "the cat eats the dog". When I heard that I laughed, because in Polish there is a famous short poem:
Bociana dziobał szpak.
A potem była zmiana
i szpak dziobał bociana.
Potem były jeszcze trzy zmiany.
Ile razy szpak był dziobany?
Which translated by google:
The stork was pecked by a starling.
And then there was a change
and the starling was pecking at the stork.
Then there were three more shifts.
How many times has the starling been picked?
The answer to the last question ZERO of course. However, the pun in the original Polish version is that the word order in lines 1 and 3 are changed, which may confuse a child maybe. But because the case/inflection/conjugation did not change, the situation remains the same. It was always the starling pecking at the stork, never the other way around. The power of case/inflection/conjugation. I love cases. Learn Polish! :)
I'm surprised that Google Translate doesn't take cases into account... wrong translation then
@@xibokamania, No, the Google translation is correct. Notice that the first sentence has been translated in passive voice whereas in the original Polish is in active voice.
'Twelfthly' is my favourite consonant cluster.
OMG, 40 years of English and I've never said, indeed never had the pleasure of that word!
Asthma is a good one, though not if you’ve got it!
The consonant cluster I have always enjoyed is in the Russian: предткновение - pryedtknovenia (stumbling). So glad to have found a place to share this!
@@annemcleod8505 if you take them out of context they frequently look completely unpronounceable. And of cpirse they get conflated sometimes into one letter - like the Russian combination shtsh, as in Krushtshov. One letter in Russian, many in Latin script.
In Croatian we have many: opskrbljen, stvrdnuti, stršljen, oskvrnjivanje, ščvrsnuti, uskršnji...
Unlike any other personality on CZcams at the moment, Simon Roper delivers complex musings on linguistic topics in an informed, intelligent, yet powerfully relaxing nature. Unconfined by the usual (and grotesquely obnoxious) vlogging structures that are seen so very often these days, Simon is able to reach directly through the screen and touch your heart with his infectious passion for language. Simple actions such as pausing to take a sip of tea as a train passes, or showing little clips of his serene backyard, allow the viewer to relax completely and dive deeper than ever before into thinking about the intensely human art of language.
I can only agree! It is very inspiring! 🙂
I agree. I adore his videos and the style. It's like food to my brain, soul and heart listening to him.
No one other than Simon Roper can bring a somewhat abstract concept such as spoken languages to life, making them more tangible and understandable to someone who is not a scholar, but is keenly interested (such as myself).
so true
I like to think about how Simon considers his videos and his style. I don't think he is trying to do anything other than effectively convey the information, but the result from our perspective feels so much more intentional.. it's interesting to think about..
Contrariwise, if you were discussing New Guinean mushrooms, Fore would be a much better language than English.
It's also important to remember that while a language may get less complicated in certain areas, it generally compensates for that loss in other areas. English, for example, has developed much stricter word order and a range of auxiliary particles which can be as 'complicated' as extensive verbal conjugation in, say, Spanish or Finnish (Edit: I see you just mentioned that in the vid. I'm validated!).
Inflexion tends to be the most visible marker of 'complexity', though that's a subjective term, in languages, particularly from an Indo-European language speaker's perspective. I hear Mandarin being labelled as a language with 'no grammar', or in milder terms, 'simple grammar', merely because its words don't inflect. That's obviously far from the case; its abundance of particles, measure words, and the like contributes just as much to its complexity as any agglutinative language with a thousand suffixes.
Mandarin, and all the Chinese languages, follow a strict SVO grammar. Not sure where you're getting this nonsense about 'no grammar' but that's not the case. Its grammar is similar to English in a lot of ways.
@@gary_rumain_you_peons Misread my comment?
@@marcasdebarun6879 Nope, just clearing up your misconceptions about Chinese.
@@gary_rumain_you_peons when they mentioned that mandarin had 'no grammar' they were saying thats what a lot of people online believe about mandarin, they weren't giving their own opinion about it
they even clarified it at the end: "That's obviously far from the case; its abundance of particles, measure words, and the like contributes just as much to its complexity as any agglutinative language with a thousand suffixes."
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@@1DMapler18 Marcas de Barun said "I hear". He was the one who also said "That's obviously far from the case; its abundance of particles, measure words, and the like".
Chinese does NOT have an abundance of particles. Not sure what he means by "measure words" but these might be Chinese classifiers. These are the same as collective nouns in English but Chinese makes heavier use of them with every noun. Not really a big deal, just a part of their complex grammar. Chinese has no gender (they use the same word for he/she/it but they write it slightly differently to denote he or she) and has no real tense. They do use a particle to denote that something had already happened but it's only one character and nothing like what you'll find for tenses in PIE languages.
Are you familiar with the theory that, over long periods of time, phonetic decay causes languages to run in cycles from agglutinative to inflexional to isolating and back to agglutinative?
That is a really interesting hypothesis!
Any article on this you'd recommend reading?
Interesting 🤔
It depends on what you mean by 'phonetic decay'. Is this the proposition that gradual loss of information at the end of words causes languages to re-innovate strategies to convey information? Generally sounds in words to not 'decay' but do change over time, however their change is not often so one-directional that the entire grammatical system needs to be re-analysed. Lithuanian, for example, has had extensive sound changes from Proto-Indo-European, but retains a relatively similar grammatical structure because these changes haven't prompted grammatical reanalysis, and Lithuanian hasn't changed its grammar much for other reasons (as also happens in languages). This idea would also not work for, say, African languages that put extensive morphology on prefixes rather than suffixes. This idea also becomes problematic when we consider Egyptian, a language we have a phonologic history for lasting thousands of years. Whilst its vowels experienced fairly significant change over the roughly 4000 years we have attested, its consonants remained fairly stable, and whilst it did lose some vowel quality on the end of words, these seem not to have affected the grammar at all as these terminal vowels were not grammatically relevant. Most of Egyptian grammar changes appear focused on changes in use of Egyptian's grammatical particles, and Egyptian if anything shifted from more inflectional to more aggluntinating.
I believe he mentioned it in one of his videos but I can't find it anymore
I'm a Polish linguist specialising in English. If I recall correctly, the idea is that the more speakers a language has over a large area, the more likely it is to become analytical rather than predominantly inflectional or inflectional-agglutinative. Thank you for mentioning Polish: it has also become "simpler" as time went by. Old(er) Polish used to have long vowels, a Slavic yer system with empty vowel slots or reduced vowels (I've never been able to understand it fully, tbh), the aorist mood and dual number, with only a few words showing traces of it currently. It also had a handful of letters which are not used at all in Polish Slavic-derived words today, like , and . Of course it isn't true that inflection makes the word order of a language "free" in any real sense. In Polish it's SVO and if you show other combinations to Polish-speaking respondents, they will say they understand them but would never use them because e.g. OSV would sound ridiculous or like a parody of Yoda-speech.
One counter-example to "language is getting simpler" is how English negatives now require the word "do". In the old days "I know not" would have been perfectly grammatical
You can still use the old style negative and be well understood, and in common speech we still keep it in pop lyrics and poems. And of course there are grandfathered basic phrases like cannot.
