# Linguistic evolution



## Arabus

Hello,

Is there literature on what makes certain languages evolve faster than others? (e.g., what makes English less conservative than German, and this is just _an example_ -- to mods: you don't need to change the title to "why English evolved more than German.")

Thank you,


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## xmarabout

I am just reading "The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue" from Merrit Ruhlen and you will find in that book some answers to your question...


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## entangledbank

Probably it's just chance, in my opinion. Why should they all evolve at exactly the same rate? You're going to get ones like Icelandic that have changed slowly, and ones like Swedish and English that have dropped a lot of older grammar (English more so than Swedish, of course). There needn't be any reason - they're just natural objects making small chance changes here and there.

That said, the question is muddied by the fact that one of the most-changed languages is English, which also happens to have a vast influx of borrowed vocabulary. Another such is Persian - very simplified, lots of borrowings. I think this too is just chance. All the main morphological changes from Old to Modern English were already underway in the Northern dialect _before_ French began to significantly influence English in the South. Also, look at Japanese: massive Chinese vocabulary, but no simplification of grammar (that I know of). I think the two effects are independent, and English just happens to have experienced both.

'Contact' is sometimes given as a reason: different peoples have to communicate. But in the North of England, the contact languages Old English and Old Norse had virtually identical grammar at the time. Hardly a strong incentive for grammatical simplification, I would have thought. Perhaps a reduction of endings so that it was unclear whether you were using the English dative plural or the Norse dative plural; but no need to drop the ending altogether.


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## xmarabout

I also think there are several factors but two main one could be the geography and the history (means exchange - peaceful or not - with other people). An island with few contacts with other countries, other people will see less evolution in the language than a country in the middle of commercial roads with a lot of exchanges with other languages.


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## Erick404

Maybe analyzing some smaller, but modern evolution of languages could be of interest. I don't know about _literature_ on this subject, but I find very interesting how Portuguese is differently used in Brazil and Portugal.
At least in spoken language, some grammatical structures commonly used by Portuguese speakers sound too much literary or even obsolete to Brazilian ears. I'm sure something similar happens the other way around.
And certain grammatical mistakes are more common to the Portuguese, others to Brazilians, and I think it shows some sort of different ways of evolving the (spoken) grammar.

I don't see much of this when comparing British and American English.


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## Pedro y La Torre

English has also experienced numerous invasions, conquests at home and abroad, and furthermore, due to the advent of the British Empire, implanted itself in the most far flung areas of the world - all of which obviously helped diversify and enrich the language. Hiberno-English, to take one relatively close to home example, has been greatly influenced by the interaction between the English and Irish languages. Many everyday terms and expressions in everyday use in Ireland derive directly from Irish (with relics of early modern English still remaining in use such as the pronoun _ye_ or the verb _to mitch_, both now fallen into disuse in BE), even some verbal forms such as "do be", which is used to express the present continuous and derives directly from Irish, is still widely used in colloquial IE.

A language like Icelandic, on the other hand, had relatively little contact with the outside world until the late 19th century and hence evolved at a much slower, more conservative rate.


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## Arabus

Thanks xmarabout for naming a book and thank you all for your input. Commenting on what bank said, I understand that linguistic evolution, much as biological evolution, must be in essence a random process, but I don't think this should preclude certain environmental (or maybe internal?) factors from playing a role in determining the direction and rate of the overall process.

My line of study has nothing to do with language, but from reading through several books on historical linguistics I am under the impression that (many) historical linguists seem to connect the rate of linguistic evolution to contact with other languages, and I felt intrigued by this idea and thought I would like to read more about this subject. Thank you all again.


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## Arabus

I would like to add that I have read the examples bank mentioned and they are interesting, but I have no comment on them. They are certainly worth keeping in mind.


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## HUMBERT0

Does “change” mean “evolution”?
A language that has needed less change maybe due to isolation, is it less evolved than one that has changed more?


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## Hulalessar

HUMBERT0 said:


> Does “change” mean “evolution”?
> A language that has needed less change maybe due to isolation, is it less evolved than one that has changed more?


 
I think it is perhaps misleading to use the word "evolve" in relation to language change, since it tends to imply moving from a "lower" to a "higher" state. Whilst there clearly was a time when language evolved it is far back in pre-history.

