Imagine if someone looked at some mountains and said “holy crap you guys, I don’t
think these things are gonna last that much longer!
Wind and rain and earthquakes and humans are constantly wearing them down, making them
a little shorter and flatter each day.
It might take a while, but if we don’t do something to stop it eventually there’ll
be nothing left!”
Now, you and I know that this is silly, but the whole thing seems kind of reasonable if
you don’t know much about how mountains work.
Like, we can see wind and rain and erosion, but it’s a lot harder to notice or understand
the forces that push mountains back up.
The same is true for languages in a lot of ways.
Like, it’s pretty easy to look at Old English turning into modern English or Latin turning
into the Romance languages and get the impression that languages are naturally prone to simplification.
And, ok, what makes a language “simple” or “complicated” is really ambiguous and
no one agrees on a way to measure it, but for the sake of this video I’m going to
talk about two ways that it might seem at first like languages are getting simpler:
phoneme inventory and inflectional morphology.
Phoneme inventory refers to the set of possible sounds, or phonemes, that a language has available
to build words out of.
My dialect of English has about 38 (assuming I counted right), but different languages
and even different dialects of the same language will have different inventories.
Now, if you look at the history of the pronunciation of English you find a lot of examples of sounds
that used to exist either merging with other sounds or being lost entirely.
We used to have sounds that were pronounced /x/, /e/, /eɪ/, /ɪu/, /ɛu/ and /u/, but
people started saying /e/ the same as /eɪ/ and they started pronouncing /ɪu/ and /ɛu/
the same as /u/, with the result that pain, pane, due, dew, and do are all spelled differently
even though the first two and the last three are pronounced the same.
At the same time people just stopped saying /x/ all-together, which is why there are these
useless “gh” letters at the ends of these words, which used to be pronounced /nəixt/
and /taʊxt/.
Now, merging sounds like this all the time does seem kind of dangerous.
Like, what if we start merging so many sounds together that we can’t tell which word’s
we’re saying anymore!
How will people tell if I’m talking about a pet or a bet or a net if “p,” “b”
and “n” are all pronounced the same?
But it’s never actually that bad.
When sounds merge with each other you’ll probably wind up with some words that used
to be pronounced differently and now are pronounced the same.
But this is never actually a big problem because: 1.
Not very many words merge together, usually there were also other differences between
them that people can still use to tell the difference
2.
The words that do merge together you can often still tell apart from context.
When I say “I’m going to have to do a lot of work if I want to collect enough dew
by the time it’s due,” you can still tell exactly what I mean even though these three
words were all pronounced the same.
3.
In the rare event that we really do lose the ability to distinguish between two things
in our speech because of a merger, people will just make up a new word for one or both
of them.
Heck, people make up new words all the time even when they don’t have to, it’s just
fun, we’re not gonna run out of words any time soon.
Now, obviously if we lost enough speech sounds it would eventually get hard to communicate.
The number of words that have merged together would grow and grow until it became unmanageable.
But in the long run people add speech sounds just as often as they eliminate them, it can
just be a bit harder to see as it’s happening.
Usually the way it starts is with a sound being pronounced differently depending on
the context, like how in Old English /ð/ was just how you pronounce /θ/ when it’s
in between other voiced sounds.
At first people won’t think of these as new sounds but just as different variants
of the same sound, like how right now we perceive the “h” in “house” and the “h”
“hue” to be the same sound even though they’re actually pronounced a bit differently.
But then, as time goes on, those differences become more and more exaggerated until people
start interpreting them as two distinct sounds instead of two forms of the same sound.
For a while this still won’t help people distinguish between words, because you can
still predict which sound it’ll be depending on the sounds around it, but eventually people
will start using this new distinction to make up or borrow new words that wouldn’t have
been possible before because before they would have been pronounced the same as existing
words.
The result is that over the long run the overall size of the phoneme inventory usually stays
about the same, and people never merge enough sounds to hurt their ability to communicate.
Now, the other way it might look like languages are getting simpler is with respect to what’s
called “inflectional morphology.”
“Morphology” refers to how a word is built from smaller parts called “morphemes.”
