# 2 languages together simplifying each others' grammar



## Philippa

Hello,

I've recently read a cool book on the history of the English language and its spelling. In it the author says that English lost many of its endings of words due to its close contact with Norman French. After William the Conquerer invaded England in 1066 the 2 languages of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French co-existed for a couple of hundred years. This book claims that the grammar of both languages got simpler as many people then had to speak both languages in their regular day-to-day work and social contacts, but had a much stronger background in one or the other, so they tended to gradually simplify the grammar to aid communication and reduce confusion. It seems this is the way that English lost its word genders (from Old German) and most of its verb endings.

I've never heard about this idea before (and I've read and watched a documentary series about the history of English before). Is it a theory with a name?! What is your opinion of it? Have any other languages gone through a similar thing at all? Or maybe they might be going through it now? For example, perhaps with Castellano and Catalán, people don't have one language as a lots stronger/mother tongue one than the other so there isn't the 'linguistic pressure' to simplify as most people are bilingual. Apparently the people living in Britain back then weren't fully bilingual.

Thank you for reading this - I hope it makes sense! I'm be really interested to read your posts.
Saludos lingüísticos
Philippa


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## Athaulf

Philippa said:


> I've recently read a cool book on the history of the English language and its spelling. In it the author says that English lost many of its endings of words due to its close contact with Norman French.



First, please allow me to express my pet peeve once again.  The grammar of a natural language can never be "simplified". Its _morphology_ can, as indeed happened in English, but _grammar_ is much more than just morphology! 

Now, as for the theory you describe, it is known as the "Middle English creole hypothesis", but as plausible as it may seem superficially, it has very little support among linguists nowadays. Here are some strong reasons against it:

(1) The process of losing inflections in Old English had already been long underway by the time Normans came. This fact is somewhat obscured because the 11th century written Old English was already pretty archaic even for its own time and kept some inflections that had already disappeared from the spoken language. However, some inscriptions in the vernacular language (e.g. the Kirkdale Sundial) show that a significant loss of inflections had occurred at least in some Old English dialects already before the Conquest.

(2) It's unlikely that there was ever really a widespread bilingualism in French, whose usage was restricted to the life and business of a tiny elite, with which the common folk had little or nothing to do. Except for the legal and governmental terms, the core vocabulary of English remained overwhelmingly Germanic through this period (and largely even to the present day).

(3) Middle English preserved some features that would be extremely unlikely to survive a process of creolization, most notably the ablauted irregular verbs (which are still alive and kicking today) and the remnants of the strong/weak adjective declensions (which have disappeared in the meantime).

(4) There are many historical examples that run counter to the basic hypothesis about the language contact causing morphological simplification. It's easy to find plenty of languages that underwent morphological simplification similar to English without any extraordinary language contact (e.g. Scandinavian languages). It's also easy to find a vast number of languages that kept a complicated morphology in historical circumstances very similar to the Normal conquest of England (e.g. many Slavic languages). 

And so on. Overall, there is very little support for the creole hypothesis nowadays, and in my opinion, it sounds highly implausible considering the above arguments.


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## Spectre scolaire

I wonder if one of the reasons why the _creole hypothesis_ doesn’t really work in this case is the fact that the language of the 1066 invaders was not the one learned by the invaded, but vice versa: The Normans (who spoke French – that is “French” of those days) learned Anglo-Saxon and were eventually assimilated in England whereas the Anglo-Saxons were “only” _code-copying_ vocabulary from the Normans who had their prestigious civilization to offer. Ironically the invaders were French assimilated Vikings and the invaded were partly of the same Scandinavian stock.

Two other language situations for the sake of comparison:

1) In Haiti the local African slaves were supposed to learn the language of the (colonial) invaders (the Frenchmen), a task which they “couldn’t stand up to” as a French purist would say. They learned French without Grevisse***), and an entirely new language came into being after some generations. In the process they completely forgot their African vernaculars.

2) Following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek was brought to people who had never heard about Plato or Aristoteles, and yet they were supposed to learn the new prestige language. The same happened: they were not up to it... The so-called _koiné_ emerged, and numerous local idioms, some of non-Indo-European origin diappeared in the process. But in this case _koiné_, the “creole language” – probably due to the fact that it became the language of a new religion – “supplanted” Classical Greek with its complicated structure, a language whose parochial existence in the Greek city states couldn’t possibly survive the new global visions of Alexander. For the sake of argument it would have been like Haitian Creole supplanting French because the _woodoo religion_ had spread to the heartland of the invader. 

