# Why are east Asian languages morphology-free?



## Johnnyjohn

Let us compare a phrase in Cambodian to Navajo:
"puak khngom aoy cruuk new ceik pram camnuem" (Quiet analytical)
"group me give pig obj-marker banana five bunch"
We gave the pigs five bunches of bananas.

Let's look at Navajo (from wikipedia):
*diʼnisbąąs* "I'm in the act of driving some vehicle into something and getting stuck"
(Quiet synthetic)

With the exception of Korean (where more may be going on than meets the eye), almost every single east Asian language is 100% uninflected. Japanese and some Tibetic languages have morphology, but they are relatively new having developed in the past few thousand years. (There is a theory Japanese was originally a creole due to the absence of articles, irregularities in pronouns, plurality, reduplication, lack of prepositions and difficult postpositions and all of the verbal forms are derived from separate words contracting.)

A poster once said that maybe tonality prevents contraction, yet this ignores tonal languages with vast irregular verb systems such as in Northern Africa and central America (though the latter also shows signs of being isolating in the past often with isolating nouns and no prepositions!) Also Cambodian was never tonal yet productive morphology is naught. (Some unproductive derivational infixes and prefixes exist but they evolved from an isolating ancestral language, the just didn't catch on)

The agglutinating languages like Mongolian and Manchu also show very recent signs of grammaticalization, the ancestor may have also been isolating.
So why are Asian languages isolating or have been in the deep past? Why have some begun to not be so? Why not others? The Pali language has influenced Thai for centuries yet they never seem to adopt any features, yet on the other side of the world it is hypothesized parts of Georgian morphology and ablaut was from proto Indo European. Thoughts?


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## ahvalj

Just a remark: Manchu's morphology is secondarily reduced. Other members of the Tungusic family (Tungusic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) all have rich morphology of the Altaic type (as does Mongolian). Altaic languages, due to the modular nature of their morphology and the strong stress, are in the process of constant renovation of their morphological tools, but they don't seem to be reducible to a recent poorer system. Georgian ablaut is more often hypothesized to be cognate or parallel to the Proto-Indo-European one, not borrowed (Nostratic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).


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## Sepia

Could there be any reason why some needed flections and others didn't.
It seems to me that the North Germanic languages lost most of their flections after the language lost the purpose of "complex storytelling" - meaning after the people were told to shut up about the ancient gods and be good Christians.
It is noteworthy that two Germanic languages that have a lot of flections left are High German - first Bible translation - and Icelandic, where a more natural cultural evolution made it possible for the old stories to be transferred into writing which probably made it possible for the strudture of the language to stay unchanged and vivid in the minds of the people.

That is why I figure that necessity is an important factor. One should look a what people use the language for - complex storytelling or "bring the cows to the water", and what one can do with the complex system of flections - and if one can develop just as complex functions with other means.


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## M Mira

Sepia said:


> Could there be any reason why some needed flections and others didn't.
> It seems to me that the North Germanic languages lost most of their flections after the language lost the purpose of "complex storytelling" - meaning after the people were told to shut up about the ancient gods and be good Christians.
> It is noteworthy that two Germanic languages that have a lot of flections left are High German - first Bible translation - and Icelandic, where a more natural cultural evolution made it possible for the old stories to be transferred into writing which probably made it possible for the strudture of the language to stay unchanged and vivid in the minds of the people.
> 
> That is why I figure that necessity is an important factor. One should look a what people use the language for - complex storytelling or "bring the cows to the water", and what one can do with the complex system of flections - and if one can develop just as complex functions with other means.


That doesn't work for East Asia, where the oldest known religions of each culture are still in practice today, except for Tibetan who also happen to have inflections.
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There are speculations that Old Chinese did have inflections, but they're obscured by the orthography which does not cater to fine morphological details as can be observed in the practice of using the same grapheme for several different words that sounded similar which later led to the use of radicals to disambiguate them.

A few of them, if they were indeed result of the long gone morphology instead of derivations, can be observed even in modern Mandarin in different degrees: both very active like 買 mai3 and 賣 mai4 ("buy" and "sell"), one reduced to polysyllable terms or in writing like 授 shou4 "give" against 受 shou4 "receive", distinction moribund like 轉 zhuan3 (probably transitive "to rotate") and zhuan4 (probably intransitive "to revolve, orbit") which is hardly differentiated today.


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## wtrmute

Sepia said:


> It seems to me that the North Germanic languages lost most of their flections after the language lost the purpose of "complex storytelling" - meaning after the people were told to shut up about the ancient gods and be good Christians.



Nonsense: There is plenty of "complex storytelling" in Christian Europe regarding the lives of Saints and the Mediaeval literary cycles like the Matters of Britain, France and Rome.  If the Northern Germanic languages simplified their morphology a couple of centuries after their Christianisation, the reasons for it must be sought elsewhere.



Sepia said:


> It is noteworthy that two Germanic languages that have a lot of flections left are High German - first Bible translation - and Icelandic, where a more natural cultural evolution made it possible for the old stories to be transferred into writing which probably made it possible for the strudture of the language to stay unchanged and vivid in the minds of the people.
> 
> That is why I figure that necessity is an important factor. One should look a what people use the language for - complex storytelling or "bring the cows to the water", and what one can do with the complex system of flections - and if one can develop just as complex functions with other means.