This reminds me of a study which looked at how people process information as they read. Apparently Chinese characters encode more information on average than Latin characters in English text, but when a person reads a text in Chinese they process fewer characters at once. These facts balance perfectly, so that whatever language you read, the amount of information you process per second is the same.
So perhaps if a spoken language really did get simpler we would simply speak more quickly to compensate, since brain power is the real limiting factor in communication?
There have also been several experiments that compare the rate of syllables per second in languages (which can vary quite a bit) with the actual transferred-information per second in languages (which seems to be pretty constant). The hypothesis is that in slower-spoken languages each individual syllable contains a bit more information and vice versa. I haven't looked into these studies to see exactly how much evidence they have for this, however.
Also, since we read whole words at once rather than analyzing the individual letters, you could interpret the Chinese-English study as both Chinese and English reading roughly the same amount of words per second, it's just that English words are physically wider on the page so our eyes move more. Same conclusion worded slightly differently.
Interesting.
Chinese characters do not "encode more information". There are 6 types of Chinese characters - from simple pictograms to ideograms. Try reading Wieger's book Chinese Characters to get the details on this. Modern Chinese uses a lot more characters than Classical Chinese. The reason why has to do with sound shrinkage (Mardarin is probably the best example of this since it has lost the most sounds). So what would have been said with one word/character in Classical Chinese is now said with two words / characters in Modern Chinese - with both of the words / characters used taken from words in Classical Chinese with the same meaning. Basically, Chinese is simple and can be short but throw in classifiers and more more complex ideas which uses more words / characters and it doesn't remain short and simple.
As for general language vocabulary, I like to compare product instructions when they are given in various languages. Invariably, English is one of the shorter ones and inflected languages are usually the longer ones. Chinese is a mixed length one. Depending on what the instructions say, it could be shorter than English or it could be longer if there is a lot of technical jargon.
"apparently Chinese characters encode more information on average than Latin characters in English text"
Lol. That's an understatement. I particularly like the "on average" part. Exactly when do they not?
@@gary_rumain_you_peons "Chinese characters do not 'encode more information'."
I think you must of misunderstood, especially since your reply didn't address the core issue at all. We are comparing Chinese and English (modern in both cases, no doubt, but that really doesn't make a difference). We are counting the number of characters, not the physical size of the text. Since there are more Chinese characters to disambiguate between, they are more complicated on average, and thus are usually drawn larger for visibility. When they aren't very much bigger, as they often aren't on computers, it can be hard to see all their details. We are also not counting the number of strokes, radicals, words, syllables, or morphemes, nor the temporal length of time it takes to say thing. These are all very different.
English has 26 letters. ASCII has less than 100, and other characters are very rare in English, except maybe a few altered letters like and which are only rare. Chinese regularly uses thousands of characters. Any reasonable mathematical definition of information content* would assign more information to a single Chinese character than to a single English letter. That is why, no matter whether you translate English to Chinese or Chinese to English, the Chinese almost always has fewer characters than the English. Each Chinese character usually represents a one-syllable morpheme "word", so it's more comparable to information content of a single English morpheme than of a single English letter.
*"Information Entropy", or "Shannon Entropy" would probably be what you want. (I actually kind of got that from XKCD: what-if.xkcd.com/34/ , though I also encountered the concept on Wikipedia while trying to understand entropy in physics, though that was probably after the first time I read the XKCD.) However, just the number of possibilities a character could be is a crude overestimate of the information content.
The Old English example for "the dog ate the cat/the cat ate the dog" is interesting because Late Old English started to lose noun inflections, but Early Old English had them, so you could change the word order completely and still understand who ate who. What really separates Old English from Middle English isn't so much the Norman French influences, but the loss of noun cases and the erosion of grammatical gender.
Funnily enough, there is a Polish nursery rhyme titled "Był sobie król" (eng. there was once a king) that my grandmother used to sing to me when I was little, that ends on an enumeration which courtier was eaten by what animal told in an object-verb-subject order, with the meaning made clear by inflections.
I have some suspicions myself:
-Rate of mutation might increase as the number of speakers increases
-Language stability is tied to social stability, and social mobility increases the rate of mutation
-Non-native speakers strain the grammar of the language, and assimilating foreigners increases incentive for the language to change to more easily integrate them(and in general language contact promotes compromise between languages, which often takes the form of cancelling out their differences)
This might have the effect that as the population grows, and especially if the context of the population is chaotic, that it will develop an analytic grammar as a "path of least resistance". You can completely dismiss this idea, but I get the impression that smaller populations can better afford having more convoluted grammar because of having a more cohesive community, while other languages may have to communicate information between wholly unrelated people across large distances. Different registers for social statuses and regional identities etc. will also develop and weigh down the common language, which demands compromise, which is usually going to be interpreted as simplification.
I get this impression from the fact that ancient languages seem substantially more grammatically complicated than their descendants all around, and it seeming oddly coincidental for the two dominant languages Chinese and English to have so many key similarities.
I also want to add that there clearly are simpler languages vs more complex ones. Pidgins really have very little to say in their defense, and the common similarity of pidgins reveals that there is clearly an "intuitive human" grammar that languages can be closer or farther from. Word order seems more consistently tied to this than "amount of inflection", but I would say that inflection and syllabic structure do play a part(consonant clusters are simply objectively harder to pronounce than consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel structures).
@@Supahdenning tell me that "shatasharengakathas" is easier to pronounce than "strengths" (which most English speakers pronounce /ʃtʃɹeŋkθs/ since "tr" tends to be "tʃɹ" and that sound palatalizes the initial s). It completely depends on what you're used to.
There may be something to your point that word order and auxiliary/phrasal verbs are easier to remember than expansive conjugations, but your second point about "objectively easier" pronunciation is false
@@evan-moore22 >tell me that "shatasharengakathas" is easier to pronounce than "strengths"
Yes, it is? At worst it's confusing to read, but this is trivial to pronounce in practice. It's not even a tongue twister or anything.
@@evan-moore22 It's very easy to pronounce the first word but it's too long which makes it easier to stumble, you picked a long word to compare to a short one so your comparison is very bad.
I think you live in an Anglo speaking bubble because Strenghts is a hard word to pronounce for many people since in many languages you don't even compress syllables that much, it is however very common to see consonant vowel.
I am French and I can tell you it would take years to get it right for a Frenchman. For an Italian it would be almost impossible to say it correctly since they always use vowel with their consonants (which explain their funny English accent since they can't help adding a vowel after a consonant.
@@evan-moore22 it actually is easier to pronounce, especially if you divide it into chunks (Shata sharen ga kathas)
I had an opportunity to study early Hittite. I was taken aback by just how simple the language was.
simon the type of guy i want to say a few words at my funeral
Yea and Brian cox.
i agree, as long as he says it in Old English
@@sammarsden8719 YESS I LOVE BIG COXS
I've seen a couple of CZcams language channels argue that immigration / cultural exchange reduces cases and inflection etc.
