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A question about historical and evolutionary linguistics
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Calling out fellow linguistics buffs, looking for some information.
I have been thinking about how historical linguistics reveals a general trend of simplification of languages over the ages - rules of syntax and morphology get simplified, sounds and sound combinations shift to those that are easier to pronounce, etc. This did not seem counter-intuitive, until I started thinking about the origins of language and how primitive early human speech must have been. This seems to imply that in the span of time between the emergence or the earliest human speech and the development of languages as complex as Sumerian and PIE there must have been an opposite process of increasing linguistic complexity.
While I am very interested in linguistics, I have never studied it formally and I don't really know much about the history and the current state of the science. What I would like to know is whether there is any sort of consensus in historical or evolutionary linguistics about how this process could have taken place, whether there is any well-developed underlying theory that explains it and whether there are any notable books, research papers or articles on this topic.
If I remember correctly, the standard assumptions in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics on this matter are that the current form of a given language simply represents its current status and that language change does not increase or decrease complexity. For example, a human natural language tends to change so that it becomes more economical in a given situation. While this might appear to be simplification if, for example, phonological merging and sound loss occurred, language acquires new features in other respects, keeping its complexity virtually the same. By the same token, a sound split in a language doesn't necessary mean it gains complexity; it just occurs to adapt to the environment in which the current speakers are in.
So, for instance, English a few hundreds years ago isn't more complex or superior to the one we speak today. Similarly, a language which used to be a primitive pidgin language until recently and became a full-fledged language only 100 years ago isn't inferior by any means. Hence, for example, Hawaiian Creole is as complex as, say, Chinese and Italian.
As far as I am aware, no serious research claims that one language is more complex, better or superior. And it seems that the same applies to historical changes in language. If you've read a language as a whole is getting worse, better, simpler or more complex, maybe the claim is not based on science.
Last edited by magamo (2011 September 09, 8:14 pm)
magamo wrote:
If I remember correctly, the standard assumptions in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics on this matter are that the current form of a given language simply represents its current status and that language change does not increase or decrease complexity. For example, a human natural language tends to change so that it becomes more economical in a given situation. While this might appear to be simplification if, for example, phonological merging and sound loss occurred, language acquires new features in other respects, keeping its complexity virtually the same. By the same token, a sound split in a language doesn't necessary mean it gains complexity; it just occurs to adapt to the environment in which the current speakers are in.
So, for instance, English a few hundreds years ago isn't more complex or superior to the one we speak today. Similarly, a language which used to be a primitive pidgin language until recently and became a full-fledged language only 100 years ago isn't inferior by any means. Hence, for example, Hawaiian Creole is as complex as, say, Chinese and Italian.
As far as I am aware, no serious research claims that one language is more complex, better or superior. And it seems that the same applies to historical changes in language. If you've read a language as a whole is getting worse, better, simpler or more complex, maybe the claim is not based on science.
So you're saying that when a new language is created, it is instantaneously equally as complex as all languages that have ever existed?
fakewookie wrote:
So you're saying that when a new language is created, it is instantaneously equally as complex as all languages that have ever existed?
It's more like pidgin languages and other kinds of primitive languages start to be considered full-fledged language by linguists when they become rich enough. And studies have shown that this can happen only in a span of a few generations.
[Edit] I skimmed through the Wikipedia article on creole languages, and it says that the universalist theory assumes children have innate linguistic capacities to transform a pidgin language into a full-fledged one. So in this view, it only takes one generation of native speakers.
[Edit2] I remembered two recently born languages I read about in the context of when a primitive language becomes a "real" language: Nicaraguan sign language and Al-Sayyid Bedouin sign language. Both were born out of thin air without any linguistic influence from outside of the world. The former was developed spontaneously in 1970s. It seems there isn't a consensus on at which point it became a language as complete and rich as any human language known to date, but at least one expert cited in the Wikipedia article claims the first generation of young children acquired it as a full-fledged language.
So, to answer your question, yes. Quite possibly in many cases the first generation of native speakers who naturally learned a "primitive" language turn it into a real language as rich and complete as any other human language we know of. I don't see why I should think the other way.
[Edit3] Here is a short article written by a Columbia University professor about how a new born language became a complete one that could express ideas as complex as any other language in just one generation and how it has been passed on to next generations.
Last edited by magamo (2011 September 10, 5:29 am)
I am sorry if I came across as an Indo-European supremacist who thinks that fusional languages are the pinnacle of linguistic evolution. It was never my intent to suggest that some human languages are superior to others. To be honest, I do not remember where I first encountered the observation that the complexity of languages decreases over time - it may have been on another forum, stated by an amateur linguist like myself. I guess I shouldn't have talked of complexity of language in general, because that is not a well-defined concept and the trends do vary.
However, in the area of morphology historical linguistics does reveal a tendency towards the simplification of inflectional systems. For example, none of the modern Indo-European languages have all the eight or nine noun cases that PIE had, and none of the Romance languages have all the seven cases of Latin. What I am wondering is how do historical and evolutionary linguists explain the formation of complicated inflectional systems in the first place, if most languages that have them tend to simplify them or, in some cases, get rid of them almost entirely (like English, Afrikaans and Bulgarian).