Now, in the case of the Norman conquest, if the same basic creole procedure as with French in Haiti and Greek in Anatolia had occurred, the Anglo-Saxons would have appropriated French – in their own concocted way – and the Anglo-Saxon language which once came from the continent and had supplanted Celtic and whatever else, would have disappeared altogether. 

In addtition to the above, I think I can adhere to most of what _Athaulf_ says. 

***) For those who are blissfully ignorant about this Belgian(!) scholar, Grevisse is synonymous with French standard grammar. 
 ​*PS*: I hope this is non too inconsistent – it was written in a haste.


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## ireney

Spectre Scolaire I think you are oversimplifying things a bit when it comes to Koine Greek. The process of "simplifying" the Greek accent had started before the conquests of Alexander albeit with a really slow pace. Plus, let us not forget that some centuries passed between those conquests and the Gospels 

note: My excuse for any mistakes is being woozy


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## Pedro y La Torre

Philippa said:


> This book claims that the grammar of both languages got simpler as many people then had to speak both languages in their regular day-to-day work and social contacts, but had a much stronger background in one or the other, so they tended to gradually simplify the grammar to aid communication and reduce confusion



That's going a little far. The process of "simplification" had already begun thanks to influence from the Scandinavians combined with the fact that the vast majority of the English (the peasant's) never learned to speak Norman, would lead me to believe that while Norman French certainly introduced a great number of new words into the language, it's effect on grammar might be overstated.


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## Spectre scolaire

ireney said:
			
		

> let us not forget that some centuries passed between those conquests and the Gospels


 Just enough time to “standardize” a new Greek language, the so-called _Koiné_  – even if the language of the various parts of the NT is a long shot from being consistent in terms of adhering to one particular standard. Some Hellenistic writers are much more coherent in their language which, for all intents and purposes, is something very different from the Classical language. 

My point is that this _Koiné_ was basically the result of a creolization process. Such a process never took place in England where we are rather faced with an enormous impact, especially lexical (see _Pedro y la Torre_), of one language upon another.

English remained a Germanic language; however. 
 ​


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## Consimmer

_Empires of the Word_ by Nicholas Ostler (one of my favorite books) has a section on the history of English language development just after the Norman conquest. Basically the impact was relatively small, per some of the reasons mentioned in earlier posts. Further impact did not take root due to The Plague in the 14th/15th century, and the printing press would pretty much set the stage of establishing a "standard" form.


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## Wynn Mathieson

Athaulf said:


> The grammar of a natural language can never be "simplified". Its _morphology_ can, as indeed happened in English, but _grammar_ is much more than just morphology!



Bravo, Athaulf. That dictum should be inscribed above the portals of every institute purporting to concern itself with (T)EFL!

W.


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## Philippa

Hello,
Thank you for all your opinions and answers so far. Very interesting, but I do feel a rising sense of panic that it might all get too complicated for a simple scientist like me!!
Thank you, Athaulf, fascinating stuff. I looked up 'ablauted' and felt happy, but the dictionary didn't help me with 'morphology' - if you think I need to understand it to help me understand this discussion then would you please explain it to me - sorry! 

I found a thread in the this foro on whether English is a creole and the whole discussion seemed to hinge on how you define 'creole' so I think it might be worth defining it here:
creolized language A language derived from a pidgin but more complex in grammar and vocabulary than the ancestral pidgin because it has become the native tongue of a community
I don't think the author is suggesting a creole or even a pidgin was created by the contact between the 2 languages, but that some simplification happened, I guess in a similar, but much less complete way than creolisation. He claims that both Anglo-Saxon and Norman French were simplified by the contact but not that either turned into a new language or than a new, 3rd language was created.

Why do languages either keep or lose their inflections and other grammar thingies, then? You mention Scandinavian and Slavic languages - what are the thoeries that explain why they are different?
Pedro y La Torre, you mention influence from Scandinavian simplifing English - how does this work? Surely there wouldn't be enough people travelling to and fro and talking together for the languages to interact?

Coming back to creolisation - what type of grammar things survive this process and why? English verbs like 'sing sang sung', have presumably survived all this time because they are just so common and basic.