It seems to me that children and adults have different ideas of what is difficult to learn (I.e. adults can deal with putting the words in a different order than what's common in their native language, but new cases is very difficult). So when adults need to learn a foreign language (in order to trade, say) their languages will become more "adult-friendly" by reducing the number of cases and inflections so that the adults can talk to each other. Whereas isolated languages can retain them, because in that situation everybody who learns the language, does so a as children, and children understand different cases but may have a harder time with word order.
We see this in the case of Latin. Cicero's speeches were delivered 2000 years ago to much less educated native speakers, to persuade them to condemn or acquit a client, yet they were enormously complex in their syntax, as viewed on the page by a modern schoolboy. Whereas Pope Benedict XVI had an audience of second or third language users, so despite having been a university professor his Latin was simple and direct.
The linguist John McWhorter has a number of books on this thesis. He's most directly focused on creoles and how they form, but he argues that a much less severe form of the same thing occurs when large numbers of adult second-language speakers raise new first language speakers, especially in a pre-modern environment. It's fairly persuasive, at least to me, and he's able to line up large shifts in language evolution with geopolitical/historical correlates such as the shift to Middle Persian following the rise of the Achaemenid Empire, etc. In his case, he argues that languages, left to their own devices, actually tend to become more ingrown and byzantine, because smaller local speech communities are able to diverge due to language change and proceed to hyperadapt to tinier and tinier nuances of their language.
Obviously, there are still neurological and phonotactic limits to where that process can go, but within those, there's always room for complex morphologies or tongue-twisting phonemes.
If you look at Sweden, most Swedes are speaking modern Swedish with a grammar that is just a bit more complicated than the English. Though in a very sparsely populated part of northwestern Dalarna a few thousand people are speaking Älvdalian, which is considered an own language grammatically similar to Old Swedish like it was 6-700 years ago. Also, the [w] sound is extinct in most of Sweden but also still exists in some very sparsely populated parts of the country. On the other hand, in the major cities, young ethnic Swedes are speaking Swedish with a grammar and accent similar to that of immigrants. So yes, I think it's obvious.
@@francisdec1615 Immigrants (second language learners) are not the only force towards simplification. Local dialects of English often simplify things like verb conjugation: e.g. the principal parts of "to go" are "I go, I went, I have gone" in standard English, but colloquial speech may have "I have went" or "I gone," or erase distinctions of person and number such as "I go, he goes, they go."
These are creeping into paper and especially on-line writing and also textspeak. This is greatly reinforced by the linguists' dogma that native speakers are never wrong, which seems to have extended into "children are never wrong," so the forms and structures of old-fashioned written English are no longer taught.
Another external force is the mass media, which tend to favour American Vernacular English: pop music familiarises us with forms such as "Ima do (this or that)" meaning "I'm going to or will do ..."
While I am typing I am inevitably made aware that Microsoft and Google constantly try to enforce the spelling changes that Noah Webster invented in the 19th century to separate US from British English.
A countervailing influence is the ubiquity of keyboards. Back in the days of dictation, shorthand and typists, secretaries usually stripped out features like subjunctives and gerunds, which we are free to use now.
@@faithlesshound5621 It seems to me all the examples you're giving are of immigrant/non-native speakers.
What isolated English dialect says "I gone"?
I think the belief in language-simplification is partially due to an over-reliance on Indo-European for historical language examples, in combination with a sort of "regression to the mean" by PIE: from what I've read on PIE, it was a pretty unusual language both in grammar and especially in phonology (at least compared to languages we know about). It would make sense, then, that through random evolution the daughters would all tend to become more "average," and this general trend happening independently in the different branches of IE is misinterpreted as the languages getting 'simpler.'
I also think the spread of global languages killing off a lot of linguistic diversity and affecting smaller languages could also be at play - since there's less linguistic diversity and languages have a lot more contact with one another, it's a lot less likely for a certain language to go down it's own really screwball path - in essence, the standard deviation has decreased. So, when looking back at historical languages, we misinterpret this diversity as languages having been 'more complicated.'
Just an anecdotal (possibly wrong) example of this: Central Yup'ik is technically a very polysynthetic language, but I've heard that speakers tend to prefer more analytic grammatical phrasing (I don't actually know any speakers of this language so I can't confirm this) and that this trend has only really been seen in the last century. The reason given is that almost all Yupik speakers are are raised bilingual in English, the dominant language of literally everything, so even without borrowing any words or phases English indirectly changes the other language to be more like it. Now, I could easily see someone looking back at polysynthetic Yupik and thinking "oh, it got simpler" when i reality it just more familiar.
Most pidgin languages tend to be grammatically simpler than the parent languages. If you increase contact between languages (as we've done over the past centuries), the number of pidgin languages is likely to increase, possibly leading to a similar effect as what you describe.
I'm Lakota and from what I know of my language and the languages from my in-laws' tribes words are added to update the language such as ice cream but fundamentally the language does not change. You have to know and speak with people who are from the culture and know the language. You can't learn this in a book or from a tape. There is a lot of cultural impact that is within the language.
@@gnostic268 thank you for speaking on this topic!
I love falling down these linguistic rabbit holes on CZcams, but I rarely hear anyone mention First Nation languages. You have such a rich history that is generally ignored by most content producers I am exposed to.
You forget that the people setting the standard for English used to judge the language by its ability to be like Latin. Latin was considered the perfect language.
A few comments on languages that I know a bit about:
Classical Latin poetry messed about freely with word order to suit the metre because inflection kept the syntax clear.
Some inflectional endings in French are preserved in writing but usually lost in the spoken language.
Modern German has considerably more inflection than modern English but also fairly rigid word order.
English has a vestigial instance of the "verb comes second" standard in German in expressions such as "Never have I heard ..."
My Grandmother, born in 1895, would say such as "five-and-twenty to ten" for a time of day, preserving a structure once usual in English and still in German, but I don't thnk she used that word order in any other context.
As a native Russian speaker. We have six cases and it looks scary to a non Slavic speaker. On the other hand: English words bad, bat, bed, bet sound exactly the same to me.
So I think there are no simple or complicated languages. They are each complicated in different ways.
I am a native Portuguese speaker and sometimes I hear about the supposed complexity of Portuguese and others romance languages verbal conjugation but words in Portuguese are so easy to pronounce and so distinct from one another that I somewhat think our language is easy to learn but like all languages have things that are tricker to some
@@jimmg4585 I really like the music genre bossa nova and I really would like to sing along to some of the great songs within that genre, but the pronunciation of Portuguese is so complex I find it difficult to rap my head around.
An example of English being more complex than we native speakers may realize is to compare a simple statement in German with possible translations in English. Although German has a very complicated grammar (3 genders; 4 cases; subjunctive 1 and 2; prepositions that demand accusative, dative, accusative or dative, or genitive; verbs that demand accusative, dative or genitive; 8 ways to construct plural; and so on and on), it can be surprisingly simple in other ways.
If we take the simple sentence "Es hat diese Woche viel geregnet" (the simple preterite form is virtually never used in daily conversational German and has the same meaning) and translate it into English, we get the following, each with a subtle difference in meaning readily understood by the native speaker:
"It rained a lot this week."