The first Germanic language to get a Bible translation was actually Gothic, which was fairly inflected as Germanic languages go.  It still had a set of modal verbs with extremely reduced forms, but it's attested at a time fairly close to the time of Proto-Germanic, so it's hard to tell whether the language would have shed its complex morphology or not.

Regarding East Asian languages, I rather think that the analytical character of the languages is actually mostly Middle Chinese influence, which was a stupidly influential language and quite radically analytic.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]


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## Hulalessar

M Mira said:


> That doesn't work for East Asia



I do not think it works for anywhere!

It is important not to equate the overall complexity of a language with its morphological complexity. All languages are equally complex.

All languages are equally capable of expressing complex thought. They are equally subtle, even if subtle in different areas. The suggestion that some languages are only suitable for speaking to cows is misconceived. Whilst certain languages may lack the vocabulary to talk about the modern world or institutions its speakers do not have, that is not the same as saying it lacks complexity. It has been shown that any language can forge the expressions it needs if it moves into an unfamiliar area.

There is evidence that language change is cyclic. What type of language any community speaks at a given time is independent of social factors. You cannot tell anything about a language community simply by studying its language, nor does studying a community allow you to predict what type of language it speaks.


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## Sepia

@the first Germanic language to get a Bible translation was actually Gothic,

OK I forgot that one - it never made it on to the best-seller lists. The one I mean is the one that did - without being the judge of its popularity, industrial factors made it possible that a lot of people read it.

@which was fairly inflected as Germanic languages go.


Weren't they all at the time?


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## Sepia

Hulalessar said:


> I do not think it works for anywhere!
> 
> It is important not to equate the overall complexity of a language with its morphological complexity. All languages are equally complex.
> 
> All languages are equally capable of expressing complex thought. They are equally subtle, even if subtle in different areas. The suggestion that some languages are only suitable for speaking to cows is misconceived. Whilst certain languages may lack the vocabulary to talk about the modern world or institutions its speakers do not have, that is not the same as saying it lacks complexity. It has been shown that any language can forge the expressions it needs if it moves into an unfamiliar area.
> 
> There is evidence that language change is cyclic. What type of language any community speaks at a given time is independent of social factors. You cannot tell anything about a language community simply by studying its language, nor does studying a community allow you to predict what type of language it speaks.



Sure, you are right about not equating the overall complexity of a language with its morphological complexity. But when you translate from German into Danish you really often get into situations where really only have the choise of throwing information overboard or venturing into some very odd constructions, cutting everything into several single phrases, making footnotes or such, because clever writers simply use functions of the language that you dont have in Danish. Many of these are based on flections. It rarely happens in the other direction. 

I am aware that changes a lot along the way and also in ways that are less influenced by social factors except that social groups always try to create their own language.
But I would really like to know which evidence you can present that you "cannot tell anything about a language community simply by studying its language".
I assure you, I can always tell a lot about the people I meet by the way they use their language - and when a lot of pepole use their language in a certain new way, that is what we call "change".


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## Hulalessar

Sepia said:


> Sure, you are right about not equating the overall complexity of a language with its morphological complexity. But...



I cannot comment on translating between Danish and German, but I can comment on translating between Latin and English. You may get the feeling, especially if your Latin teacher has hinted that English is somehow less perfect than Latin, that when translating from Latin to English you are losing something. What is happening is something different, which is that what you may be required to express in Language A you may not be required, or indeed able, to express in Language B. The feeling that something may be lost in translation does not just happen between languages with different typologies, but between languages with similar typologies. Analytical language C may have a continuous form of the verb but no classifiers, while analytical language D may have classifiers but no continuous form of the verb. Synthetic language E may have a passive form of the verb, but not require a verb to be marked to agree with its object, while synthetic language F may have it the other way round. Sometimes complexities do not express anything at all. I have yet to come across a language which has the same complications as English when it comes to forming questions and negative sentences.

It may well be that within a given language you can guess someone's social status by the way they speak, but that will be a question of register. When I say that you "cannot tell anything about a language community simply by studying its language" I am not referring to social niceties such as the T-V distinction nor to whether it has a lexicon capable of describing sub-atomic particles, but to its morphology and syntax considered together as "grammar". The grammar of the various dialects of Occitan when used to discuss how to repair a barn is no less complex than that used by any member of the Académie Française when discussing Racine, despite what some members of that illustrious organisation may believe.


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## myšlenka

Sepia said:


> It seems to me that the North Germanic languages lost most of their flections after the language lost the purpose of "complex storytelling" - meaning after the people were told to shut up about the ancient gods and be good Christians.


That is one of the most far-fetched theory I have ever heard. First of all you are using the very vague notion "complex storytelling" without defining what it actually refers to. The inflections that disappeared (most notably case marking and person marking) were part of the everyday grammar, governed by syntactic structure and prepositions. I don't see why that should depend on the existence of "complex storytelling". Second, it is not clear to me how you imagine that the causal mechanism works. Is it a unidirectional implication of the sort "loss of complex storytelling -> loss of inflection"? Is it possible to have a language with little or no inflections and yet with "complex storytelling"? And how does this relate to East Asian languages? Third, you probably didn't intend to say this, but talking about the "purpose" of a language makes it sound like given linguistic features are volitionally invented and created.


