Re: less/fewer

"TOF" <fran_beta@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Stephen Calder wrote:
Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On 5/31/2006, Stephen Calder posted this:
dontbother wrote:
Stephen Calder <calder9@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

No, it's like saying electricity takes the path of least
resistance. The goal is more efficiency than correctness.

That's never been a goal of any natural language, as far as I
know, so if it's goal now, it means that the culture of English
has changed substantially.

It's how language develops and evolves; towards simplicity. Hence
English dropped grammatical gender and most case declensions;
irregular verbs tend to regularise, etc.

OK, if that's how language develops and evolves, how'd it get so
complicated in the first place?

Don't know, sorry.

I think it's more likely the other way around.

The first language would have been very simple, covering no more than
prosaic matters --where there were bison and water and such like. As
users of language began to stretching the language to describe time
and sequence and to compare attributes, an accompanying syntax would
surely have had to follow. Thus, language would have tended to become
more complex.

This suggests that there was no syntax to begin with or that the original
syntax of early natural languages was very simple. I don't think that's
true. I'll do some research on this because I've forgotten what I learned
about it in my linguistics courses a quater of a century ago.

The development both of of settled communities and regular barter
would have greatly enlarged the demands on language, expanded the
lexicon and thus introduced more complexity in the syntax of each
language.

Expanding the vocabulary is true enough. The more things there are to
talk about, the more words are needed, even if they're combinations of
old words, like "Fernsprecher" ["far-speaker"] for new things like
"telephone".

Since settled communities based on agriculture need to begin
to make sense of and measure the seasons, predict the rain and so
forth, they are obliged to think beyond the tangible and to consider
the place of humans in nature -- to consider sequence and time and so
forth in a way that those merely following the bison do not. Each new
attempt to control and represent nature demanded an enlargement of the
language. And of course, the attempt to record the learning and
insights of past human beings in ways going beyond the oral tradition
created a new set of demands on language.

An interesting theory, but based purely on reasoning and not on fact. It
implies that hunter-gather socieities have no need of abstract ideas,
which is insupportable on any level. As Fromkin, Rodman, and Hyams say,
"There are no 'primitive' languages---all languages are equally complex
and equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe. The
vocabulary of any language can be expanded to include new words for new
concepts." (_An Introduction to Language, 7th edition_. Thomson-Heinle:
2003, p. 27.)

There are, of course, what modern humans in technologically advanced
societies call primitive societies and cultures, hunter-gatherer
societies that seem not ot have changed for millennia. Ironically, some
of them have the most syntactically complex forms of language with
elaborate systems of, for example, kinship terms and classificatory
systems, and complex sound systems that include sounds that must be
learned before the age of 12, e.g., the click in certain African
languages (Bantu languages, I think)

I'm not sure why English dropped the Latin-style declensions and
grammatical gender. Certainly, English is far simpler without them. It
would be interesting to know how they arose in Latin.

But English is a Germanic language and not at all related to Latin but to
proto-Indo-European through southern Gothic. Those grammatical
complexities would, of course, have been Germanic and not Latin-style.

One aspect of English that is making the language slightly less
complex, is the tendency for the rapid spread of the language around
the world to make for greater uniformity and to wipe out some of the
particularism that had marked it.

But the grammatical simplification of English occurred long before that
began to happen.

--
Franke: EFL teacher and medical editor
Posting from Taiwan. Unmunged email: /at/hush.ai
It's all in the way you say it, innit?
.

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