"It was raining a lot this week."
"It has rained a lot this week."
"It has been raining a lot this week."
Try to explain the nuances to a non-native speaker.
There are 2 reasons why Germans shouldn't worry about their English:
1. I estimate that significantly less than 5% of native speakers nowadays could correctly describe the differences between these four sentences.
2. Your English is significantly better than their German.
I only understand train station ;)
I cant , and they all seem to have the same meaning to me. Can you please explain the nuances to me, an ill informed native speaker. To me, they could all be seen as being a bit vague, about the rain, that has occurred in the last week. If I wanted to be more precise I would mention dates or times. For example, It rained lot this week, but its been dry since Thursday.
@@TheEggmaniac That's just it - I can't explain the differences completely either other than to say that the use of present perfect and pp progressiove imply it is either still raining or might rain again this. The preterite and preterite progressive say that it is no longer raining.
@@rojbalc77 I dont think German people in general should have to worry about their English either. All the German people Ive met, are amazingly fluent in English. I feel quite envious of their great understanding a language that is foreign to them, and Im always impressed by this. However I would like you to 'describe the differences between these four sentences.' As I said in my reply to michaelswisher8630, I cant see any real differences in the meaning of the four sentences. Perhaps Im missing something. Im really curious.
9:40 In Norwegian, even though we've lost the cases (except for some remnants of the dative and the accusative in a few dialects), we can say "Katten spiser hunden" (the cat eats the dog) and "Hunden spiser katten", and have "katten" be the subject either way, just by changing the stress and pitch. We do this a lot, but usually when wanting to emphasize the object.
A sidenote from Germany: In our language ,verspeisen' exists, it is a bit dated now and usually used only for humans eating something.
Wouldn't you need a comma between the "dog" and "eats", in the second case, when it is written! Could it not then be understood the same in English: "The dog, eats the cat!"
Isn't it like: "Eat grandma!" VS "Eat, grandma!"
Edit:
Or more like: "Grandma eats" and "Eats, grandma"
@@aa-zz6328 : There is in CZcams a Video in english language about german Humor.In this Video you can see a sign in german language: Dieses Areal wird video überwacht um Verbrechen durch die Polizei zu verhindern! Does it mean ( excuse my bad english): a) This area is observed by cameras, that police can prevent crime? Or b) This area is observed by cameras, to prevent crime done by the police? The forgotten Komma (,) changes the sense of noted sign totally. A sidenote: Der Schild- the shield. Das Schild- the sign.
@@brittakriep2938 punctuation is so important, when one doesn't know which syllables or words are stressed, and the time duration (plus many other things, of course)!
I found it really fascinating the first time I discovered that there are languages that have become more inflective over time, given that I am a native English speaker and that the Indo-European languages have generally moved in the opposite direction. Up to then I mostly still felt that becoming less inflected is the natural evolution of language over time. Though that never sat right since it followed that there should never have been any inflected languages in the first place if analytic languages were, in fact, simpler/easier.
The specific example of a language that became more inflected that I came across was Finnish, which gained of a number of noun cases in the process of its evolution from Proto-Uralic. I also seem to recall coming across a language that is moving from being analytic (like English) to synthetic, though I don't recall which language or any specifics beyond that it was evolving in that way.
Some dialects of Mandarin Chinese, which is almost totally analytic, are in the process of evolving noun cases.
Of course that doesn't instantly make Chinese a synthetic language, but it's a step in that direction.
@@renerpho Some dialects of Mandarin Chinese? What dialects would those be?
And what are these noun cases?
French, as far as I can remember, is in the process of developing polypersonal inflexion on verbs.
@@marcasdebarun6879 This may be an imposed rather than a 'natural' development. In other words, I think it may be the result of a deliberate attempt to create gender-free constructions for ideological reasons rather than a gradual linguistic evolution. (This is quite understandable in the current cultural climate and I have no wish to create a divisive debate here over the 'rights' and 'wrongs' of such an attempt - but it does raise another interesting point in the development of languages in general: sometimes specific and deliberate changes can be established, either by fiat or by general consensus, for political, religious or cultural purposes. Finding examples of such 'artificial' manipulation in various languages throughout recorded history might make an interesting topic for research. )
I think it's important to consider the effect of written language. It's easy for a language to become analytic, but to go back to agglutinative or fusional, you need to have words becoming attached as endings, and I think that's tougher if everybody knows that something is a different word. There could be some counterexamples such as the clitics in romance languages.
Technically speaking, you only need two different symbols to express any meaning, akin to the binary representation of numbers. The only issue with this approach is that your utterances would need to be enormously long most of the time.
This makes me think of traditional Hawaiian languages where there are relatively few syllables so you end up with longer words and lots of repetition and homonyms
@@seebasschipman293 yeah, kind of like Japanese
Technically you only need one since you can use unary
@Aspiration Cul-De-Sac Not necessarily hard to remember; if you know Morse code, it wouldn't be hard to tell me the weather forecast using just two phonemes (a long vowel and a short vowel). Learning the 256 8-bit symbols used to write binary text isn't a lot harder. I'm pretty sure it's a lot easier to learn to "speak binary" than it is to learn any natural language.
However, here is that amazing fact that among all the natural languages in the world, the amount of information they convey in a given time is about constant, even if the number of syllables per time can vary a lot. So the reason that no natural language uses something like Morse code isn't that it's hard to learn or remember, it's that you just can't use Morse code fast enough.
Well as we all know, cave men used only two phonemes to convey all information: ooga and booga.
Languages can "recomplicate" too. I'm not a speaker but I've heard that Russian has gained a vocative case in relatively recent years
that's true for spoken Russian but linguists say it's a form of nominative, idk why
Rarely, complexity can even arise where none has existed before.
Proto-Uralic had 6 cases-modern Hungarian has 18.
@@EnigmaticLucas One of them arose by the separate word "rea" becoming a suffix "-re" or "-ra", depending on vowel harmony.
@@pierreabbat6157 Interesting
Господи! Боже мой!
Most folk think fusional or polysynthetic languages are 'complex', and analytic languages are 'simple', and that languages somehow always drift from fusional and/or polysynthetic to analytic.
However, what the casual observer doesn't see right so well is the fact that language is more than words, it's syntax, it's pragmatics, it's also extra-linguistic, somehow. Pretty much every tongue has the tools of every other, only that some meanings are relegated to longer or shorter expressions, or to more or less words, or to more or less affixes, so on. Phonetic changes between cases and morphemes or whatnot are also aplenty in every language, only they may seem more or less obvious to the casual observer.
Take, for example, Mandarin Chinese. Old Chinese, it seems, had a whole bunch of (unwritten) case endings and conjugations and such that were dropped over time in favor of analytic structures and pre-/postpositions. However, it most likely will be the case that Mandarin will develop case and conjugation once more. I've heard from more than a few papers that northern Mandarin varieties are developing case. We might even see the completive aspect particle 了 le, amongst other particles, be fused to verbs as verb endings (which will likely make writing the language even harder, lol), even in the standard variety. But either way, it won't be more or less complex than before, only its 'tools' have taken different shapes.