It seems there were enough Norman French rulers to make almost all the written material to be in that language rather than Anglo-Saxon (which had been written down quite often before then). Maybe it was partly this lack of written 'English' that led to it getting simpler as it's the written language that tends to retain the grammatical niceties and spoken language that moves on. My book's author also claims that many Anglo-Saxons would have wanted to learn some Norman French to get on in life and that many Normans would have needed some Anglo-Saxon to boss their people around. Definitely not bilingualism for many, but both languages spoken to some extent by quite a few.


Spectre scolaire said:


> ...the Anglo-Saxons were “only” _code-copying_ vocabulary from the Normans who had their prestigious civilization to offer...


This author would disagree to some extent with the 'prestigious civilisation' bit as he reckons that the Anglo-Saxons had a higher literacy rate that the conquerors and at least as sophisticated civilisation!
I agree that English picked up lots of French vocabulary (especially for legal terms, posh (!) foods and the like) from this time, but was it a time of rapid grammatical simplification too? Did we lose our word genders then, for example?


Athaulf said:


> And so on.


Hey, that's cheating!!  If there are other things then you should mention them - it'd be interesting and anyway, how can I ask questions about them if you just hint at strong but secret arguments against the 'creolisation hypothesis' with an 'and so on'!!

Good evening from here!
Philippa


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## tenseconds

Philippa said:


> Have any other languages gone through a similar thing at all? Or maybe they might be going through it now? For example, perhaps with Castellano and Catalán...



Actually, I have heard that this happened with Castilian and Basque, since Castilian developed in contact with Basque, it is simplified compared to other romances in the Iberian Peninsula (for example, it has only 5 vowels).


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## Pedro y La Torre

Philippa said:


> Why do languages either keep or lose their inflections and other grammar thingies, then? You mention Scandinavian and Slavic languages - what are the thoeries that explain why they are different?
> Pedro y La Torre, you mention influence from Scandinavian simplifing English - how does this work? Surely there wouldn't be enough people travelling to and fro and talking together for the languages to interact?



You're forgetting that the Vikings settled and ruled a significant part of Northern England known as the Danelaw. Thus their language had a significant impact upon Old English, changing and/or simplifying it to a great extent, at least as much as Norman and probably more.


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## 0stsee

Pedro y La Torre said:


> You're forgetting that the Vikings settled and ruled a significant part of Northern England known as the Danelaw. Thus their language had a significant impact upon Old English, changing and/or simplifying it to a great extent, at least as much as Norman and probably more.


 
A bit off topic comment:

If you ever learned a Scandinavian language, you'd realize just how "Scandinavian" English is.
I was surprised of the things I discovered while learning Scandinavian languages.

I don't know, though, if the simplification of English had anything to do with the Scandinavian influence.

Gruss,


0stsee


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## Athaulf

0stsee said:


> If you ever learned a Scandinavian language, you'd realize just how "Scandinavian" English is.
> I was surprised of the things I discovered while learning Scandinavian languages.



However, back in the day, Vikings spoke various dialects of Old Norse, which was a highly inflected language, just like Old English and pretty much any Germanic language at that time. Subsequently, the descendants of both Old English and Old Norse went on to lose almost all inflections in the following centuries, but these were parallel and independent developments, at least on the Scandinavian side. 



> I don't know, though, if the simplification of English had anything to do with the Scandinavian influence.


Some theories along these lines have been proposed, namely that the loss of Old English inflections was caused in part by the contact with Old Norse (see, for example, this paper). This hypothesis seems more plausible to me than the Norman French one, since the language contact with the Danes was likely much more extensive than with the Normans, and it's possible to point out more Norse than French borrowings and influences in the very basic vocabulary and grammar of English. But this is only my amateurish opinion anyway.


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## Athaulf

Philippa said:


> Thank you, Athaulf, fascinating stuff. I looked up 'ablauted' and felt happy, but the dictionary didn't help me with 'morphology' - if you think I need to understand it to help me understand this discussion then would you please explain it to me - sorry!



_ Morphology_ refers to the part of grammar that deals with the internal structure of words, i.e. how you combine the smallest units of speech that carry some meaning (known as morphemes) into words. For example, you form the word _books_ by combining the noun stem _book_ with the plural suffix _-s_; both of these units are individual morphemes, since they don't preserve any meaning if divided further ("s" is already a single sound, but "book" also loses all meaning if anything is taken out of it -- it's meaningless to divide it into, say, _b + ook_ or _boo + k_). Or, the past tense verb form _discredited_ can be broken into three morphemes (negation prefix _dis-_ + verb stem _credit_ + past tense suffix_ -ed_). Obviously, each language has a set of rules that determine how morphemes can be used to form valid words, and the "morphology" of a language refers to this set of rules.

