Pedants' Paradise

[Pabmusic]

... I like the Celtic Reminants in Pabs's chart

.

So it says! Presumably they're ancient sheep.

[Nick Armstrong]

... I like the Celtic Reminants in Pabs's chart

So it says! Presumably they're ancient sheep.

Huh?





Ah.....!


Ruminants...!

[LeMartinPecheur]

Among pab's 'Celtic sheep' I'm surprised to see loss of case and gender! I'd always understood this happened in late ME probably because of the utter confusion created when people from different bits on England met (eg in a melting-pot like London) and tried to communicate in different dialects with completely different systems of inflection. Substantial ON influences north of the Wash had substantially added to the existing mess of OE variants too.

Easier just to scrap the lot: we've managed pretty well since after all. It may even have helped English to become the main international language despite our crazy spelling and enormous vocabulary.

[Pabmusic]

Among pab's 'Celtic sheep' I'm surprised to see loss of case and gender! I'd always understood this happened in late ME probably because of the utter confusion created when people from different bits on England met ...

I suspect you're right - I don't find that easy to accept. ('Ancient Celtic' means 'pre-Germanic', yet modern German and Dutch have very complex systems of cases, etc.)

[Pabmusic]

Huh?





Ah.....!


Ruminants...!

Well done, Cali. My little joke.

[french frank]

Among pab's 'Celtic sheep' I'm surprised to see loss of case and gender! I'd always understood this happened in late ME probably because of the utter confusion created when people from different bits on England met

Not to mention the effect of French which by the early medieval period had reduced the Latin declension system to two cases: Nominative and Oblique (everything else), and after that to just a single form (more accurately, two: singular and plural). Gender differentiation persists, though only in two genders, unlike the German(ic) and Latin three.

Language tends to reduce to the simplest, usable form, to become more analytic (like English) - broadly, different words to convey meaning rather than bundling meanings up in different forms of the same word (as in declensions).

[jean]

Not to mention the effect of French which by the early medieval period had reduced the Latin declension system to two cases: Nominative and Oblique (everything else), and after that to just a single form (more accurately, two: singular and plural). Gender differentiation persists, though only in two genders, unlike the German(ic) and Latin three.

Language tends to reduce to the simplest, usable form, to become more analytic (like English) - broadly, different words to convey meaning rather than bundling meanings up in different forms of the same word (as in declensions).

It is said that English lost its inflections earlier that most because of the conflict between Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse.

But why do some languages hang onto them for so long? Polish still has a locative, which survives only in a residual form in classical Latin

[french frank]

But why do some languages hang onto them for so long?

Goodness knows! One linguistics book I read a while back said there was an African language which had a verb form which carried the meaning: "I had the intention of [doing], but didn't" . My mind had the intention of boggling - and did.

[LeMartinPecheur]

Language tends to reduce to the simplest, usable form, to become more analytic (like English) - broadly, different words to convey meaning rather than bundling meanings up in different forms of the same word (as in declensions).

In which case, why was it made so complicated in the first place?

Just to make life difficult for schoolkids perhaps??

[french frank]

In which case, why was it made so complicated in the first place?

Just to make life difficult for schoolkids perhaps??

What can one say? Except perhaps to suggest that it takes intelligence to make the complicated simple.

Anyone remember the Borges story Funes el Memorioso? Funes had an extraordinary memory and devised a new system of counting which consisted of assigning an existing noun 'name' to each number. I can't remember the exact nouns, but imagine that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 was instead desk, plant, rain, cat, book. With his phenomenal memory he had reached about 3000, consisting of random words, and couldn't quite grasp the utility of dividing the numbers into smaller sets and establishing a pattern that reduced the reliance on memory: so twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three bore a resemblance to thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three ...

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Goodness knows! One linguistics book I read a while back said there was an African language which had a verb form which carried the meaning: "I had the intention of [doing], but didn't" . My mind had the intention of boggling - and did.

That's not too different from the future perfect.

[Sydney Grew]

. . . Language tends to reduce to the simplest, usable form, to become more analytic (like English) - broadly, different words to convey meaning rather than bundling meanings up in different forms of the same word (as in declensions).

To some extent it is a matter of mere spelling (omitting the gaps) and word positioning: instead of "in the house" write "housein" or even "houseinthe" ; instead of "at home" write "homeat". Voilà! the same old locative case rises again. It - the meaning - had always been there in the minds of civilized men.

[french frank]

To some extent it is a matter of mere spelling (omitting the gaps) and word positioning

But if you were able simply to tack the word 'at' on the end of any noun to indicate the locative (workat, BetFredat, Coopat) you wouldn't really have a synthetic language. Special locative forms in Latin were already breaking down under the influence of phonetic evolution (sloppy pronunciation to you?) so that they were indistinguishable from other case endings; and therefore the minds, even of civilized men, were much exercised in working out exactly what the case ending meant in any particular context. The all-purpose analytic forms facilitated understanding which is itself a major reason for language evolution. All-purpose singular and all-purpose plural were the only case forms deemed necessary in a highly evolved language in a more complex world.

[jean]

How is it that Polish manages to retain a locative? I've often wondered.

[french frank]

How is it that Polish manages to retain a locative? I've often wondered.

Good question. A Slavic language, but some Germanic languages retain a case system too.

Add: THinking about it more (and I'm theorising from a position of incomplete knowledge ), I'd say that different racial groups have different phonological features. So some racial/linguistic groups will have specific developments that affect some grammatical forms but not others. Even within the Romance group there are clear differences: Portuguese couldn't manage the bl group and altered it to br. Others couldn't manage st and changed it to est > ét and so on. So in any given language it would depend what difficulties were caused by the particular development. That works better with consonants than vowels.

But, for example, Old French retained two cases: the nominative (sing and pl) and the oblique (everything else). But the nominative singular ended in s (from the -us ending) and so did the oblique plural (from -os), while the oblique singular and nominative plural had no s. This created some difficulty once various unstressed syllables started to disappear.

The Slavic languages might have retained tighter articulation which enabled formal differences still to be heard in pronunciation. We need Quilisma on this for the professional explanation!