Interesting. Could you name me the papers you read on northern Mandarin? A link would be great to. I want to read more about this.
As a Mandarin speaker myself, I don't know if my language is developing case, but I certainly feel the development of a definite article, from the demonstrative 那个 /nəɡ̥ə/ "that". One of the papers that talk about this is "The emergence of a grammatical category definite article in spoken Chinese" by Shuanfan Huang.
@@samgyeopsal569 He's probably talking about the Hezhou language, which is a creole with Mandarin-rooted words and Turkic grammar. It has six noun cases, agglutinative morphology and an SOV word order. There are a few other creoles based on Mandarin and other languages, for instance, the Tangwang language (Mandarin + Dongxiang language, a Mongolic language), the Wutun language (Mandarin + Amdo Tibetan), the Dao language (Mandarin + Khams Tibetan), etc.
For the case endings of Old Chinese, as far as I know, there's only some traces in the first person pronouns of Old Chinese (Maybe there's a case system in proto-Chinese). And because Chinese has barely had a clear case system ever since it started to be written down, Chinese has always been developing its prepositions and grammatical particles. Nonetheless, Old Chinese used to have plenty of affixes that realize various grammatical functions, say, converting transitive verbs to intransitive ones, verbs to nouns, and vice versa. However, during the first millennium BCE, Old Chinese underwent a dramatic simplification in its phonological system and therefore the word-forming system too as consonant clusters where affixes reside disappeared or fused into single consonants.
@@user-ck1kx5ie6t I don't know if that can really be taken as the definitive article. If, for example, you were talking about a book, you could say 'a book' (one book) or 'this book' or 'that book'. None of which really denotes 'the book'. Perhaps the easiest why to do it would be to introduce a new word for 'the' and a new character (or repurpose an old one or add/remove a stroke or two). Then you could say, for example, 'da shu' to refer to 'the book'.
@@gary_rumain_you_peons But the word for "the" usually comes from "this/that". Not only are they related in Modern English, but, for example, in the Romance languages, the article comes from Latin "ille/a/um", which means "this". So it makes sense that the word for "this" in Mandarin is starting to mean just "the".
Thanks Simon, fascinating as usual. As you say, complexity can lie in the eye of the beholder. English verbs for example are often held to be much simpler than they are in French, German, Spanish and so on. But in fact English has more verbal forms than any of these languages once you realize it uses forms such as, e.g.: we see, we saw, we shall see, we are seeing, we were seeing, we have seen, we have been seeing, we shall have seen, we are seen, we are being seen, we would be seen (if), we were being seen, we would have seen (if), and more!! A Chinese or Vietnamese person trying to learn English has to get his head around all these forms given that in their language they have none of them. So the issue here is less that of the existence of complexity than it is of the kind or form of complexity: in Spanish it is more in the endings of verbs whereas in English it is more in the combination of auxiliaries. If we take nouns, German and Russian (and even more Finnish and Hungarian) use case endings like Latin and Old English to express things like of, to, with, etc. Modern English uses prepositions instead, but every person trying to learn English as a foreign language will tell you how bewilderingly hard and complicated the correct use of English prepositions is! Not to mention when to use « the » and when not to, which is probably as hard as using Chinese classifiers. In the end, humans are humans (homo sapiens species) and, potentially at least, we all have similar brains and minds, so that each language, no matter how different in appearance, will at the end of the day be able to express the same thoughts and emotions as any other, with some exceptions due to culture. In that sense, every language roughly has the same amount of complexity as any other, even if the shape and appearance of that complexity vary hugely. Just my twopence worth… and happy to be corrected where I get it wrong!
I was also struck by your point on the speaker / listener tension. I wonder if the kind of optimising that goes on between the two has ever been modelled or understood in terms of Shannon’s theory of communication. Would you know anything about that?
Cheers.
I understand what you're trying to say, but Spanish was a poor example. It has all of those verbal forms... and more (future perfect, a whole host of continuous tenses plus subjunctive tenses). And unlike in English, the future isn't built with a particle, but rather it comes from the grammaticalisation of the verb have, tacked onto the infinitive
@@rlou4386 Exactly. Spanish has verbal conjugations yet it's still richer in tenses. That's why I love my language so much. English speakers can't tell the difference between "yo estaba saltando" and "yo estuve saltando". In English it is "I was jumping". They can't understand the difference between "yo caminé" and "yo caminaba" either. English: "I walked" (if you say "I used to walk" in Spanish we can say "yo solía caminar" and the verb soler can also be used in the present tense for example).
I'm interested in the 'multiple consonants' idea. It came to me that English pronunciation is developing some. One example is the word 'Platinum,' which is plat-i-num - three distinct syllables. However, I have noticed that younger people are pronouncing it more like 'platnm' with only 2 syllables and the 't' sound as a glottal stop.
'murican here - I say "platnm", where the t is unreleased but still noticeable due to the airflow cutoff.
The languages definitely get simpler.
please do more linguistic hypotheticals
I think it's worth pointing out that while case as we think of it in a language like Proto-Germanic doesn't still exist in English, English nouns are not completely case free, and the example of Old English "cattes", in the genetive singular, still exists in modern English in the form "cat's", which is also the case for pretty much every other noun.
the possessive 's isn't a case inflection, it's a clitic. that is, it's a separate word but one that is phonologically dependent on a host noun phrase, rather than being an inflection on the noun itself. eg, for 'the man standing over there's coat', if it were case, it would be the noun 'man' that has an inflected ending, but the 's is tacked on to the whole phrase 'the man standing over there' instead because it's a separate word.
@@daarioforel in the example you gave I can see where you're coming from, but the ('s) ending is the evolved form of the (es) ending from OE. The example you gave is just a modern use of the ending, but the idea of "the man standing over there" is almost a big noun in itself. In that phrase you're not trying to communicate anything other than the identification of the subject. It's all one idea, so in a sense you could argue that it is a noun with an inflection. But regardless of that usage, it definitely is a case inflection, because it is cognate with the way it is used in modern German, ie "der Hund des Mannes", where the article changes from "der" to "des", but also the noun "Mann", is inflected with "es", meaning "the man's dog".
@@marcussessford1313 Adding on to this, being a separate word doesn't make it not a case marker. It's not inflection then, but still is case. There are languages that mark many cases through a separate word. And languages such as Basque where case is marked on the final word of a noun phrase, just like the possessive in English
@@miamc4602 The status of 's within English grammar is disputed. Some analyses describe it as a case ending (analogous to possessive forms of personal pronouns), while others as an enclitic postposition
@@pawel198812 yea I probably should've said that. It's why I didn't directly address 's in my comment.
4:23...there's a train coming. I had a drink too.☕
I hope you won't be disappointed to hear, Simon, that the first thing that came to mind for me on watching the bit about how there has to be some sort of balance of "power" if you like between the simplicity of expressing something and the capability of understanding what's being expressed was...the Smurf language. It suddenly struck me that that cartoon had ridden a line. Because when I was 8 years old and watching the Smurfs, sometimes I wouldn't understand what they were talking about, but often a sentence like "I tried to smurf the smurf, but when I smurfed it, it just smurfed and now I can't get it to smurf any more" made complete and utter sense in context.