Compared to the majority of the other languages of the world, English has a very simple morphology. This is especially true for English inflections, i.e. the way words are marked for case, tense, person, gender, etc. Compare, for example, what you can do with a verb in English and Spanish. English has the third person suffix _-s_, the past tense suffix _-ed_, the gerund suffix _-ing_, and that's pretty much it, whereas in Spanish, you have to learn dozens upon dozens of suffixes that a verb takes in different persons, tenses, and moods. Similarly, for English nouns you just have the possessive and plural suffix _-s_, whereas in e.g. Latin or Russian you have to learn complicated tables of case declensions. Even the irregular verbs and nouns in English are very simple to handle compared to the morphological irregularities found in these other languages. Old English had a much more complicated morphology than Modern English, comparable to modern German.

The problem, however, is that the simple morphology of English often makes people believe that its grammar is overall simpler than many other languages -- but nothing could be further from the truth. The simplicity of the English morphology is balanced by its extremely complicated syntax, i.e. the grammar rules for combining individual words into valid sentences. It is indeed very easy to learn to form single English words correctly, but it's extremely hard -- unless you're a native speaker, of course -- to learn to form valid English sentences. Selecting the correct order of words, choosing the right prepositions, deciding when to use articles... these rules are harder to master than even the most complicated and irregular tables of conjugations and declensions found in other languages. Hence my objection to people who claim that English is "easy" or that its grammar is "simple". Yes, its morphology is simple, but its overall grammar is every bit as complicated and difficult as any other natural human language.



> Why do languages either keep or lose their inflections and other grammar thingies, then? You mention Scandinavian and Slavic languages - what are the thoeries that explain why they are different?


I'm afraid that nobody has a reliable answer to these questions. Language change is a very curious process. Linguists nowadays know how to reconstruct the process of language change beyond the available documentary evidence in a fairy reliable way, and they also know that language change follows certain rules whenever it happens. However, what exactly _triggers_ linguistic change is still a complete mystery. Sometimes a language will keep a complicated case or conjugation system almost unchanged for thousands of years, only to lose it completely in just a few centuries without any apparent reason. Sometimes a language closely related to yours, and spoken only a 3-4 hour drive away, will diverge more than another related language spoken a thousand miles away in the same period. Sometimes the language changes so rapidly that a few centuries old documents are totally incomprehensible to a modern speaker without special training, and sometimes it changes so slowly that one can read them almost as easily as yesterday's newspaper. 

Now, in each individual case, it's easy to formulate plausible-sounding theories about why a given language has changed drastically or remained relatively stable. The problem is that such theories usually explain everything and nothing. They can't be refuted in the particular cases for which they are tailored, but they also provide no testable predictions, because for any combination of historical circumstances and language change (or lack thereof), you can find some languages that passed through that exact combination. In particular, as I've already mentioned, if you observe a large enough number of examples, you'll see that there is no apparent connection between foreign rule, extensive language contact, and  language change, except in the special case of creolization.



> Pedro y La Torre, you mention influence from Scandinavian simplifing English - how does this work? Surely there wouldn't be enough people travelling to and fro and talking together for the languages to interact?


Actually, Old English  seems to have had more contact with Old Norse than with Norman French (see my above post about this topic). 



> Coming back to creolisation - what type of grammar things survive this process and why? English verbs like 'sing sang sung', have presumably survived all this time because they are just so common and basic.


Well, the case declensions of basic words were also common and basic, and yet they disappeared completely. My native language has a very complicated case system, and believe me, we feel that choosing the right case for a noun is as basic and fundamental as anything else.  

Now, as for the grammar of creoles, you can find some interesting info in, for example, this or this article.  Generally, creoles have greatly simplified and regularized inflections compared to their parent languages (this of course doesn't mean that this simplification isn't offset by complications in other areas!). If a language such as Old English passed through creolization, it is likely that the ablauted irregular verbs would have been uniformly regularized (_sing-singed_, etc. -- assuming that the past tense suffix _-ed_ wouldn't have disappeared too, and it likely would have!). Some ablauted verbs have indeed been regularized, but hundreds have remained to the present day. 



> Maybe it was partly this lack of written 'English' that led to it getting simpler as it's the written language that tends to retain the grammatical niceties and spoken language that moves on.


