Re: less/fewer

On 5/31/2006, dontbother posted this:
"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.

All of this resonates with one of my long-time dreams: I wish someone would create a time machine that enables us to view (without being seen and without being able to effect any changes) the development of societies and of languages.

The above comes from the interaction between my life-long interest in languages and my youthful interest in science fiction. The fact that we can't really figure such things out from where we now sit is a non-trivial part of the wish as well.

I do worry that were we to achieve time travel, some of my pet theories (really just hypotheses, obviously) would be shot down, but I can handle it, stiff upper lip and all...

My own guess would be that language appeared fairly suddenly and was from the first fairly complicated. I would further guess that many languages have gone through cycles of simplifying and elaborating. I could imagine an analytical language such as English or Chinese developing into inflected or synthetic languages such as Latin or Turkish by allowing what are now felt as separate words to agglutinate (!) to the stem forms of words, so that ultimately, complexity develops. Then the simplification starts over...

Of course, both forces [1] (and there other kinds of complexity: look at English!) are running at the same time.

Literacy, however, probably throws a monkey wrench into these workings, as a force (not always very effective) towards conservation of forms. A non-literate language presumably has fewer ways of noticing changes, except maybe for memorized epics and (oxymoron alert) unwritten scriptures.

OK, it's time to descend from the soapbox.

[1] Not really forces. Aleatoric shifts come to mind.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")


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