So that got me thinking...just how many words of that particular sentence I just made up could be replaced with "smurf/smurfed/smurfing (etc.)" before it would cross the line into unintelligibility? Fairly certain linguists must know the answer to this. I'd be interested to know what the current idea on this is. :)
thank you for this vid Simon
Definitely one of my favourite videos!
Great video and makes a clear point. I think what’s also interesting is getting into how we need to think differently if we are speaking a language with multiple cases and inflection like for example, the way that Classical Latin was spoken (which is well attested) versus its descendant modern Italian or the other modern Romance languages.
Exactly my thoughts, Simon, thanks for the video!
I like all your videos, structured or not. They're interesting, informative and very relaxing. Cheers from Sweden!
This was very fascinating. Thank you!
@12:02 that's also why it becomes more of a chat with a friend than a production video! So don't worry about it
I enjoyed watching this video, thank you.
As one of the folks who asked you about this on Patreon, thanks for making this video! Also jfc I think you must have the most knowledgeable commentariat on CZcams.
I loved the informal structure of the video. It felt so natural like I was having a cup of tea with you. I also appreciated the mindful moments when the train passed by! 😊
As someone who has a deep and abiding love of language, I just want to let you know that your videos are fantastic.
Thank you for taking the time out to make them.
The axe scene was a highlight
Love that your native (I assume) pronunciation of "to" comes out as "tuh", said while discussing the possibility of a language made up of only the word "tuh"
This is very helpful - thank you!
Enjoyable, enlightening, comfortable video, Simon. I always learn something new. Much appreciation to you and your engaged community! 💚
What's interesting is that most languages have complicated (formal) and simple (colloquial) versions concurrently. I suspect that formal language sheds some of its complications as colloquial becomes the norm, but then colloquial language adds new nuances that formal language has to catch up with. So maybe we are just changing out old complications for new ones. I also wonder if inflection was diminished in exchange for increased use of tense. Like say, how often was the past perfect progressive tense used (or needed) in prior history?
Language can also show status. Then to be able to use a more complex form correct can show I am better than you. Then it would be possible the language gets more complicated for just being complicated and hard. Or it can be used as "secret" language for example all different words for illegal drugs, that is used so not to many can understand it. So it is supposed to be hard to understand.
I don't know if colloquial language is necessarily simpler.
Maybe some sort of approximation is simple, but if your target was completely accurate and idiomatic use of a particular dialect or sociolect or whatever, (which is ultimately the target for formal/standard versions), you'd find there were lots of tricky things to get your head around.
@@eldricgrubbidge6465 hence the caveat " but then colloquial language adds new nuances that formal language has to catch up with". Cheers.
True. In Spanish we lost nouns declinations but we gained more complicated verb tenses compared to Latin. The other romance languages did this too but they've lost some of them afterwards. Especially French. In Spanish we've only lost two of them: future subjunctive (still used in Portuguese) and pretérito anterior (literally called previous preterite. Ex: yo hube estado = I had been).
This was just a wonderful, concise, explanation of this linguistic phenomenon. Great job.
You really don't need the caveat its gonna be Chill... :) Thanks for the Video, good stuff!
Great points! Language isn't getting simpler. The form is always changing.
I am impressed by the depth of knowledge and the linguistic erudition of your commentators, which speaks volumes for your presentation. Bravo !
I think it would have been interesting here to explore how you could add layers and layers of meaning to the tea and schwa language that you described for example by using the length of the vowel perhaps some variations on the t sound, tones like in Chinese, and of course all of those would apply to all of the possible variations on the order of the letters in your language: tuh, uht, tuht, uhtuh, and of course bare t and uh. One could even imagine something like Morse code where repeating the t a certain number of times makes it a different letter....
Also I love the shirt and you don't need to pause for the trains because the train noise isn't that loud
Watching your videos always reminds me of how much I love listening to smart people talk
That was great!
Languages follow the human mind.
It's as complex and simple as we are.
Some lexicon/concepts get out and other come in according to usage.
Usage is moulded by culture.
Some lexicon/concept are dropped and new ones are created and brought in as the culture changes in itself.
I love linguistics :)
thank youuuuuuuuu you are the best
Very insig, balanced, and well-considered!
this is off topic but i love the background of all your videos, so calming haha.
Great vid! Would love to know the details of how changes like vowel shifts, and particularly consonant shifts, actually happen. I can kind of imagine how a vowel shift might happen but consonant shifts I find a bit difficult to comprehend.
Great video. Complex ideas, simply explained.
Your content is grounding
The "tuhtuh tuh tuh" example reminded me of the Smurfs' language.
Smurf you, you smurfing smurf!
First of all, that's a great shirt.
Yeah, I'm with you. It takes a change in viewpoint to see how complicated what your own language is like because you're into it. I didn't really understand that until I tried helping people with their English.
What you CAN see, however, is how regular it is.
Great discussion
Writing is also getting simpler with the rise of instant messaging services they spell the word you as “u” and why as “y”
This is a satisfyingly nerdy (and respectful] comment section
I find your channel fascinating …I’m interested in how we can now understand the form and anatomy of the proto -European languages and so its use in expression of meaning and information in every day life . I’m not a paleo-linguist but tantalised to know more. Good presentation 👍
Hey bud id love to give your audio a super quick edit for the extra noise so you won’t have to worry about it! I do a lot of audio leveling with wind, it’s quite simple and quick to edit out and I’d love to do it for you for free! Love your videos and don’t want you to worry about quality so much!
Could'a' bloody _sworn_ I'd subscribed to your channel already, so either I _was_ and it randomly fell off my subscribe list, or I'm misremembering and I wasn't subscribed at all. In either case, I'm subscribed now. Always enjoy watching your videos. We share a common interest in language and your videos are nice and relaxing - like we're all just sitting around at your place while you share your interests. Less "classroom" and more "group of mates".
Wonderful, thank you for sharing your thoughts
In Swedish there remain no cases but the word order has remained right the same as in Old English : voice intonation alone will distinguish whether Katten ätar hunden means the cat is eating the dog, or maybe conversely.
The video and comments are, as usual, very interesting.
Generally speaking, it seems the simplification of any language is reflective of the environment (time and place) of a given culture and what is socially important within that culture in a given period. The apparent 'simplification' seems to be the result of a true lack of understanding of one's own language and its potential as a means of expressing the ever-so-needed levels of nuance required to promote a healthy exchange of information.
Language can and should be one of humanity's top priorities as a means of effective communication in conveying thoughts, feelings, ideas, and so on.
Sheesh! This is complicated and I'm having difficulty effectively choosing my words.
Hey man - this is a very interesting topic and you make some good points. I'd also check out John McWhorter's work on this topic because his thesis is basically that languages tend to become less complicated (at least if we perceive complexity as cases and tenses with lots of inflection) as they expand and become 'lingua francas' i.e. languages which have tonnes of adult learners. Adults struggle with grammar and pronunication and may simplify the language (intentionally or just because it's the best they can do and the new speakers are too powerful to ignore and the society changes with them). On the other hand as you say I'm thinking maybe language change is just a mirage, a change to 'less complex' results in something new but also complex? Although it is hard to make this argument maybe with say dumping grammatical gender, did English dumping gender for most objects result in a change that was equally as complex? I don't think it did but happy to be talked out of it.