Again, you're falling into a misconception with these "niceties".  Yes, some grammatical niceties get lost as a language changes, but at the same time, new niceties are invented in other areas of the same language (not consciously, of course, but entirely spontaneously, without anyone even being aware of what's going on). And furthermore, the grammar of any exalted written language is merely the invention of the common folk from the time before this language attained its exalted status. The case system of Old English was alive and vigorous at the time when its speakers were illiterate pagan barbarians -- and it was obviously invented even earlier, when its speakers were in an even ruder state -- so it doesn't make sense to assume that a lack of written tradition would cause its disappearance. 

It just happened by historical accident that we're living in a time in which Germanic languages, and especially English, have been simplifying their morphology and complicating their syntax for the past thousand years or so. It could have easily been the other way around by sheer chance. 



> I agree that English picked up lots of French vocabulary (especially for legal terms, posh (!) foods and the like) from this time, but was it a time of rapid grammatical simplification too? Did we lose our word genders then, for example?


Some vestiges of grammatical gender that are now gone were still preserved in Early Middle English (more info here). There are also good indications that the gender system in the spoken language had already eroded significantly by the time of the Norman Conquest. So, even if the majority of this loss happened during the Norman rule, it can't be concluded reliably that the loss was caused by the contact with Norman French.



> Hey, that's cheating!!  If there are other things then you should mention them - it'd be interesting and anyway, how can I ask questions about them if you just hint at strong but secret arguments against the 'creolisation hypothesis' with an 'and so on'!!


Well, I hope you've found some more interesting stuff in this post.  Unfortunately, both time and space are too limited for branching into every area relevant for this fascinating topic...


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## LoboSolo

Philippa said:


> Hello,
> 
> I've recently read a cool book on the history of the English language and its spelling. In it the author says that English lost many of its endings of words due to its close contact with Norman French. After William the Conquerer invaded England in 1066 the 2 languages of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French co-existed for a couple of hundred years. This book claims that the grammar of both languages got simpler as many people then had to speak both languages in their regular day-to-day work and social contacts, but had a much stronger background in one or the other, so they tended to gradually simplify the grammar to aid communication and reduce confusion. It seems this is the way that English lost its word genders (from Old German) and most of its verb endings.
> 
> I've never heard about this idea before (and I've read and watched a documentary series about the history of English before). Is it a theory with a name?! What is your opinion of it? Have any other languages gone through a similar thing at all? Or maybe they might be going through it now? For example, perhaps with Castellano and Catalán, people don't have one language as a lots stronger/mother tongue one than the other so there isn't the 'linguistic pressure' to simplify as most people are bilingual. Apparently the people living in Britain back then weren't fully bilingual.
> 
> Thank you for reading this - I hope it makes sense! I'm be really interested to read your posts.
> Saludos lingüísticos
> Philippa



I'm surprised that this thread is still open but I'll throw in my two cents.

The simplification was already taking place when the Normans arrived. However, that being said, I do believe that the coming of Normans accelerated and intensified the change. The inrush of a large, foreign, vocabulary on a heavily inflected tongue would put a strain on the native speakers to classify the new nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter and decline them properly. In addition, there was no longer Anglo-Saxon authorities, government, or bureaucrats to put their stamp of approval on any change so there was no consistency if it was done at all. Once you start using a large number of words without the inflected endings, then the tendency would be to drop those endings for many, if not all, of the native words as well. If you ever look at a few documents from transition period from OE to ME, you'll see that spelling is all over the place as is the use of the inflected endings.

England was basically a cultural outpost of France. It was over 400 years before French was finally dumped as the official language of the court (1399) but, even to this day, Latinates are often preferred by the "educated". I didn't do it in this post, but lately I've been trying to write using fewer words of Latin roots that came into English after 1066. It's hard to do! I just posted a blog yesterday Anglo-Saxon Names for the Modern Military and it was an undertaking to use as few Latinates as possible!


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## LoboSolo

Athaulf said:


> First, please allow me to express my pet peeve once again.  The grammar of a natural language can never be "simplified". Its _morphology_ can, as indeed happened in English, but _grammar_ is much more than just morphology!



Are you trying to say that the grammar of English didn't change? By definition, grammar is composed of both syntax and morphology. So I think it obvious that the grammar did change.

Or is it your OPINION, that the grammar changes didn't simplify the language? 