Language change seems to be inevitable. To an extent it is necessary to distinguish between spoken and written language. Spoken language changes much faster. If there is a difference between the rate that spoken languages change I think it may have something to do with whether or not the language is also written and the extent to which the speakers of the language are literate. The more speakers of a language are literate, the slower it seems to change. Sometimes, for cultural reasons, the written language does not change or changes slowly and when that happens the degree of diglossia may increase so that you may reach the situation where children have to be taught the written language almost as a foreign language. Indeed, many "standard" languages, though they can be spoken and are "uttered" in certain situations may not really function as spoken languages.

When an unwritten language is considered then I do not think that isolation prevents change. In fact, if anything, writing a language tends to slow down the rate of change. Studies (I cannot quote them) have shown that unwritten languages may change so fast that grandparents have difficulty communicating with their grandchildren. (I observe in passing that many of my acquaintances say they have that problem with their children!) There are something like 80 language families and any number of language isolates in New Guinea. Though possible, it seems unlikely that that number of language families were actually brought to New Guinea. There were so many isolated communities and over time their languages changed so much that linguists have difficulty in demonstrating any relationship between them.

As for Icelandic, it is a bit of a special case. Although Iceland is geographically isolated, it has never been politically isolated. For nearly 800 years it was part of/ruled by Norway and/or Denmark. It has a small and homogenous population which has the highest rate of literacy in the world - it is apparently everyone's ambition to write a book. This has lead to a consensus that resulted in a deliberate policy of language purism that perhaps would not be sustainable in a larger, less homogenous, less literate community.


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## Ajura

entangledbank said:


> Probably it's just chance, in my opinion. Why should they all evolve at exactly the same rate? You're going to get ones like Icelandic that have changed slowly, and ones like Swedish and English that have dropped a lot of older grammar (English more so than Swedish, of course). There needn't be any reason - they're just natural objects making small chance changes here and there.
> 
> That said, the question is muddied by the fact that one of the most-changed languages is English, which also happens to have a vast influx of borrowed vocabulary. Another such is Persian - very simplified, lots of borrowings. I think this too is just chance. All the main morphological changes from Old to Modern English were already underway in the Northern dialect _before_ French began to significantly influence English in the South. Also, look at Japanese: massive Chinese vocabulary, but no simplification of grammar (that I know of). I think the two effects are independent, and English just happens to have experienced both.
> 
> 'Contact' is sometimes given as a reason: different peoples have to communicate. But in the North of England, the contact languages Old English and Old Norse had virtually identical grammar at the time. Hardly a strong incentive for grammatical simplification, I would have thought. Perhaps a reduction of endings so that it was unclear whether you were using the English dative plural or the Norse dative plural; but no need to drop the ending altogether.


 
I don't really call languages that are part of the same continuum independent language I prefer to call them topolect or dialect cluster instead.


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## sokol

Hulalessar said:


> HUMBERT0 said:
> 
> 
> 
> Does “change” mean “evolution”?
> A language that has needed less change maybe due to isolation, is it less evolved than one that has changed more?
> 
> 
> 
> I think it is perhaps misleading to use the word "evolve" in relation to language change, since it tends to imply moving from a "lower" to a "higher" state. Whilst there clearly was a time when language evolved it is far back in pre-history.
Click to expand...

I agree.
While "change" and "evolution" in this context have approximately the same meaning it is misleading to use the evolution metaphor on language; even though language once *did *evolve (from the first, supposedly, very primitive - and not documented - stages used by the early hominids to fully fledged, modern languages as used by Homo sapiens) I prefer to not use this metaphor as far as change in modren languages is concerned.

There exist theories that languages may change "in circles" - that they may begin as isolating languages (like English and Chinese), then go on to become agglutinating (Finnish, Hungarian) or inflecting languages (or first agglutinating then inflecting languages), and then again go on to bcome isolating languages: there's no proof for that yet (and probably there never will be) but I hope this shows how language to not really develop to "higher" or "lower" levels on an evolutionary ladder but rather *change to different levels* - which are, technically speaking, equivalent.

Of course a language like Burgenland Roman (the Gypsy variety spoken in Eastern Austria) has by far less words than English as it is used only amongst the minority itself (and even there only in intimate and some informal situations) and one would need to borrow heavily from German and English (or other languages) in order to being able to write a technical description of the processes at work in a nuclear power station - but this is not what matters.
The point is that *even *Burgenland Roman, a language spoken only by a few hundred people (or probably a couple of thousand) is a fully fledged language and perfectly capable of explaining nuclear power. So even though languages are not equal neither equivalent as far as their use in real life is concerned they *are *equal from a linguistic point of view.