In the end all languages are easy to native speakers/children; and so 'complexity' is probably just a judgement call an individual makes based on what languages they're already familiar with.
As usual, fascinating stuff, Simon.
I don't know how people get by speaking only one modern language.
I think it depends a lot on whether the one language they speak happens to be spoken by the people around them as well. If it isn't, then life would be pretty difficult, I imagine. ;)
Thank you! I didn't know how a language would get more complicated if language evolution relied on slurring and making things more convenient... but thinking of it as a tug of war really helped!
Going through intense anxiety spiraling and a bad break up. Your voice and videos are one of the few things grounding me and keeping me sane. I’m sure that’s not at all what they were intended for but still. Thanks!
Simon, what you think about the role of the growing world economy over the history, connecting different places and peoples and the necessity of comunication between them, as a explanation to this sense that languages became "simpler" over time? Maybe there is also something to do with the creation of grammar, that did not exist in old languages, which were mainly oral. The grammar is probably related to the Modern States and its class dynamics
This is really therapeutic to me as a German teacher and Czech learner...
7:10 reminds me of The Memorandum by Havel
The Polish word at 3:13: szczęście /'ʃtʃɛ̃ɕtɕe/ - hapiness, luck
So far I only know about analytic and synthetic languages (e. g. English vs Latin). But maybe learning about other types of languages (e. g. agglutinative, isolative) which I heard of but don't know much about, could inform me more about what types of languages exist. Maybe Simon, you could make a video on those types of languages. I heard that Hungarian, Japanese and German agglutinate, for example. Maybe you could also talk about how case systems can actually arise out of nothing ("grammaticalization" if I'm not wrong).
I always feel this blend of empathy and guilt when I hear friends, or Germanic-language-speaking natives in general, complaining about consonant clusters and hellish inflections of some language they’re learning. Therefore, as a native speaker of one such suspect, I would like to offer a few comforting words: the rest of us find the mighty vowel diversity and strict word orders of Germanic languages to be of equally questionable utility and by no means less daunting. Don’t flatter yourselves, you’re no better.
I just envy people who have close linguistic relatives still around, lol. Hungarian is pretty much the odd one out.
@@cerberaodollam i mean, mansi and khanty are pretty close
I think it might be interesting to also discuss verboseness in languages. You can certainly say more with less syllables in a highly inflected language than a highly analytical one I would think. (Hence contractions etc.)
Coming from a more phonological perspective, I could add phonological difficulty.
Some languages like Thai have a lot of different vowels, combined with half a dozen tones, and about 20 consonants. If all these factors are combined (consonant x vowel(s) x tone - plus a possible final consonant), you get a LOT of different syllables.
Modern Spanish on the other hand also has about 20 consonants, but only five vowels, and no tones. So, to produce distinguishable words in Spanish, speakers need to make longer words.
As a result, Spanish speakers have to speak faster to produce more syllables in the same amount of time that Thai speakers produce theis (more complax) syllables. It has been measured that Spanish is spoken considerably faster than Thai.
So here again, a lack of complexity in one place comes with more complexity in a different place.
A lovely video! I have often pondered these questions myself, and yes, some of my students (I teach Modern Swedish) first find Swedish very simple, compared to Slavic languages or Hungarian... but, while we have "lost" a lot of cases and verb conjugations (compared to Old Norse), there is so much that we convey with stress and prosody. Like one thing that popped up in my mind this evening, when I toughed a class: One girl had a Dracula t-shirt.
This made me think of, the very huge difference between (I will just put the stressed word in capital letters here, as an easy way of marking tone, rhythm and such... and sorry... teaching three evenings in a row makes me forget all of my linguistic vocabulary 🙂):
"Jag GÅR igen" = "I walk again", as in "now I am able to walk again, after being brutally mangled by a train, vs:
"Jag går IGEN" = "I am risen from the dead and have come back to haunt you guys, as a draugr" (or someting else).
This is just one example of a million that I can think of.
I always love to watch your videos. Keep up the good work!
I am german, Brittas boyfriend, and every morning i read the newspaper. For a number of years i notice, that the journalists (?) make more and more mistakes with change of wordendings, caused by four german grammar cases. For example ,der Polizist' ( the policeman) changes for grammar reason into ,dem Polizisten', but newspaper uses ,dem Polizist', which is simply wrong. I don' t understand this phenomeon, because newspaper personal should use the language correct.
@@brittakriep2938 it is somewhat of a colloquial trend that words like 'Polizist' are used in the accusative, genitive, or dative without the standard 'en' ending ('Polizisten'), as it should as a 'weak noun'. German weak nouns normally do this, as opposed to strong nouns, which have no special ending.
I cite Wikipedia in saying, "Some weak nouns have a strong inflection in colloquial speech. For example, the standard accusative of Bär is Bären, but the strong inflection Bär may also be heard." In any case I can't argue this usage is 'correct', but the fact that it exists is proof that German speakers may stop appending the -en suffix, much like how the dative -e suffix isn't used much anymore either. Once upon a time that was standard, and not using it is wrong. Do you write 'auf dem Tische'? 'dem Buche'? The -en suffix on Polizist is undergoing the same change.
@@spaghettiking653 In the Western U.S., the adverb is disappearing. Just today I saw a sign at a car dealership that said "We treat you different," rather than "We treat you differently." Coming from the East coast this just sounds WRONG. On the East coast such usages sound uneducated and ungrammatical. In the Southwest it's the norm, and saying "differently" might sound pretentious. These things don't bother me much; what bothers me is that young people speak in sentence fragments rather than full sentences.
@@steveneardley7541 That exactly bothers me as well, and I do my best to speak "properly", as it were, but our texting-speech is leaking out into the real world it seems :'). And, about the adverbs, I think I read that that usage was called "flat" adverbs, which as you said is gaining traction in some places. But, this is already the norm in German, where most adverbs are just identical to their adjective... so to me this change is alright, really. Thanks for sharing anyway, I didn't know this was such a big thing in America!
It's said that English is so analytical yet it's loaded with contractions and a bunch of verbs slowly becoming strong. Contractions at their core are very similar to conjugations. It's actually interesting to see this process unfold.
Contractions are an important way how analytical languages can become inflected.
The prime example in English is "I am going to" -> "I'm going to" -> "I'm gonna" -> "I'mma". If such a contraction went on to incorporate the verb that follows it (like "I'mma eat" -> "I'mma'eat" -> "I'mmeat"), you'd have evolved a new grammatical tense.
Yes, I've thought that myself. How for future tense most speakers just add 'll to the relevant word (rather than will). Is -ll in the process of becoming a conjugation? You could, as you have said, say it already is. Same with -n't, would -> 'd. So I can see how there is this constant flux between analytic to synthetic. With a pure 100% version not really existing.