In my OPINION, having gender assigned to non-animate nouns like table, chair, sun, asf. ... is just nuts. Any language that drops random gender assignment ... especially if that language has articles like a, an, and the ... it does indeed simplify the language. I have yet to learn a language (Russian, German, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon) where having random gender assignments to objects, with the corresponding changes for adjectives, helped me in any fashion. They were a hinderance! FWIW, that's OPINION, and I'm sticking to it.


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## Arath

The theory that I find most plausible is the one with the vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. Germanic languages in general have more simplified morphologies (I'm comparing morphologies not grammars) than other Indo-European languages. That's true for German too. If one looks at the phonology of the Germanic languages, one will see that they have very rich vowel inventories and at the same time their vowel system is very unstable (prone to rapid change). It's amazing how many realizations of the vowel in "like" exist in present days: /aɪ/, /ʌɪ/, /a:/, /ɑɪ/, /ɒɪ/, and they all came from /i:/ through /ɪi/ and /əi/. Germanic languages give great prominence to the stressed syllable of a word, especially the vowel in it, and forget about what comes after. Since Indo-European morphology relies mostly on endings, this leads to the reduction of inflectional endings. A contributing factor is the shifting of the word stress on the first syllable further away from the ending.

Another reason for the simplification of the verbal inflection, I think, is the verb second word order that Germanic languages have (English used to have it to). As I understand it, this word order makes the presence of the verb subject necessary. A simple sentence, consisting of just a pronoun and a verb (you speak) in a pro-drop language can be expressed  with just one word ("hablas" in Spanish). Even though in Old English and Proto-Germanic the subject could be inferred from the inflection ("spricst" for Old English and "sprikizi" for Proto-Germanic, according to Wiktionary), I don't think that it could have been omitted, because then the verb would be first, not second. If someone more knowledgeable than me could, please, confirm whether Old English, Proto-Germanic or Old High German were pro-drop languages, I would be very grateful, but I don't think they were. Since the subject is always explicitly present, there's no point of verbal inflection for person and number.


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## Arath

Athaulf said:


> The grammar of a natural language can never be "simplified". Its _morphology_ can, as indeed happened in English, but _grammar_ is much more than just morphology!


A bit off-topic, but I don't think that's entirely true. Grammar is the set of rules by which we derive meaning from symbols, and it can be simplified. English grammar distinguishes between "I did" and "I have done", whereas other languages don't (for example French, almost all Slavic languages). I define grammar simplification as loss of meaning. Although English and many other languages don't have grammatical cases, they can still express possession, instrument, etc. they just use other means (prepositions, word order), so there's no loss of meaning. Another example is the category of definiteness: in English "a house" and "the house" mean different things but many non-native speakers struggle to grasp the difference in meaning.


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## Alxmrphi

> If someone more knowledgeable than me could, please, confirm whether  Old English, Proto-Germanic or Old High German were pro-drop languages, I  would be very grateful, but I don't think they were. Since the subject  is always explicitly present, there's no point of verbal inflection for  person and number.


I can't speak on behalf of OHG, but I can speak on behalf of Old English and Old Norse, they were not pro-drop languages, but did allow omission of the subject in coordinate clauses, where it is interpreted that (due to verb agreement with the earlier subject), it was still possible for the second verb to be coindexed with the subject at the start of the clause (but this is nothing remarkable since it's common in Modern English, too). In Early Middle English there are also usages of (coordinated clause) pro-drop where the subjects aren't identical, but it very much was the exception and not the rule.

This is pretty common in Germanic generally, in subject omission when the subject was an expletive, it wasn't mandatory to use any dummy pronoun (as it would be today).


> ða cwom þær micel snaw & *<missing expletive subject>* swa miclum sniwde swelce micel  flys feolle



Then in Old Norse you can have repeted object pronouns being dropped, as well as subjects (in certain conditions).
So, in short, no, they were nothing like the Pro-Drop languages that we know like in the Romance languages, but to say dropping of pronouns didn't happen, hasn't happened, or even doesn't have a very long and detailed history in Germanic, is equally as ridiculous.


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## Frank06

Athaulf said:
			
		

> First, please allow me to express my pet peeve once again.  The grammar of a natural language can never be "simplified". Its _morphology_ can, as indeed happened in English, but _grammar_ is much more than just morphology!





LoboSolo said:


> Are you [=Athaulf] trying to say that the grammar of English didn't change?