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## wtrmute

Sepia said:


> @the first Germanic language to get a Bible translation was actually Gothic,
> 
> OK I forgot that one - it never made it on to the best-seller lists. The one I mean is the one that did - without being the judge of its popularity, industrial factors made it possible that a lot of people read it.
> 
> @which was fairly inflected as Germanic languages go.
> 
> 
> Weren't they all at the time?



I expect that they were, though I'm not aware of any writings in any other Germanic language for the following 300–400 years, so the comparison is biased.  At any rate, glottochronology is a tragedy, but Proto-Germanic is said to still have been a single language around the time of Christ, so it's likely that all Germanic peoples still spoke very closely related languages at the time of Wulfila's translation.


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## Nino83

There are isolating languages also in the Niger-Congo family, for example Youruba, Igbo don't have noun class/gender, case system, no verbal person marking.
In the same family we have Swahili, with 7 noun classes (6 singular and plural, one for abstract concepts and three for locatives, for a total of 16 different affixes), the verb agrees with subject and class, direct/indirect object, tense and mood with prefixes, infixes and suffixes, adjectives agree with noun in class and number.
There are different languages also in the Indo-European family, English vs. Polish, Icelandic, Russian.
The same in Austronesian languages. In Tagalog verb conjugation is quite complicated, with a lot of prefixes, infixes and circumfixes denoting agent, patient, locative, benefactive, reason, instrumental focus, while in Malay/Indonesian verbs are uninflected, like in English (you have only one prefix for active voice and another one for the passive one, aspect and tense is marked with modal verbs).
In East Asia, Korean and Japanese have a case system and a complex verb conjugation for tense, aspect and formality, and all these languages have classifiers that we can see as prefixes/suffixes, something like 80-90 in Chinese and 120 in Japanese.


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## Sepia

wtrmute said:


> I expect that they were, though I'm not aware of any writings in any other Germanic language for the following 300–400 years, so the comparison is biased.  At any rate, glottochronology is a tragedy, but Proto-Germanic is said to still have been a single language around the time of Christ, so it's likely that all Germanic peoples still spoke very closely related languages at the time of Wulfila's translation.



What might interest you is the original "Jyske Lov" - the first Danish civil law book. From the introduction of Christianity to where the language is today I'd say they made it halfway in approx. 200 years.


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> There are isolating languages also in the Niger-Congo family, for example Youruba, Igbo don't have noun class/gender, case system, no verbal person marking.
> In the same family we have Swahili, with 7 noun classes (6 singular and plural, one for abstract concepts and three for locatives, for a total of 16 different affixes), the verb agrees with subject and class, direct/indirect object, tense and mood with prefixes, infixes and suffixes, adjectives agree with noun in class and number.
> There are different languages also in the Indo-European family, English vs. Polish, Icelandic, Russian.
> The same in Austronesian languages. In Tagalog verb conjugation is quite complicated, with a lot of prefixes, infixes and circumfixes denoting agent, patient, locative, benefactive, reason, instrumental focus, while in Malay/Indonesian verbs are uninflected, like in English (you have only one prefix for active voice and another one for the passive one, aspect and tense is marked with modal verbs).
> In East Asia, Korean and Japanese have a case system and a complex verb conjugation for tense, aspect and formality, and all these languages have classifiers that we can see as prefixes/suffixes, something like 80-90 in Chinese and 120 in Japanese.



The classifier system is borrowed from middle Chinese influence and the case system in Korean and Japanese is quite transparent. The particle "-ulo" in Korean means "with, through, via, by, from, out of..." a person doesn't have to memorize the meanings and usage of them like in Russian with numerous declensions and numerous prepositions with verb or noun complements that have to be remembered. The conjugation is more regular than a western language. There seems to be a trend in Altaic languages to refresh their morphology frequently preventing morphological or adpositional irregularity, it has been noted that they tend to easily make new morphemes to replace the old one or they just don't change as much. Middle Korean was more irregular with ablaut, pitch accent ablaut, another class of irregular verbs, distinct tonal noun stems or vowel changes, etc. Same with tagalog, very crystal morphology and lack of irregular adpositional usage. Swahili is also quite regular, there is a theory Yoruba may be closer to the original language as an explanation of why bantu languages are not as irregular as western languages syntactically (prepositions) or morphologically.

The Scandinavian language and English despite being less inflecting still have syntactical, derivational, and morphological irregularities not found in Korean for instance. Isolating languages also tend to not just be inflection free but also very syntactically ambiguous. 
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~gast/swl3/abstracts/pdf/swl-117.pdf
"Hidden complexity", believe me, Cantonese can be a pain to understand since the grammar omits many things such as subjects or objects.
Old Chinese had derivational morphology that was waning. 

As for Georgian, we cannot instantly assume direct relation to IE but it is possible. The fact ablaut was borrowed can be possible, it is not unheard of for morphological characteristics to be borrowed here and there, one only need look at Svan which has a noun system very similar to NE Caucasian, yet is also being influenced by regular Georgian. Or Armenian declension being very un-IE like compared to Latin. A language can greatly complexify from language contact, not just simplify as in the Vikings with English or Turkic tribes with Mandarin.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> The classifier system is borrowed from middle Chinese influence


I'm interested in this matter. Is there some book where we can find some information about it?


Johnnyjohn said:


> a person doesn't have to memorize the meanings and usage of them like in Russian with numerous declensions


This is because there is no grammatical gender. Russian declension would be very regular and not difficult if there were only one gender and only one declension.


