It has been determined that whenever a language becomes simpler in terms of morphological features, its phonology will eventually get more complex.
thesaurus wrote:Just a thought, but does it have anything to do with the dominance and effects of other languages? I'm not sure about late Latin, but perhaps German could be taking its cues from English?
vir litterarum wrote:... we discussed in class today how the genitive is being replaced in spoken German in most instances by von+ dative.
modus.irrealis wrote:My own theory is that this is due to the fact that Ancient Indo-European languages do inflection in as complicated a way as possible, with e.g. the same case being realized by different endings for different nouns, case and number being mixed together in nouns, lots of suppletion. You can compare these languages to Turkish, which is also a heavily inflected language but does inflection in a very straightforward way. Personally I think it's this extra complication that motivated speakers of these languages to heavily simplify these aspects of the language.
Lucus Eques wrote:Plus, does Turkish have gender? I know Finnish and Hungarian don't — no doubt that's a BIG contributing factor to the complexity of PIE syntheticism, having three genders.
annis wrote:Lucus Eques wrote:Plus, does Turkish have gender? I know Finnish and Hungarian don't — no doubt that's a BIG contributing factor to the complexity of PIE syntheticism, having three genders.
Swahili has eight — but it's quite regular.
Lucus Eques wrote:annis wrote:Lucus Eques wrote:Plus, does Turkish have gender? I know Finnish and Hungarian don't — no doubt that's a BIG contributing factor to the complexity of PIE syntheticism, having three genders.
Swahili has eight — but it's quite regular.
Eight genders?
calvinist wrote:At first glance eight genders sounds crazy, I think because we usually mix grammatical gender with natural gender (since they overlap), but if you think about gender as a purely grammatical concept, then there's really no limit to how many genders a language could have. Just as with noun declensions, verb conjugations, etc. I'm not sure what advantage there would be in having eight genders though, from a communication standpoint.
annis wrote:There's no need to think in terms of advantage here. Once a language comes up with a good idea, there is a very good chance of that idea spreading out into areas where it does not, at first glance, have any obvious business going. This is a normal feature of language and language change.
Once you get more than three genders one starts to speak of noun "classes" instead. Swahili has eight (give or take) and other some Bantu languages may have quite a few more. Classifier languages are quite common, actually. Classes in Swahili are a little different from gender — there is a semantic component, so you can pick different classes for the same root for related meanings — but the formal grammatical apparatus is much the same: noun-adjective agreement in class and number, etc. In the case of Swahili, the verb has to agree with the subject class, too. I'm not aware of any Indo-European language that does this, though in most Semitic languages the 2nd and 3rd person verbs are also marked for gender.
Estoniacus Inoriginale wrote:Inlection dies and may re-emerge. At the same time, phonetical complexity increases and upon generation of new inflections a related phonological simplification may take place. Can this be said to be right?
calvinist wrote:Classes, yeah that makes sense. Especially when you mention the added semantic meaning. I guess it would also allow for much more freedom in the placement of noun modifiers like adjectives than in say Latin where we have three genders and the masculine/neuter share endings in most cases.
annis wrote:In exchange, the funky German uvular /r/ is taking over parts of France and northern Italy.
annis wrote:In fact, at the moment I cannot think of a single language that has a rich classifier system and also uses a nonconfigurational word order.
Lucus Eques wrote:annis wrote:Lucus Eques wrote:Plus, does Turkish have gender? I know Finnish and Hungarian don't — no doubt that's a BIG contributing factor to the complexity of PIE syntheticism, having three genders.
Swahili has eight — but it's quite regular.
Eight genders?
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