“Inflectional morphology” refers to how words are marked for various grammatical properties.
It’s a little unclear to me how to tell if something counts as a “grammatical property,”
but usually linguists are talking about things like number or case for nouns or tense or
voice for verbs.
Now, it might look at first like the inflectional morphology for a lot of languages has been
getting simpler the past couple thousand years.
It looks this way because that’s actually exactly what’s happened.
Latin used to have like twelve different forms for each of its nouns depending on whether
they were plural or not but also depending on the role they played in the sentence.
Not a single romance language has that kind of inflection for their nouns anymore.
Old English had stān, stānes, stāne, stānas, stāna and stānum, where today all we have
are “stone” and “stones,” and holy crap our verbs used to be complicated.
And this isn’t just limited to English and the romance languages, you see similar patterns
in almost every single Indo-European language.
But, while it is true that the number forms that words take has been decreasing for all
these languages, I think it’s worth pointing out how that doesn’t necessarily mean that
the languages are getting simpler over-all.
In Old English and Latin all these different word forms used to do a lot of the work of
communicating what the words ment and what they were doing in the sentence, but it’s
not like we can’t figure that stuff out anymore.
We just have separate words that do the same thing as well as rules for what order the
different parts of the sentence need to appear in.
All the same information’s there, it’s just being expressed in different places.
That being said, the fact that so many languages are moving towards less inflectional morphology
does seem kind of weird, until you consider the fact that most of these languages are
part of the same language family, and the language they’re all descended from, Proto-Indo-European,
just happened to have some really complicated inflectional morphology.
It’s hard to imagine getting any more inflection from there, so of course most languages descended
from it have been losing inflection instead.
That same pattern doesn’t hold for non-Indo-European languages, languages can gain inflectional
morphology just as easily as they can lose them, but it can be harder to notice because
new inflectional morphology doesn’t just appear out of nowhere.
It happens when separate words that used to carry grammatical information combine with
the word they’re describing.
Chinese, for example, seems like it might be starting to develop some new inflectional
morphology for the first time in a long while.
This word used to be a normal verb that ment “to finish,” but these days people are
using it as a suffix that you attach to the end of a verb to mark it’s tense.
You can see similar things happening in English.
Most of the time we barely have any inflectional morphology anymore, but when “I am going
to” gets compressed into “Ima” or when “of” becomes a quick little “o’”
attached to the beginning of a word, you can see the beginnings of how complicated markings
for grammatical properties form.
In the moment this looks like people are just sort of slurring their words together, but
if you go back far enough these same processes are probably where all those complicated inflection
systems of Latin and Old English came from in the first place.
And we’re not gonna to run out of new words to make new inflections out of, because, again,
people couldn’t stop making up new words even if they wanted to.
Now, if I can go on a quick tangent, there’s a theory out there that languages tend to
move in a cycle, where fusional languages become analytic languages which become agglutinative
languages which go back to being fusional again.
If you don’t know what any of those words mean, that’s ok because I only wanted to
bring it up to say that this theory isn’t actually that popular.
Wikipedia talks about this kind of thing a lot, and my old Historical Linguistics teacher
liked it, but as far as I can tell most linguists don’t even think that these three terms
are that useful for categorizing languages anymore.
Alright, tangent over.
What I find really amusing is that you could look at any of the types of change we’ve
talked about and make an argument they’re a simplification of language or that they’re
making language less clear.
If you’re losing inflections “oh no, words are getting smaller and slowly breaking down”
If you’re gaining inflections “oh no, words are slurring together into a giant mess.”
If you’re losing sounds “oh no we’re gonna pronounce everything the same as everything
else,” if you’re gaining sounds “oh no no one’s pronouncing sounds consistently
any more.”
The reality is that language needs rules and complexity in order to function as a means
of communication, and if a possible change would make language unusable then no one starts
talking like that in the first place.
Whenever old rules stop being followed new ones are created, and whenever language gets
simple in some ways it usually gets more complicated in others.
It doesn’t get better or worse or more elaborate or more efficient.
It just changes.