Author Topic: A linguistic question finally answered (Read 3102 times)

Jonathon · « **on:** March 31, 2005, 05:28:00 PM »

For quite a while now, I've had a question about historical linguistics that has driven me nuts. In many languages, you can see a gradual but inevitable move from case-based grammar to a more rigid sentence structure with fewer case endings, which have a tendency to drop off over time.

So if most languages are moving away from a declensional system, where did it originally come from? Why does it seem like no languages are developing a case system? I mean, it's not like people got together thousands of years ago and said, "Okay, let's create this thing called the ablative case, and it'll have this paradigm. . . ." That's just silly. But it wasn't until just last week that I finally got a reasonable answer.

Many sets of words have a tendency to slowly change from lexical words (words with a full meaning) into function words (words that do something in the sentence but don't mean much by themselves). Modal verbs (like can and will come from real verbs. Definite articles come from demonstrative pronouns. Relative pronouns often come from other kinds of pronouns (like demonstrative or interrogative pronouns).

And sometimes, as these words change meaning, they get shortened, too, because there is less stress put on them. For example, will often becomes 'll and gets tacked on to the end of another word.

So let's hypothesize that you've got a language that puts a verb after nouns to indicate what function those nouns serve. According to Wikipedia, in Chinese you would form the sentence "I travel from Shanghai to Beijing by airplane" as "I sit airplane originate Shanghai arrive Beijing travel." The verbs give the same sense of directionality that we get from prepositions. After time, these verbs may become function words, losing their status as full verbs and becoming postpositions (like prepositions, but they come after the noun). If they continue to erode, they'll become enclitics (words that cannot stand by themselves) and then eventually affixes.

Bingo! You've got case endings. Then those case endings eventually erode away, and you have to develop another system to convey the same information: prepositions and word order. If for some reason those prepositions erode away, too, then you've got to come up with another system again.

Of course, this still doesn't explain where language come from, but it's a start.

Porter · « **Reply #1 on:** March 31, 2005, 08:27:03 PM »

Nerd.

Jonathon · « **Reply #2 on:** March 31, 2005, 08:55:57 PM »

Thank you.

Brinestone · « **Reply #3 on:** March 31, 2005, 09:30:05 PM »

*finds all this fascinating*

Now I wonder where prepositions came from. It's not like suddenly all the declensions dropped off and people were left to come up with a new solution and settled on prepositions. Were they decayed forms of other words?

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #4 on:** March 31, 2005, 09:41:25 PM »

I'm going to re-read this when I'm coherent. It sounds like it could be fun, but heck if I could understand it now.

Jonathon · « **Reply #5 on:** April 01, 2005, 08:25:07 AM »

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*finds all this fascinating*

Now I wonder where prepositions came from. It's not like suddenly all the declensions dropped off and people were left to come up with a new solution and settled on prepositions. Were they decayed forms of other words?

Basically, yes. All function words derive from lexical words. This would mean that language originally consisted of two classes of words: topics and predicates (essentially nouns and verbs). Verbs often contain a sense of directionality or location, so you can keep those senses and reduce the verb to a function word.

Also, it's important to point out that this is all gradual. Prepositions and case endings existed side-by-side in Old English, which only had four or five cases. However, we have a lot more than four or five prepositions, and as cases have slowly died away, we've had to rely on prepositions more and more (and thus come up with new ones). Whatever process must've formed the original prepositions has long since ceased to be productive; now if we need a new one, we just make a compound phrase of some sort.

Noemon · « **Reply #6 on:** May 10, 2005, 05:35:18 AM »

Fascinating stuff Jon Boy, thanks.

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Of course, this still doesn't explain where language come from, but it's a start.

Oh, it's turtles all the way down.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #7 on:** May 10, 2005, 06:55:12 AM »

Actually, I just listened to a lecture on tape by Noam Chomsky on Universal Grammar, and he made many of the same points. One of the questions the audience had was about how Finnish could have somewhere like 12 cases and Chinese 0 and whether native speakers of each were really capable of the same kind of thought. He said absolutely; grammar is just an outward manifestation of internal understanding and even people speaking pidgins can express the same concept as those who have complex grammars.

Have you read much Chomsky, JB?

TheTick · « **Reply #8 on:** May 10, 2005, 07:47:00 AM »

It's like you're trying to speak to me, I know it.

Jonathon · « **Reply #9 on:** May 10, 2005, 07:50:16 AM »

I haven't read any Chomsky, actually. Maybe I should remedy that.

But I totally agree with that—people who say that speakers of other languages think different thoughts or can't express the same thoughts don't really understand how languages work.

Noemon · « **Reply #10 on:** May 10, 2005, 08:25:14 AM »

We just had a newbie whipping out the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis (in so many words--I don't think that he was aware that what he was postulating had been thought of before) on Hatrack the other day.

Jonathon · « **Reply #11 on:** May 10, 2005, 12:27:40 PM »

I've said before that I think Sapir-Whorf is total bunk, and after reading the Wikipedia article on the theory, I have to admit that I believe even more strongly that it is bunk. If the Inuit have more words for snow (a myth that can apparently be traced to Whorf and that can be shown to be false), it's because their environment has shaped their language and not because their language has shaped their worldview.

pod · « **Reply #12 on:** May 18, 2005, 05:23:51 PM »

hm.

Sapir-Whorf is not bunk, and it has been horribly horribly distorted by anti-nurturers. The claim that should is supported by Sapir-Whorf is not that your experience modifies your physical perception. What experience does is modify how you process information received via your perceptual organs (and there are some interesting psycholinguistic studies that demonstrate that). The original Sapir-Whorf thing is made all the more anomolous, because as it turns out, a lot of the cultures which have color fusions turn out to be a result of the older portions of the populations having eye diseases which contribute to their in ability to distinguish two colors such as blue and green, so nobody talks about them as being seperate since a large portion of the population can't tell the difference.

Case systems may develop out of a process called cliticization, which is notible in forms of spanish currently. Essentially what would hypothetically happen is that you have a particular type of word (or group of words) that keep getting contracted with a set of function words, like "to", "for", "with" etc. Eventually, these themselves become lexicalized, and boom case system.