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From: rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Langauge Evolution
Message-ID: <311@ptsfa.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 20-Oct-84 19:21:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: ptsfa.311
Posted: Sat Oct 20 19:21:59 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 22-Oct-84 06:49:20 EDT
References: <13190@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: Pacific Bell, San Francisco
Lines: 82

> From:  Rick Briggs 
> 
> 
>         Why do languages move away from case?  Why did Sastric Sanskrit
> die?  I think the answer is basically entropy.  The history of
> language development points to a pattern in which linguists write
> grammars and try to enforce the rules(organization), and the tendency
> of the masses is to sacrifice elaborate case structures etc. for ease
> of communication.

You may want to read Otto Jesperson, "Language: it's nature, development,
and origin", chap 19, "The origin of grammatical elements". 
He has some very lucid discussions of how language changes. He argues quite
well that yes, of course, language changes towards shorter and shorter forms.

However, he argues against the assumption that languages start out as having
so-called synthetic syntax (i.e. use of word roots with prefixes, infixes,
and suffixes, e.g. case endings) and evolve towards a so-called analytic syntax
(i.e. use of separater words, etc. , e.g. English and Chinese ).
There are numerous examples, even in English, where a full word root has evolved
into a prefix or suffix, showing the reverse trend exists as well.
For example, the suffix 'ly' comes from a noun meaning 'body, appearance, form'.The suffix 'ful' obviously comes from the adjective 'full'. So now we have
a so-called synthetic form 'truthfully' sort-of meaning 'having the form of
being full of truth'.

Another great example is the future tense in moderm
Romance languages (this is my example, not Jesperson's). Due to phonological
changes in Latin, the traditional future tense got confused with other tenses
and dropped out of use. For example, in classical Latin, "I will love" is
"amabo". This so-called synthetic form (a verb root plus suffixes ama-b-o)
was supplanted by analytic forms:
	Eo amare (lit. I am going to love)
	Habeo amare (lit. I have to love)
	Debeo amare (Lit. I ought to love)

The form using 'habere' (to have) with the infinitive is the one that stuck,
and as the forms of habere got shortened and ADDED TO THE END of the infinitive,a new set of verb endings resulted:

	Classical Common
	habeo ==> ajo
	habes ==> as
	habet ==> at
	habemus ==> emos
	habetis ==> ete, etis
	habent ==> ant

Hence we get the following as the future tense in the following languages:
	Spanish		French
	amare		aimerai
	amaras		aimeras
	amara		aimera
	amaremos	aimerons
	amareis		aimerez
	amaran		aimeront


Similarly, the Conditional tense of moderm Romance languages arose from the
PAST tense of 'to have' (in shortened form) added onto the end of the infinitive.

>         Why do languages move away from case?  Why did Sastric Sanskrit
> die?  I think the answer is basically entropy.  The history of
> language development points to a pattern in which linguists write
> grammars and try to enforce the rules(organization), and the tendency
> of the masses is to sacrifice elaborate case structures etc. for ease
> of communication.
So please beware of jumping to obvious conclusions and applying some
quasi-Marxist political theory to language change.

>         Current Linguistics has begun to actually aid this entropy by
> paying special attention to slang and casual usage(descriptive vs.
> prescriptive).  Without some negentropy from the linguists, I fear
> that English will degenerate further.

I seriously doubt that what linguists pay attention to very much alters
the course of evolution of a language. It is not obvious that language
change even when from synthetic forms to analytic forms is "degeneration", since
languages change to fit the communications needs of its speakers.
-- 


Rob Bernardo, Pacific Bell, San Francisco, California
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