But to the original question: linguistic *change.*
There are a great many factors influencing the speed of change which takes place in a language (and we've discussed this in quite some threads already ); I'm only listing a few:
- language contact (which may prompt quicker change);
- purism (which may be due to language contact, and which will work against change);
- "counter-purism": rejection of purism may lead to change in a direction not intended by purists at all;
- political power: may force specific linguistic changes upon a population; and don't say this doesn't exist in "modern western democracies", it most certainly does (one example: political correctness; in Austria textbooks for schools must be written with PC terms which may lead to their acceptance by the population);
- rejection of political power: this may lead to change but not in the direction intended by the politicians;
- etc. etc. etc.


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## Sepia

Pedro y La Torre said:


> English has also experienced numerous invasions, conquests at home and abroad, and furthermore, due to the advent of the British Empire, implanted itself in the most far flung areas of the world - all of which obviously helped diversify and enrich the language. Hiberno-English, to take one relatively close to home example, has been greatly influenced by the interaction between the English and Irish languages. Many everyday terms and expressions in everyday use in Ireland derive directly from Irish (with relics of early modern English still remaining in use such as the pronoun _ye_ or the verb _to mitch_, both now fallen into disuse in BE), even some verbal forms such as "do be", which is used to express the present continuous and derives directly from Irish, is still widely used in colloquial IE.
> 
> A language like Icelandic, on the other hand, had relatively little contact with the outside world until the late 19th century and hence evolved at a much slower, more conservative rate.


 

One basic fact that is usually neglected, what Iceland is concerned is that nobody forced a new culture or a new religion on to them - so they had enough time to convert their old story telling tradition into a tradition of written literature. As you probably all know, writing - for literary purposes - was introtuced into Northern Europe together with the expansion of Christianity. It should be taken into consideration that the preservation of a culture's literature may also influence the development of its language. In the rest of the Germanic areas there were no "cooling off period" of peaceful coexistence between Christianity and ancieng Germanic tradition and religion - and thus no tolerance of its traditional story telling.


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## Epilio

It seems that all languages tend to simplify. Romance languages lost the Latin case system, the passive mood and many other features that made them more analytical than their 'mother'. Similar processes happened to many other languages, just as English or German comparing them to their origin. Basically the same pattern occurred in all Indo-european languages (well, maybe with some exceptions as Lithuanian, even though it's said that it's less flexible than the Old Prussian so it evolved as well). 

I notice the same pattern within the current languages. For example my mother tongue. There are many contractions within prepositions (_pa_ instead of _para_, ie, for), articles and prepositions (_pal_ instead of _para el_), adjectives, verbs etc. 

In German, if I'm not wrong, the genitive case is being substituted by the dative one. In English many irregular verbs are switching over to regular ones (dream, learn, spell, burn...).

I wonder where is the limit of simplification. Will it stop? or it will continue constantly?.

Greetings 

PS: Simplification is this case would mean the prevalence of the analytical scheme, since it seems to be the most 'popular' evolution of Indo-european languages.


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## Hulalessar

The question has been discussed a bit on this forum!

You views are predicated on the assumption that the transition from synthetic to analytic is one of simplification. It may involve a simplification of the inflectional morphology of a language, but that does not mean that a language is simplified over all. Other "complexities" arise, but these may not be perceived as complexities by speakers of analytic languages.


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## Alxmrphi

Epilio said:
			
		

> I wonder where is the limit of simplification. Will it stop? or it will continue constantly?.


Something to think about: Take what you said about Latin, I agree with you on your other points and am also interested in language change, the grammatical simplifications especially.

Consider there was a language called Latin, now it's a dead tongue and we now have its offspring, French, Spanish, Italian etc, all major world languages, if you look at what Latin once was, and see how it's been the root of a new family of languages which are significantly different from each other to warrant being called separate languages, that's hardly a simplification! (I do get your point though)

I guess the limit of simplication (using your own definition referring to prevelance of analytical languages) would be, well, when _all_ languages can be considered analytical. I don't know enough about non IE languages to make a comment about they work and might change... it's something I think would be interesting to research.



			
				Hulalesser said:
			
		

> It may involve a simplification of the inflectional morphology of a language, but that does not mean that a language is simplified over all.


I don't think the OP meant 'simplified over all', I think he meant exactly that, _simplification of inflectional morphology_. For what I know about the terms analytic and synthetic when it comes to languages is that of word order, which has to be constrained if you aren't using any inflected forms, with regard to synthetic / analytic what other complexities arise within this transition? To me I can't see any but I am happy to learn!