Wikipedia says:
Many separate languages developed this property through convergent evolution. There seems to exist a preferred evolutionary direction from agglutinative synthetic languages to fusional synthetic languages, and then to non-synthetic languages, which in their turn evolve into isolating languages and from there again into agglutinative synthetic languages. However, this is just a trend, and in itself a combination of the trend observable in Grammaticalization theory and that of general linguistic attrition, especially word-final apocope and elision. This phenomenon is known as language drift. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language)
Without going into the specifics of what all of those things mean, it goes around in kind of a big circle. An agglutinative language -- let's say Japanese -- lets you add on suffixes to get, for example, passive or negative or formal endings. But after hundreds of years the sounds in all those verb endings might get simplified -- as, for example, おとひと got simplified to おとうと. And when that happens, you won't be able to tease out "this is the passive ending," "this is the negative ending," etc. Instead... you'll have something that looks kind of like a case system. A pretty complicated case system, because it's not really a case system, but something that developed from something entirely different. And so, the case system will start to get simplified over time. And you'll get a language like Chinese, which doesn't inflect at all for case. And in a language like Chinese, you'll get a bunch of words -- like 了 and 着 -- that look kind of like separate words, but... also look kind of like verb endings. And then after hundreds and hundreds of years, you get back to an agglutinative language like Japanese.
As languages evolve, they tend to simplify one part while making another part more complex. This is because both the speaker and the listener tend to want simplicity, but you can't have simplicity for the speaker and the listener at the same time. If there were no grammar rules and no inflection then it would be easy for the speaker, but everything would be terribly ambiguous for the listener; if everything were completely spelled out for the listener, then it would be too hard for the speaker to say. And the evolving result of that tug-of-war can come out as very complicated case systems, or very complicated inflectional systems (in Inuktitut, "I am hunting caribou" is a single word), or very complicated syntactical systems, or some mix of all of those.
Caution. Not a professional linguist. For entertainment purposes only. Slippery when wet.
vonPeterhof wrote:
I am sorry if I came across as an Indo-European supremacist who thinks that fusional languages are the pinnacle of linguistic evolution. It was never my intent to suggest that some human languages are superior to others. To be honest, I do not remember where I first encountered the observation that the complexity of languages decreases over time - it may have been on another forum, stated by an amateur linguist like myself. I guess I shouldn't have talked of complexity of language in general, because that is not a well-defined concept and the trends do vary.
However, in the area of morphology historical linguistics does reveal a tendency towards the simplification of inflectional systems. For example, none of the modern Indo-European languages have all the eight or nine noun cases that PIE had, and none of the Romance languages have all the seven cases of Latin. What I am wondering is how do historical and evolutionary linguists explain the formation of complicated inflectional systems in the first place, if most languages that have them tend to simplify them or, in some cases, get rid of them almost entirely (like English, Afrikaans and Bulgarian).
Maybe you're assuming that a set of grammar rules which take more pages to describe by using a human language must be more complex or taxing to a human brain. The part of our brain that handles conscious logical thinking may find it more complex to memorize, learn or use correctly, but I don't know if that's the case for innate linguistic part of our brain.
In any case, it seems to boil down to the question of what kind of environment caused this particular phenomenon about inflection systems and what those languages acquired/lost instead, which I'd also like to know the answer to. It's certainly interesting to know what was the cause of particular grammar rules which look more complex at least to human eyes (or conscious minds if you will). Most likely the answer lies in the environment speakers of languages you're talking about were in when those tongues were at the particular point in the cycle Fillanzea's post explained.
Anyway, as I said in the first post, it's a universally accepted idea that a language gains something in exchange for another thing, hence the complexity remains the same. Unless you believe the inflection/case system in PIE is very special so it shouldn't be gained or can't become more complicated in exchange for other language features, (which I believe you don't,) maybe it isn't that surprising, though changes like acquiring a seemingly more complicated inflection system are certainly interesting.
I'm sorry for taking your post in the wrong direction when I myself didn't know the answer to what you actually asked. I didn't mean you were an Indo-European supremacist or anything like that. It's just I thought that you were talking about a language's complexity in general and assumed it was decreasing.
[Edit] I just read some random articles about language evolution and the Wikipedia article on Nostratic languages, which are reconstructed languages older than PIE. But every webpage I read including the Wikipedia article suggests that the majority of linguists do not trust the methodology they used, and it seems to be widely believed that the current reliable research methods can go much further than 5000 years. So it's very unlikely we can find the answer to how PIE gained the case system. As the last paragraph of this page about language evolution says, all we can say seems to be:
Dr. C. George Boeree wrote:
Nevertheless, it is likely that, "once upon a time," there was indeed only one language, one with a limited vocabulary and simple rules for combining words into sentences. As the need arose, the vocabulary could expand by combining old words or inventing new ones, and the rules could become more and more detailed. At some point, long ago, the vocabulary and the grammar apparently levelled off: All languages today, no matter how "primitive" the people, appear to be equal in their abilities to express the nuances and complexities of human life.
So assuming what this guy and other people who contributed to the Wikipedia article etc. are saying is correct, maybe the complicated case system appeared before the level-off point as languages gained complexity, and if it happened after the level-off point and it was in exchange for other features, it's still before the oldest point we can reliably trace a language back to.
Last edited by magamo (2011 September 10, 3:20 am)
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