Johnnyjohn said:


> The conjugation is more regular than a western language.


This is true. Japanese has only two irregular verbs, while Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages have some "strong" verbs.


Johnnyjohn said:


> Same with tagalog, very crystal morphology and lack of irregular adpositional usage.


I don't agree on it.
Some verbs take the transitive -um- infix, other ones the mag- prefix. The same prefix can have a different meaning with different verbs, for example _pag-...-an_ has a locative meaning with _kain_ (to eat), _pagkainan = to eat in/on/at_ while it means "about" with _usap_ (speak), _pagusapan = to speak about_.
The same prefix can have different meaning with different verbs, for example the prefix _ma-_ can mean _do something_, _maupo' = to sit down_, _to be able to_, _makain = to be able to eat_, or _to do something involuntarly_, _makain = to eat involuntarly/accidentally something_, and so on.
I'd not call a system like this "transparent", "clear".


Johnnyjohn said:


> Swahili is also quite regular


For every gender/class you have to recall: noun prefix (m-, wa-), subject prefix (a-, wa-), object infix (-m(wa)-), demonstrative pronouns (huyu, hawa, huyo, hao, yule, wale), relative infix (ye-, o-), possessive prefix (w-), associative form (wa), i.e 15 affixes per class.


Johnnyjohn said:


> Isolating languages also tend to not just be inflection free but also very syntactically ambiguous.
> "Hidden complexity", believe me, Cantonese can be a pain to understand since the grammar omits many things such as subjects or objects.


I know. This is why I think Japanese is more understandable (for an Indo-European) than Chinese. Often it is good to have a case marker, an adposition, because it clarifies the role of the word.

A language is easy if it is regular, then predictable.
There are many languages that are more unpredictable than Indo-European ones, for example Navajo and other American languages.
Anyway I find Indo-European languages very regular. For example, Latin has 6 declensions, with very few exceptions. Verbal conjugation is quite regular. If one excludes those few strong verbs where the preterite stem is different from the present stem, verb inflections are very very regular.

You can say that Mandarin is easier because it has no gender, number, no verb conjugation, but when you start counting or using demonstrative pronouns, things change.


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## olaszinho

Nino83 said:


> This is because there is no grammatical gender. Russian declension would be very regular and not difficult if there were only one gender and only one declension.



Russian declensions are far from being regular, believe me, even if there were only one gender.


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## Nino83

olaszinho said:


> Russian declensions are far from being regular, believe me


I believe *in* you!  
I know, more or less, how Latin, Greek, German and Icelandic declensions work, I've seen Polish declensions but they seemed quite regular. I don't know how Russian declensions are.


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## olaszinho

*


Nino83 said:



			Anyway I find Indo-European languages very regular.
		
Click to expand...

*
Nino, it is true that Latin verbs are quite regular, but Romance ones are not regular at all. Take into account the Italian _Passato remoto_, for instance. There are lots of exceptions in French, too. German plurals are a nightmare, so I'd say that you can find plenty of irregularities in most IE languages.


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## Nino83

olaszinho said:


> it is true that Latin verbs are quite regular, but Romance ones are not regular at all. Take into account the Italian _Passato remoto_, for instance.


English irregular (strong) verbs are something like 400, but the most used are 120, more or less. The Italian irregular (strong) verbs are more or less 150. 


olaszinho said:


> German plurals are a nightmare


True. 


olaszinho said:


> so I'd say that you can find plenty of irregularities in most IE languages


Agree. 
I take back what I said about IE languages.


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> I'm interested in this matter. Is there some book where we can find some information about it?
> 
> This is because there is no grammatical gender. Russian declension would be very regular and not difficult if there were only one gender and only one declension.
> 
> This is true. Japanese has only two irregular verbs, while Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages have some "strong" verbs.
> 
> I don't agree on it.
> Some verbs take the transitive -um- infix, other ones the mag- prefix. The same prefix can have a different meaning with different verbs, for example _pag-...-an_ has a locative meaning with _kain_ (to eat), _pagkainan = to eat in/on/at_ while it means "about" with _usap_ (speak), _pagusapan = to speak about_.
> The same prefix can have different meaning with different verbs, for example the prefix _ma-_ can mean _do something_, _maupo' = to sit down_, _to be able to_, _makain = to be able to eat_, or _to do something involuntarly_, _makain = to eat involuntarly/accidentally something_, and so on.
> I'd not call a system like this "transparent", "clear".
> 
> For every gender/class you have to recall: noun prefix (m-, wa-), subject prefix (a-, wa-), object infix (-m(wa)-), demonstrative pronouns (huyu, hawa, huyo, hao, yule, wale), relative infix (ye-, o-), possessive prefix (w-), associative form (wa), i.e 15 affixes per class.
> 
> I know. This is why I think Japanese is more understandable (for an Indo-European) than Chinese. Often it is good to have a case marker, an adposition, because it clarifies the role of the word.
> 
> A language is easy if it is regular, then predictable.
> There are many languages that are more unpredictable than Indo-European ones, for example Navajo and other American languages.
> Anyway I find Indo-European languages very regular. For example, Latin has 6 declensions, with very few exceptions. Verbal conjugation is quite regular. If one excludes those few strong verbs where the preterite stem is different from the present stem, verb inflections are very very regular.
> 
> You can say that Mandarin is easier because it has no gender, number, no verb conjugation, but when you start counting or using demonstrative pronouns, things change.