Edit: I've just thought of something, the use of prepositions to take the role of once inflected forms, is that the type of thing you meant Hulalessar? With no case system there now means there is a myriad of prepositions that go with some verbs but not others, and mixed together with certain types of verbs to change the meaning (i.e. _cercare - to look for_, _cercare di - to try..._)

I suppose even though English has got rid of basically all its inflection morphology but as it seems to me it seems a lot more syntactically complex than Old English, though I have basic knowledge of how Old English works and a little idea on the word order development I can't call to mind any full / complete examples to illustrate this, but yeah, modern English is more syntactically complex and this would have grown directly out of being an analytical language as syntheticity is usually (more) flexible.


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## sokol

Epilio said:


> I wonder where is the limit of simplification. Will it stop? or it will continue constantly?



How could it?

Just imagine that it only had been "downhill" since Homo sapiens descended from the trees. How could they have evolved to what they're now? Also if it'd only ever been "downhill" since Latin then we'd be babbling baby talk today.

It always is, and always was, a two-way process: simplification on the one hand, and new words and morphemes (and sounds), also new grammatical features, to compensate for what was lost (if too much was lost) through simplification.


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## Alxmrphi

Can we please start a revolution in the linguistics world in completely avoiding words that seem to tag this process as a bad thing?

"going downhill" - the languages are just changing, not going downhill! (I am not referring to you sokol! I can see you said it in quote marks) but it seems everyone thinks it's in some way a dumbing down, but it was obviously at the desire of the speakers or else it wouldn't have happened.

Epilio, I found this thread when looking around the net and it's a great thread, especially Dee Xtrovert's post!
It provides a lot of insight into your question


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## sokol

Alxmrphi said:


> "going downhill" - the languages are just changing, not going downhill! (I am not referring to you sokol! I can see you said it in quote marks)


On purpose of course, as you know. 
I just used this as it seems it was implied above.

Of course languages don't go "downhill", they just change; they also do not lose through simplification because what they lose (if they lose anything at all) through simplification they gain through new features.

We've had this topic so many times before that it seems I lost my patience above; sorry for that, won't happen again.  (Hopefully.)


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## sokol

Mod note:

After giving it some thought I merged this thread about simplification with the previous thread about Linguistic evolution (one of the closely related threads already existing in the forum) as both original questions and replies so far adress the same question: the powers behind change.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

For some reason I have feeling that simplifcation as a donné implies losing much inflectional morphology (i.e. loss of verb conjugations, inflection for case, etc.).  But how would losing a rich inflectional system mean simplification unless of course it is said that the former system was complex?   If simple here means having few or little parts, then yes I agree but in no means is Latin grammar more complex than English's, etc.  My curiosity is that there seems to be a trend for dropping inflectional morphology; are there any examples of languages which GAINED inflections or went from being analytic to synthetic?  

And if it were true that languages prefer to simplify over time, what would be the reason for that unless of course inflectional morphologies become burdensome to communication?


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## berndf

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> And if it were true that languages prefer to simplify over time, what would be the reason for that unless of course inflectional morphologies become burdensome to communication?


I think languages have developed, or increased the number of, morphological distinctions as communication needs grew and lost them again as as they grew even more because the number of morphological distinctions would have exploded. They traded it for a system of prepositions, auxiliary verbs etc., i.e. became more synthetic, more modular because this allowed a greater flexibility to express new things without having to develop new forms.


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## Sepia

Pedro y La Torre said:


> ...
> A language like Icelandic, on the other hand, had relatively little contact with the outside world until the late 19th century and hence evolved at a much slower, more conservative rate.


 
This is a very widespread belief, but I still have not seen too many facts to support that "theory". What kind of contact did they not have?. Judging from what has been found in graves not only Icelanders but even the settlers on Greenland were wearing the clothes that were highest fashion in Europe even one millenium ago. Iceland could be reached by ship from Ireland, Scotland and Norway in two days, and paper combined with the art of writhing the alphabet we know was introduced there almost as early as anywhere else in where North Germanic tribes lived. 

To me, living somewhere which can be reached in two days by ship in those days, is like living next to the turnpike or an airport today. 

I find it very odd, that one factor that is almost always neglected, when trying to explain the evolution of northern languages is that the Icelanders actually wrote down a lot of the old stories that had been told and retold for centuries. I don't think there can be much doubt that maintaining conserving a culture's literature is an important factor in the conservation of a language. Another good example of this is High German, which probably comes second after Icelandic when talking of having conserved a lot of its original case and gender system. The language that became known as High German was the first Germanic language that people got to read or hear the Bible qouted in.

So the really interesting thing here, I'd say, is to figure out why the Icelanders "cared" to keep telling their old stories and even writing them down while the others didn't ..


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