Nope, that's _*not*_ what he's saying. The rest of your post is a strawman and hence that doesn't need to get addressed. In my OPINION, that is. 



Arath said:


> A bit off-topic, but I don't think that's entirely true. Grammar is the set of rules by which we derive meaning from symbols,


Can you please explain the part about set, rules and symbols?



> I define grammar simplification as loss of meaning.


Come again?


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## mataripis

I agree English and French removed some grammatical rules in order to allow more words to come or become part of their language.They seem to be simplified but not because they become  rich in vocabulary words.


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## Alxmrphi

mataripis said:


> I agree English and French removed some grammatical rules in order to allow more words to come or become part of their language.They seem to be simplified but not because they become  rich in vocabulary words.


Can you explain what you mean?
There's no reason for rules to get out of the way as if they impede the amount of words a language can hold, that's not the case at all.
Did you mean words incompatible with English's case system? That those agreements left as it was not easy to adapt so many after being borrowed?
That would be a different topic, but it's still not removing rules to allow for more words.


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## Istriano

English morphology may have gotten simpler over the years, but the syntax has gotten complicated.
300 years ago, there was no progressive tenses in English, and passive voice was in many times neutralized with the active voice (untill 1850ies, people used: _The dishes are washing _instead of _The dishes are being washed*)_.

(*In modern colloquial Brazilian Portuguese the opposite occurs, more and more people say _O livro tá xerocando = The book is xeroxing,_ instead of _O livro tá sendo xerocado = The book is being xeroxed_).


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## Arath

This is how I see it.

There is a difference between morphology and grammar.

Although English does not conjugate verbs very much, both English grammar and Spanish grammar distinguish between first, second and third person and between singular and plural. They just do it in different ways: Spanish uses endings, English uses personal pronouns. So, in this respect neither grammar is simpler or more complex than the other, but Spanish morphology is more complex than English morphology.

Although English does not have an instrumental case, it can still express the instrument of the action, by using prepositions (with, by means of, using, etc). So in this respect English grammar is not simpler than the grammar of a language that has an instrumental case.

English grammar distinguishes between "I did" and "I have done", French and German grammar usually don't. So in this respect English grammar is more complex than French and German.

Bulgarian grammar distinguishes between actions witnessed by the speaker, actions the speaker was told about, actions the speaker did not witness and wasn't told about but which can be inferred from direct evidence and actions the speaker was told about but which they don't believe are true. So in this respect Bulgarian grammar is more complex than the grammar of languages that don't make those distinctions.

It's the same as difference between having a small vocabulary and having a big vocabulary. One can express virtually everything with just 3500 words. But the more words one knows the more subtle distinctions one can express. So a more complex grammar is a grammar that allows one to make more subtle distinctions.


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## Arath

mataripis said:


> I agree English and French removed some grammatical rules in order to allow more words to come or become part of their language.They seem to be simplified but not because they become  rich in vocabulary words.



I don't believe that's true. Recently, Bulgarian has also experienced a big influx of English words and they are perfectly accommodated to our morphology:

to log in - *логвам се* (logvam se, impf), *логна се* (logna se, perf).
to chat - *чатя* (chatya)
to save - *сейфам* (seyfam)
to paste - *пействам* (peystvam, impf), *пейстна* (peystna, perf).
to mount - *маунтвам* (mauntvam, impf), *маунтна* (mauntna, perf)
to wow - *уаувам* (wauna, impf),* уауна* (wauna, perf)

And they are conjugated like every other verb. Nouns, and adjectives are also declined like native nouns and adjectives:

site - *сайт* (sayt), *сайтът* (saytat), *сайта* (sayta), *сайтове* (saytove), *сайтовете* (saytovete)
interface - *интерфейс* (interfays), *интерфейсът* (interfaysat), *интерфейса* (interfaysa), *интерфейси* (interfaysi), *интерфейсите* (interfaysite)
of/like a gentleman - *джентълменски* (dzhentalmenski), *джентълменска* (dzhentalmenska), *джентълменско* (dzhentalmensko),* джентълменски* (dzhentalmenski), *джентълменският* (dzhentalmenskiyat), *джентълменския* (dzhentalmenskiya), *джентълменската* (dzhentalmenskata), *джентълменското* (dzhentalmenskoto), *джентълменските* (dzhentalmenskite)

If you look at French words, you will see that all syllables following the stressed one have been lost, which means that many endings have been lost. That's why French morphology is simpler.


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