Many of the classifiers are direct loanwords from middle Chinese, they also did not exist before contact, perhaps it is an assumption, it could have been convergent evolution.
Postpositions are not as random in Korean or Japanese though. -e can mean in/on/at/to/into/upto/by/along.....
As for the affixes in Tagalog, the conjugational morphology is regular, there is one paradigm used for all verbs. Tagalog may have it's prefixes but they are more like prefixed verbs in German, that still leaves out regular usage of prepositions.
Swahili noun class markers many as there are are fewer than the total amount of conjugational paradigms as in Russian where every verb is pretty much irregular.
Indo European languages also tend to have a lot of derivational irregularity, Navajo has one agentive suffix while russian has -ik with at least 13 variants including extensions and so on. A grammar of czech would show the fact irregularity is heavily distributed in every area of the language while navajo would focus entirely on the verbs which there are a limited class.

But this is all off topic, the real question is: why are east asian languages isolating?


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## Angelo di fuoco

olaszinho said:


> Russian declensions are far from being regular, believe me, even if there were only one gender.



I would say they are far from being that irregular either, except for stress, which often poses problems even to natives speakers.



Johnnyjohn said:


> Many of the classifiers are direct loanwords from middle Chinese, they also did not exist before contact, perhaps it is an assumption, it could have been convergent evolution.
> Postpositions are not as random in Korean or Japanese though. -e can mean in/on/at/to/into/upto/by/along.....
> As for the affixes in Tagalog, the conjugational morphology is regular, there is one paradigm used for all verbs. Tagalog may have it's prefixes but they are more like prefixed verbs in German, that still leaves out regular usage of prepositions.
> Swahili noun class markers many as there are are fewer than the total amount of conjugational paradigms as in Russian where every verb is pretty much irregular.
> Indo European languages also tend to have a lot of derivational irregularity, Navajo has one agentive suffix while russian has -ik with at least 13 variants including extensions and so on. A grammar of czech would show the fact irregularity is heavily distributed in every area of the language while navajo would focus entirely on the verbs which there are a limited class.
> 
> But this is all off topic, the real question is: why are east asian languages isolating?



As for Russian and Czech: if you don't understand (and, what's worse, dont _want_ to understand) the way Slavic verbs work it doesn't mean that every verb is pretty much irregular. We had that discussion elsewhere. And once again you make it clear that "irregular" languages are inferior to those you can press into a limited number of paradigms.
Czech neuter nouns in -í: the same ending for six cases out of seven.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> Many of the classifiers are direct loanwords from middle Chinese, they also did not exist before contact, perhaps it is an assumption, it could have been convergent evolution.


The first documents in Japanese are from the eight century AD. There are no documents before the Chinese influence.  
It's true that some nouns about body parts are similar to that of some Austronesian languages and that reduplication in some words in order to form plurals is similar to the Austronesian strategy. Somebody says that Japanese is a mixed language, Austronesian with Chinese influence, but we don't have any document attesting earlier stages of the language.  


Johnnyjohn said:


> Swahili noun class markers many as there are are fewer than the total amount of conjugational paradigms as in Russian where every verb is pretty much irregular.


Let me clarify one thing. Romance and Germanic strong verbs are irregular in the stem of the preterite, not in inflections. If we speak about nominal and verbal inflections, they are very very regular.  


Johnnyjohn said:


> the real question is: why are east asian languages isolating?


I think it's difficult to say *why* it is so.


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> The first documents in Japanese are from the eight century AD. There are no documents before the Chinese influence.
> It's true that some nouns about body parts are similar to that of some Austronesian languages and that reduplication in some words in order to form plurals is similar to the Austronesian strategy. Somebody says that Japanese is a mixed language, Austronesian with Chinese influence, but we don't have any document attesting earlier stages of the language.



It is entirely possible that a creole language in the deep past can develop morphology over time and become indistinguishable from a regular language. A Korean girl I know even told of a legend where Japanese is supposedly the result of them attempting to teach some islanders Korean yet they failed and spoken a pidgin version (it's nationalistic crap though). Japanese morphology can be easily traced to contractions of separate words.

Either it is an ex-creole or it seems to follow the altaic trend of constantly replacing old morphology with new regular ones. An old 19th century book mentioned that the "nomadic nature" prevented old morphology from remaining and that "each generation would speak a different grammar than the elder, creating new suffixes fresh absent of weary fused paradigms" which while an exaggeration would have to be true to some degree to explain the sheer regularity, either that or it just so happened that way that languages like Swahili, Tagalog, or Manchu just didn't ever become irregular. Modern Mongolian on the other hand seems to have more vowels, a more complicated syllable structure, and some more irregular tinges here and there compared to the one Ghengis spoke. Fact is that many languages with numerous morphological paradigms or stems can be traced back to a less morphologically complex proto language. Languages can complexify in all areas just because. Proto Indo European's earliest stages was like Hittite, something closer to an Indonesian language (not standard Indonesian but more like one of the island dialects). Indonesian could morph into Russian in thousands of years, it just happens.

But the questions still remains: Why are east Asian languages isolating, and why do they have so few word boundaries or notions of transitivity and syntactical irregularities? They are pragmatically orientated. Perhaps the theory of "hidden complexity" as a form of maturation is true.