@@leod-sigefast So long as "could not" and "couldn't" are still readily understood as synonyms, these are just contractions, not conjugations. If the former falls out of use, you have a different situation, because "couldn't" is no longer a contraction of something. I don't think we're quite there yet, although I have to wonder if everybody who says "I'mma eat" actually knows that it's just a quick way of saying "I am going to eat", and if they'd understand that these are synonymous.
Obfuscation is an important part of the process. People have to forget what "I'mma" used to mean before it can truly evolve into a conjugation.
@@renerpho we've seen some of this process already. Think of could've. Syntax also matters , one can say" could you have done that ? "Or "could've you done that? "Both make sense to an English speaker but "could have you done that?" Just isn't right. There's also the negative contractions which also change syntax and the word can't especially. Can't and "can not" have very different meanings. Example "people can not go to church and still be religious" and "people can't go to church and still be religious". These two sentences have different meaning.
Nice discussion of this interesting question!
I just want to add my perspective on the example with quantum mechanics as a physicist working in science education specializing on learning and terminology/scientific language. I am pretty sure I get what you want to say with the example around the quantum mechanics in different languages. And on the level of "looking into official dictionaries of those languages", you will find scientific terms in dictionaries of English and German and maybe not in other languages. And at the same time, terminology itself is regarded as its own language, or at least as its own register or variety of language. So one can savely say, learning quantum mechanics is in England and Germany just as hard as in Papua New Guinea in regards of language :)
However, I have to say I cannot come up with a much better example for what I think you wanted to say - maybe just that standard example that Inuit have more words for snow than English? But that is such a boring example ;)
03:12 I'm not convinced that "szczęśćie" is a great example of consonant clusters-"szcz" is only two consonant phonemes. If you want to use Polish, perhaps the surname "Trzcinski" /t͡ʂʂt͡ɕinski/ or a word like "mgła" would illustrate the point better. Otherwise, Georgian is the classic go-to language for consonant cluster examples (e.g. "vprtskvni")
as a native speaker of Georgian myself, I don't think that Georgian is a good example of consonant clusters since we tend to break up large consonant clusters with insertion of short schwas so that the actual phonetic realization of a word like /vpʰɾt͡skʰvni/ would be something like [fpʰə̆(ɾ)t͡skʰə̆vni] or [ɸpʰə̆(ɾ)t͡skʰə̆vni].
The best example in Polish that I can think of is the word "wstręt" /fstrɛnt/ which has 4 consonants at the beginning.
"It's a big fluctuating ball". That's my tomb inscription sorted.
In the aspect of grammatical cases, English speakers (and us Spanish speakers as well, I guess) have been pampered by how straight-forward the English grammar is, and consequently by Germanic languages grammar too. Most of the languages I've studied/done research on, have grammatical cases at least at a basic level (I don't know if the particle system as seen in Japanese and Hungarian counts as case system). What seems to be more of a consistent trend, however, is the adoption of the Latin alphabet (or the Cyrillic alphabet in some cases) in languages that didn't use it at first or, at the very least, use it in one of their dialects, i.e. Turkish, Kurdish, Kazakh, just to name a few.
Having mentioned the complexity of inflexion of the PIE language and it being not-so-complex to a Polish speaker, you have made me recall a little fact from my Linguistic classes from collage. I do remember that Polish has a lot of similarities to Sanskrit. I vaguely remember this being mentioned as a fact rather than a topic that was thoroughly discussed, however, when I looked it up, Sanksrit, as well as Proto-Indo European, do have quite huge similarities both in terms of pronunciation and spelling of words to Polish, e.g.: numerals: dvi, tri and catur in Sanskirt are dwa, trzy and cztery in Polish.
Croatian is even more sanskrit like. We have infinitive in exactly same form plus i can recognize 20% words at first glance.sanskrit is more slavic in its origen than indian.
i have had this idea in my head for a while and, total disclaimer, im an absolute amateur when it comes to linguistics and this is all a big hunch. but. ive had this idea that perhaps the presence of a large written tradition in a language, combined with certain social attitudes toward language, might encourage certain linguistic norms that guide language away from innovating new inflectional morphology. because there is a, usually antiquated, language that casual language is measured up against, coming up with something like a new case or verb aspect system as part of the morphology might be discouraged because it's a more obvious deviation away from that antiquated 'gravitational pole', whereas say the evolution of a system that shows aspect across multiple words is a less obvious deviation so it passes more easily through the filter of linguistic conservatism. honestly im really not sure if this holds up to scrutiny. i'm pretty sure most indoeuropean lanugages that have had a large written tradition have been moving toward the analytic side of the spectrum, and i think, *think* something similar holds true for arabic, with the classical form having more intricate morphology than the forms spoken today, but i have no idea if this holds up with regard to, say, japanese. or nahuatl. or amharic. or any number of languages. so yeah, just throwing the concept out there, if anyone can give a more informed take on this idea i'd be super interested to hear it.
You may be interested in W. Ong's & J. Goody's classic "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word". In which they explore the idea that writing precipitated a paradigm shift in both human consciousness and society. Consider how much the communication medium of the Internet has changed us, I suspect the written word, even though it seems simple to us nowadays, had a far greater impact.
This is a great introduction. For anyone interested in an explanation of the processes that result in more complex languages vs simplified languages I would highly recommend Peter Trudgill’s work on this subject.
A few questions, Simon:
- Did most languages throughout the history move towards having less consonant clusters? If so, does it mean some forms of easiness in languages are naturally preferred over others?
- Do we have real examples of languages which “oscillated” within those fluctuations? What I mean is, this instability which comes in the form of fluctuations, is it possible that within this multidimensional space of different easiness parameters, and throughout fluctuations, can there be a convergence for a language? If some languages fluctuate less, does it mean that they are approaching their convergence state?
Japanese is one example that can be argued to gain consonant clusters recently by devoicing the vowels. French also gained a lot of clusters due to schwa deletion.
@@quain5063 Interesting!
Another example for a language gaining consonant clusters is German. Old High German, written and spoken roughly 1000 years ago, had very little consonant clusters. Similarly to English,many vowels in unstressed syllables became weaker over time, being kind of slurred, and eventually got lost totally. This lead to consonant clusters in word-final syllables.
One example would be the verb werfan (modern day German werfen) meaning to throw. The second person singular would be wirfist as opposed to modern day wirfst. Thousands years ago it was wirfist ['wir,fɪst], 700 years ago it was wirfest ['vir,fəst] and now it is wirfst ['vɪɐfst] with only one syllable and a cluster of three or four consonants at the end, depending on dialect.
So simplification hasn't been weakening of consonants but rather vowels for German over time, leading to shorter syllables. Many languages seem to have evolved towards ease of pronunciation. But German went the way towards ease of comprehension. It may be hard to pronounce sometimes, but it is very easy to be understood as all words are phonologically distinctively marked for start and end.
There are examples even in Modern English of developing new consonant clusters, e.g. (in one of the comments above) platinum > platnm (with the t becoming a glottal stop).
I, fondly, remember when we used lots of adjectives not just "cool"
Sounds like a cool memory.