How do languages become more inflected or grammatically complicated over time?

Question

There are plenty of examples of languages simplifying their inflectional systems over time, such as Latin's complicated inflectional system simplifying into the much less complicated system of the modern day Romance languages, or the inflectional system of Old English simplifying into the English of today, or the slow death of the genitive case in modern German, but how do languages develop such systems in the first place? How do languages go from having a simple system to developing an intricate inflectional system such as that of Latin or Old English? Are there any linguistic examples of this happening in the history of language?

Answer 1

There are certainly examples of infections being created, for example the future tenses in modern Latinate languages like French and Spanish, which were formed by adding "I have" "you have" etc to the infinitive - something like I have to go = I will go.

On the face of it, there does seem to be a trend over hundreds of years toward simplication; we see it in Latinate, Greek, Germanic, post Sanskritic, Iranian, and outside Indo-European with Arabic, and I think with Chinese (not sure about this one!).

On the other hand, it seems that the complex systems of the "classical" languages are themselves derived from much simpler systems that became more complicated as the languages evolved. Moreover, it is fairly clear that written classical languages preserved archaic forms that were already remote from common speech. Maybe it was the advent of writing, and the development of a literate elite that vied with each other to maintain essentially obsolete forms, that led to the apparent complexity of those written languages.

Good question, I wait to see some other answers!

Answer 2

The shift over time (a long, long time) seems to follow a parabolic curve.

Language started - we don't know where or when, but let's take proto-Indo European (PIE) as a base. Limited words. Mostly nouns and verbs.

Language worked - Indo European proper. Functioned to fit all the needs.

Language developed - Italic. More complex. More complex world required added ways to say things. People started changing endings of nouns and verbs to give shades of meaning.

Language complexity peaked - Latin/Oscan/Umbrian, etc. Language had evolved more to fill the needs. Number of cases of nouns grew - nominative, genitive, dative, ablative, accusative, locative, vocative. Verb tenses grew to fit every possible temporal/factual situation.

Language started to simplify - say the post-Latin, pre-Romance era - Langue d'Oeil, Occitian. People said "There must be a better way". Started to merge all noun forms. Simplify tenses. Start use of auxiliary verbs.

Recent past - Romance languages. Cases down to, in simplest, singular and plural. Verb tenses still there, but many Latin types replaced by auxiliary + participle.

Present - Still about the same. Many frozen in place by "Academies" that enforce the "purity" of the language.

The lesson seems to be that languages grow to fit the needs to convey information - up to the point that they become so complex they are unwieldy. Then people find simpler ways to say things. But this is often at the cost of using more words. Genitive case is a good example. Compare English "'s", which is alive and well (except for increasing misuse of apostrophe) with Romance languages that require a prepositional phrase - one word in English requires four in Spanish, Italian, etc.

Don't know if there's a model/theory/opinion that details all this. With modern communications and the language police (Academies) we may never see normal growth/change of languages again.

Great question.

Answer 3

The two most common methods are the blending of two or more languages with one another, the introduction of regional dialects, and the exclusion of words and grammars which are difficult to understand, but less commonly it's an effort to introduce an entirely new language (programming languages, mathematics, etc) or simply, as you noted, to clean up or upgrade an already existing language. The proponents of the former (blending, regional dialects, and common exclusion) are normally produced through common communications, the latter through intelligent design and introduction through education.

An excellent example of blending is that of Tex-Mex, which is a blending of Texan English (the customary drawl and inflections of southern US english) with Mexican, where some Mexicans words have become a part of the US English language. Ebonics is yet another.

The southern inflections in the US are also an example a regional dialect where certain words are pronounced differently (the town of Milan in Tennessee is pronounced 'Mylin', 'door' is pronounced 'dohwer', etc.).

Esperanto is an example of an 'artificial' language where several common linguistic styles are used to produce a language more likely to be understood by most people in the world.

Answer 4

Languages do not evolve

This essentially is your question right? I do not believe there is any empirical evidence to suggest that there has ever been a language which managed to increase it's GRAMMATICAL complexity.

It seems rather plain to me that language is in a constant state of devolution. Consider that the purpose for language is communication, and the biggest threat to communication is ambiguity. If languages truly evolve we should be seeing Language systems developing better and stronger methods of counteracting ambiguity. Instead we see the complete opposite; case systems are evaporating, pronouns are being lost, even the most basic of derivational constituents are being lost.

In short I don't think we will ever see Languages regaining or developing new forms of inflection or grammatical categories. Language is dynamic but only in lexical development, new inflection is never created.

feel free to e-mail me.

Answer 5

Guy Deutscher's fascinating book The Unfolding of Language explains the process, obviously much better than I can summarize it. He gives an example from modern Hebrew in which someone I believe combined the inflection for causation with the inflection for reflexiveness to create a meaning of "cause to do to oneself".

Answer 6

it kinda depends on 1. How old u r (the younger, the better chance you'll learn it) 2. How determined you are 3. If you have background. people will say that its easy because well.....they have spoken and written it for almost all their lives with any language theres gonna be irregular verbs and weird *** conjugations but if you study you'll get the hang of it. and Arabic is a really difficult language to learn. I was taking private tutoring for it...I dumped it a month after but you should learn it, you'd probably go farther than me.

Answer 7

it occurs but does not affect all languages.for example russian retain with its daunting grammar with 6 cases all in one (MORE complicated than only 2 cases in Latin,though it has its own declinations),very complicated verbs of motion with those perfective and imperfective as well as tenses.these verbs also count whether they are done by foot or transport.that's not all.three genders in total,like latin.and they all retain the same since centuries ago.