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## wtrmute

Johnnyjohn said:


> It is entirely possible that a creole language in the deep past can develop morphology over time and become indistinguishable from a regular language. A Korean girl I know even told of a legend where Japanese is supposedly the result of them attempting to teach some islanders Korean yet they failed and spoken a pidgin version (it's nationalistic crap though). Japanese morphology can be easily traced to contractions of separate words.



I heard about that one.  Supposedly, the cincher is that the old (pre-Chinese) number system only went up to ten... which is ridiculous, both because because the old number system went up to (at least) nine million (やおよろず is eight hundred myriads in the old system) and because I know languages which are definitely not creoles and whose number system did not even reach 10 — Old Tupi only had _oîepé_, _mokõî_, _mosapyr_ and _irundyk_.  Pirahã famously has only _hói_ "one, few" and _hoí_ "two, many".



Johnnyjohn said:


> Either it is an ex-creole or it seems to follow the altaic trend of constantly replacing old morphology with new regular ones. An old 19th century book mentioned that the "nomadic nature" prevented old morphology from remaining and that "each generation would speak a different grammar than the elder, creating new suffixes fresh absent of weary fused paradigms" which while an exaggeration would have to be true to some degree to explain the sheer regularity, either that or it just so happened that way that languages like Swahili, Tagalog, or Manchu just didn't ever become irregular.



Coming back to Old Tupi, pre-Contact Tupi verbs assumed a special form when it was preceded in the same period by "an adverb, preposition, gerund or subordinative conjunction" (according to Fr. Lemos Barbosa's grammar): for example, "the brush/woodland caught fire" is _kaá o-ká_, while "at night, the brush caught fire" is _pytun-me kaá kaî_.  As you can see, this is fairly irregular, and the Tupi were mostly nomadic (they practised some rudimentary form of agriculture).

They also had some sort of class prefix on some nouns that changed according to whether the noun took a possessive, for example: _t-eté_ "body (of a human)" vs _s-eté_ "body (of an animal or thing)" vs. _gûyrá r-eté_ "the body of the bird" vs. _xe r-eté_ "my body" vs. _s-eté_ "his/her body".  These odd prefixes have been found in other Tupian languages and, apparently, also in Macro-Je and Cariban languages, which allowed a researcher to posit a genetic relation between those three large South American families, so it's not the case that nomadic peoples will necessarily drop old morphology.



Johnnyjohn said:


> But the questions still remains: Why are east Asian languages isolating, and why do they have so few word boundaries or notions of transitivity and syntactical irregularities? They are pragmatically orientated. Perhaps the theory of "hidden complexity" as a form of maturation is true.



I still think that East Asian languages are isolating due to Middle Chinese influence (the prestige and sheer amount of lexical borrowings clearly has affected the surrounding languages).  As for Middle Chinese, it was isolating probably by chance: languages must pick a strategy, and Middle Chinese went for an isolating paradigm.  Tonogenesis increases multiplicatively the amount of possible syllables, so dropping phonemes probably looked attractive to speakers on an economy of effort basis.


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## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> All languages are equally complex.


This is a very often repeated statement, but it lacks substance. See Guy Deutscher's "Through the language glass". 



Hulalessar said:


> All languages are equally capable of expressing complex thought.


All languages have a potential of developing tools to do so, but not all have the vocabulary or grammatical tools.


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## Hulalessar

Ben Jamin said:


> This is a very often repeated statement, but it lacks substance. See Guy Deutscher's "Through the language glass"



It has to be admitted that the proposition is not easily proved, but then neither is the proposition that some languages are more complex than others. You have to define what you mean by complexity and then find some means of measuring it. If you manage to do that then you have to study every language otherwise you cannot say that _all_ languages are equally complex. The best you can do is to rely on intuition based on what languages you know and what others say about languages you do not know, and to pay attention to such studies as have been made which to try to establish which of two or more languages is the most complex.

Linguists, like all social scientists, are not entirely free of prejudice. Despite any informed linguist being well aware that many languages spoken by non-technologically advanced societies can hardly be described as lacking complexity, there may be an underlying tendency to perceive that the idea of equal complexity supports egalitarian ideals, whilst asserting that some languages are more complex than others undermines it. There is also the "prove Chomsky wrong" element which infects a lot of modern linguistics.

Perhaps the point that is being made by asserting that all languages are equally complex is to prevent equating complex inflectional morphology with overall complexity - something which, if this forum is anything to go by, is quite common. As I put it in another thread some years ago:

_When comparing an inflected language like Latin with English an Englishman is not aware of the covert complexities of English that he takes for granted. But perhaps we can imagine a Roman schoolboy who has been learning English for a while explaining it to his younger brother who is soon to have his first lesson:

"English is horribly complicated. First off the words don't change their endings so that you know what work the word is doing. In fact the words don't really have endings so you can't tell whether a word is a verb or noun just by looking at it as you can in Latin. Half the time time you have to guess. The most common ending is an 's' which does three completely different things. Then you have to get the words in the right order. If you get them in the wrong order it means something different. You can't put the most important word first like we do in Latin. What's really tricky is that when you use a noun you have to decide if its definite or indefinite and then put the right word in front of it, only sometimes you don't put any word in front. Then when you use a verb it always has to have a subject. And don't talk to me about the passive; it's not simple like it is in Latin where we usually just use one word, you always have to use two. And when you're using verbs you have to think all the time about whether the action is continuous or not. And they have a special form for emphasis. And you'll never get the hang of negation. I mean if you want to negate the past tense you have to use the present adding in an unnecessary word. And questions can be as tricky as negation involving the same extra words that you use in negation. And sometimes what looks like a question is in fact a conditional. And then there are prepositions all over the place where we don't need them. But what's really weird is that when it comes to the dative you can either use a preposition or drop it, but if you drop it you have to get the word in the right place. How mad is that? It sort of has a genitive but the ending they stick on can apply to more than one word and, if you use the ending, you can't tell if the noun is singular or plural except when you write when you have to get a little tick in the right place and apparently that confuses English greengrocers."_

Perhaps "All languages are equally complex" is better rephrased as: "There is no sound reason for believing that some languages are more complex than others."



Ben Jamin said:


> All languages have a potential of developing tools to do so, but not all have the vocabulary or grammatical tools.



I can agree that a language may lack the vocabulary to describe, say, advanced technology, but not the grammatical tools. Instructions on how to conduct a scientific experiment do not require more complex grammar than instructions on how to grow crops.


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## olaszinho

Hulalessar said:


> First off the words don't change their endings so that you know what work the word is doing. In fact the words don't really have endings so you can't tell whether a word is a verb or noun just by looking at it as you can in Latin. Half the time time you have to guess. The most common ending is an 's' which does three completely different things



In my opinion, this is the easiest aspect of English, indeed! All the other grammar features, you have mentioned, may be tricky, you are right. To sum up, I could say that English morphology is a walk in the park while its syntax is a nightmare.


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> In fact the words don't really have endings so you can't tell whether a word is a verb or noun just by looking at it as you can in Latin.


Although in Latin sentences like this were possible, "ad portum *portās portās*" (you *bring* *doors* to the port), you're right.


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## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> _
> "English is horribly complicated. First off the words don't change their endings so that you know what work the word is doing. In fact the words don't really have endings so you can't tell whether a word is a verb or noun just by looking at it as you can in Latin. Half the time time you have to guess. The most common ending is an 's' which does three completely different things. Then you have to get the words in the right order. If you get them in the wrong order it means something different. You can't put the most important word first like we do in Latin. What's really tricky is that when you use a noun you have to decide if its definite or indefinite and then put the right word in front of it, only sometimes you don't put any word in front. Then when you use a verb it always has to have a subject. And don't talk to me about the passive; it's not simple like it is in Latin where we usually just use one word, you always have to use two. *And when you're using verbs you have to think all the time about whether the action is continuous or not.* And they have a special form for emphasis. And you'll never get the hang of negation. I mean if you want to negate the past tense you have to use the present adding in an unnecessary word. And questions can be as tricky as negation involving the same extra words that you use in negation. And sometimes what looks like a question is in fact a conditional. And then there are prepositions all over the place where we don't need them. But what's really weird is that when it comes to the dative you can either use a preposition or drop it, but if you drop it you have to get the word in the right place. How mad is that? It sort of has a genitive but the ending they stick on can apply to more than one word and, if you use the ending, you can't tell if the noun is singular or plural except when you write when you have to get a little tick in the right place and apparently that confuses English greengrocers."_


A very good and funny text, illustrating how everything is relative, also in the view on languages! 
However, I don't think that the sentence highlighted in bold letters is quite to the point. Latin distinguishes between continuous/repetitive actions expressed by imperfectum and completed actions expressed by perfectum, doesn't it?


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## Nino83

Ben Jamin said:


> continuous/repetitive actions expressed by imperfectum and completed actions expressed by perfectum


The distinction is more like _habitual_ vs. _single_ actions.


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## Ben Jamin

Nino83 said:


> The distinction is more like _habitual_ vs. _single_ actions.


How would you translate "Marcus entered the room when Titus was reading a book" into Latin?


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## Nino83

Yes, preterite + imperfect.


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## Flaminius

Nino83 said:


> Japanese has only two irregular verbs, while Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages have some "strong" verbs.


Japanese has a lot moremirregular verbs than a paedagogical textbooks usually lists. See:
http://homepage3.nifty.com/jgrammar/grammar/data/uniform.htm
(Don't know how to silence the high-handed link parse function.)



Johnnyjohn said:


> But this is all off topic, the real question is: why are east asian languages isolating?


I am afraid you are practising categorical gerrymandering.  Agglutinative languages including Japanese and Korean look to me synthetic enough.


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## Karton Realista

Nino83 said:


> I've seen Polish declensions but they seemed quite regular.


There are 5 masculine, 6 feminine and 6 neuter ones (for nouns), each having exceptions, or changes resulting in using relics as equally correct forms/replacements for what would be regular forms. Also plenty of irregularities for the most commonly used words, which is obvious.


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## M Mira

Johnnyjohn said:


> But the questions still remains: Why are east Asian languages isolating, and why do they have so few word boundaries or notions of transitivity and syntactical irregularities? They are pragmatically orientated. Perhaps the theory of "hidden complexity" as a form of maturation is true.





wtrmute said:


> I heard about that one.  Supposedly, the cincher is that the old (pre-Chinese) number system only went up to ten... which is ridiculous, both because because the old number system went up to (at least) nine million (やおよろず is eight hundred myriads in the old system) and because I know languages which are definitely not creoles and whose number system did not even reach 10 — Old Tupi only had _oîepé_, _mokõî_, _mosapyr_ and _irundyk_.  Pirahã famously has only _hói_ "one, few" and _hoí_ "two, many".


Although rare, it's entirely possible for an established language to lose its inherited number system to a borrowed one. This can be seen in Thai, where the Tai-Kadai numbers are almost extinct, replaced by Chinese and Sanskrit derivates.

Native big Japanese numbers still exist in fixed expressions, after 10, there's 20 (hata, hatsu), 30 (miso), 100 (momo), 1000 (chi), 10000 (yorozu), mainly used in established compounds.

Regarding East Asian languages in general: I think it may have to do with the isochrony/prosody of the languages. AFAIK none of them are stress-timed, so there's a much smaller chance for syllables/morae of particles to be reduced and incoporated into the words attached than in stress-timed languages.

For transitivity, we do have a few verbs with "morphology" that creates VI/VT pairs, in Middle Chinese, this was represented by voicing (voiced-> VI, voiceless->VT) and tones (departing tone->VT), but in Mandarin they're not well preserved due to devoicing of the language, and the rest are often leveled by analogy with the verbs that no longer have such distinctions. However, as the need surfaced, new two-character verbs that are distinctively transitive or intransitive are formed by compounding the root with a verb with low lexical content, for example 弄壞 "break(vt)" and 壞掉 "break(vi)", the transitive form is augmented with the verb 弄 "handle, manipulate" while the intransitive form is augmented with the verb 掉.(prototypically "drop involuntarily", but as a complement it means something like "separate", "gone" or perfect aspect with negative connotations)

For word boundary, it was totally redundant in Old Chinese, where syllable boundaries are also morpheme boundaries. While no longer true in modern Chinese, there's still little need to deliberately separate words in speech, since the disyllabification of old monosyllabic words already served to minimize confusion.


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## Hulalessar

The more isolating and analytic a language is the more it leaves to context: Consider the following in English:

Are you off? = Are you leaving now?

Are you off? = Are you not feeling too well?

Are you off? = Are you not on duty?

Are you off? Are you no longer on whatever it was you were on?

Is it off? = Has it been cancelled?

Is it off? = Has it gone bad?

Is it off? Is whatever was on something, now off it?

Is it off? Is it not turned on?

Is it off? Is it not on the menu?

That's a bit off = That's not quite aligned properly

That's a bit off = That's not altogether proper


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## Itoy

Nino83 said:


> Some verbs take the transitive -um- infix, other ones the mag- prefix. The same prefix can have a different meaning with different verbs, for example _pag-...-an_ has a locative meaning with _kain_ (to eat), _pagkainan = to eat in/on/at_ while it means "about" with _usap_ (speak), _pagusapan = to speak about_.
> The same prefix can have different meaning with different verbs, for example the prefix _ma-_ can mean _do something_, _maupo' = to sit down_, _to be able to_, _makain = to be able to eat_, or _to do something involuntarly_, _makain = to eat involuntarly/accidentally something_, and so on.
> I'd not call a system like this "transparent", "clear".



Hello guys,

I'm new in this forum. Just wanted to comment on Nino83's post above.

The locative trigger with location subject "_-an_" that you mentioned is probably becoming obsolete now. _["Pagkainan"_ = to eat in] or the oft-repeated example in linguistics books [_binilhan_] now sound archaic and ambiguous. "_pinag(ka)kainan_" and "_pinag(bi)bilhan_" would be the current terms. "_pinag...an_" in this case has taken its place. And I can't think of a situation where there is an involuntary/accidental meaning in _makain _[huwag pumunta doon, baka makain ka ng oso = don't go there, a bear might eat you]. _Makakain_, however, does have this accidental meaning [huwag mo gawin iyan, baka makakain ka ng lason = don't do that, you might (accidentally) eat poison].

A related question I would pose to the learned crowd in this forum is why did Austronesian alignment and voice alternations (present in Formosan, all Philippine, some Bornean languages) stop in the Philippines and not spread widely into Indonesia? If you accept, that is, the widely-held(?) hypothesis that Proto-Austronesian began in Formosa(?) or Indochina(Cham?) and then spread south and southeast. The south-to-north borrowings and influences (Indonesia > Philippines) would merit investigation. I'm not familiar with Proto-Malay but some sort of voice simplification probably occurred. Modern Indonesian, for example, as far as I know has lost(?) voice-marking affixes (present in Proto-Malay?). After I saw the documentary "The Linguists" that many of you probably know too, with David and Greg investigating Pazeh in Taiwan, I had a look at the grammar and could recognize about 80% of the verbal pre/in/suffixes.

Anecdote: when I first encountered ergative when I was learning Georgian, I thought the concept was truly weird...until I realized I had been using it all my life in Tagalog, although I've read papers where it is argued that Tagalog is not really syntactically ergative (as a native speaker, I believe it is). If this was off-topic, my apologies.

M


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> As for the affixes in Tagalog, the conjugational morphology is regular, there is one paradigm used for all verbs.



That's incorrect. See for example:

_kumain _"to eat, ate", _kumakain _"eat(s)",_ kakain "will eat"_
vs.
_maglinis _"to clean",_ naglinis _"cleaned",_ naglilinis _"clean(s)",_ maglilinis_ "will clean"

This contrast can't be collapsed into a single paradigm with different affixes.


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