Grammar Traces Language Roots

mlewan writes "Researchers use grammar to trace relations between Papuan languages. What is interesting is not that much that they use grammar features to do this, but that they seem to have given up using vocabulary as a help."

Comments

If they want a real challenge...

[TrappedByMyself]

Use the same techniques to decipher Slashot headlines

Researchers use grammar to trace relations between Papuan languages. What is interesting is not that much that they use grammar features to do this, but that they seem to have given up using vocabulary as a help.

Re:If they want a real challenge...

[mnemonic_]

Great sentence structure! Seriously, too many Slashdotters think correct grammar is the end-all be-all requirement for decent writing. They never realize that style dictates the clarity of a message more than the grammar. Note the popularity of four-clause sentences in Wikipedia ("the encyclopedia that Slashdot built"), and you see what I mean.

Makes sense.

[HugePedlar]

Even in England, different regions use different words and pronunciations (which could count as different words). But we all use the same grammar. It's easy to change the sounds of a sentence, but to change the structure requires hefty evolution, and hence a separation of culture.

Re:Makes sense.

[ciroknight]

Makes perfect sense really. I mean look at the English language overall. The vocabulary varies within the three major countries that speak it (America, England and Australia), but the grammar has stayed steadfast to the language, so much in fact that we can understand most sentences that each other speak, even if we don't know what a certain word means. I've always thought that was one of the amazing things about language.

Re:Makes sense.

[bibliophage]

Indeed, English itself owes much of its structure to Anglo Saxon languages in existence at the time of the Norman invasion of the 11th century. While only a small percentage of Anglo Saxon words remained the lexicon, the syntax of the language stayed. It's fascinating to study.

Re:Makes sense.

[hunterx11]

There are people what use slightly different grammar, however. They speech is understandable, but it's different.

Re:Makes sense.

[Random832]

"different words" aren't often so different - you can figure out that french and german (about as different as norman vs anglo-saxon) are related from vocabulary. there are patterns of systematic sound changes.

Re:Makes sense.

[HugePedlar]

Furthermore, whilst vocabulary within a language can diversify yet remain part of the same language, vocabulary can easily bleed between diverse languages. Consider that the word "television" might exist in Chinese (I've no idea whether it does or not). That doesn't mean that Chinese was in any way derived from Latin (or Greek, I dunno). Words can migrate with ease. You certainly wouldn't expect Chinese grammar to suddenly mimic ours though.

Re:Makes sense.

[ciroknight]

Certainly. I'm just stating that vocabulary is usually not what determines the language, the grammar rules are much more important. I wouldn't be able to understand what you posted if I relied on vocabulary alone ( There are people what use slightly different grammar, doesn't make any sense once so ever), but as I understand the grammar, I know that "what" should be "that", and the sentence makes sense. It's the reason I don't bother to spellcheck my posts in Word (that, and the fact Slashdot doesn't have a button that I can press and it do it for me). Even if I horribly fuck up a word, you can still tell what I'm trying to say simply by the context that it is used in.

Grammar's different between cities in America as well as the vocabulary is, but they are miniscule differences, and are usually very quickly picked up by any outsider. But this is probably true with all languages, even extremely grammar-specific languages like the Romantic languages.

Re:Makes sense.

[ciroknight]

"tele" is (roughly) distance in Greek, vision is from "visionem", a Latin word for seeing things. But yes, words are very often borrowed and blended from languages. Some people quote that 40% of English was ripped from French, which nearly 90% or more was ripped from Latin, which was devised from Greek, et cetera. Today our languages are so blended that even an English speaker can pick up many words a French or Spanish-speaking person says, even if the word doesn't translate perfectly. The main problem with translation, however, is simply knowing where to put the words (and what to tack onto the front/end of them in the case of Romantic languages), not what those words are.

Re:Makes sense.

[Eightyford]

The vocabulary varies within the three major countries that speak it (America, England and Australia)

Eh?

Re:Makes sense.

[ArcSecond]

Yes, it would seem you often are. And, indeed, too lazy to spend 15 seconds to find an answer.

I searched google with the terms "canada language english percentage" and got this as the top response:

"English 59.3% (official), French 23.2% (official), other 17.5%"

There ya go. A little Canuck assistance to test "what you heard". Knowledge is power, and all that.

Re:Makes sense.

[dhasenan]

Hm...

In late Old English, we used a rather loose SOV word order (Subject-Verb-Object) with plenty of case inflection. Now, we use no case inflection and have a strict SVO word order. Before the Saxon invasion, it was probably VSO; and the Saxons used V2 order (where it doesn't matter what's first, as long as the verb is second).

In Old English, we sometimes had prepositions appearing after the nouns they control; now that's quite ungrammatical. ("I went the store to", anyone?)

And we developed articles somewhere along the way. How'd that happen?

Really, if you looked at the grammar of Old English, you'd think it a more complex form of German and probably not link it at all to modern English. And English stands out from the rest of the European languages a fair bit.

Re:Makes sense.

[WhitetailKitten]

Aww, you make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside! Don't you know that showing off your own intelligence by correcting idiots is what the Internet is for? Well, that, pr0n, and pingflooding each other.

Re:Makes sense.

[Mozk]

'Once so ever' should actually be 'whatsoever' in your post.

Re:Makes sense.

[bogado]

And English stands out from the rest of the European languages a fair bit.

This tend to happen when you live isolated in an island. :-D

Re:Makes sense.

[hackerjoe]

I really don't know what your "eh" was about

Well, there is the fact that Canada has a significantly larger population than Australia: 31M vs. 20M, by the latest census data. So... why put Australia but not Canada on the list of major english-speaking countries?

Of course if we just go by english-speaking populations, I think South Africa has as many english-speakers as Australia, and India probably has as many as the rest of the world put together.

Re:Makes sense.

[Jesus 2.0]

Latin was not "devised from Greek". There were significant borrowings, but to say that Latin was devised from Greek is along the lines of saying that French was devised from Spanish. Proto-Italic and Proto-Hellenic had split off from each other long before there was a "Latin" or "Greek".

Re:Makes sense.

[Jesus 2.0]

Well, there is the fact that Canada has a significantly larger population than Australia: 31M vs. 20M, by the latest census data.

Well that's just super. Congratulations.

Re:Makes sense.

[cp.tar]

Latin, which was devised from Greek

Ouch.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Latin and Greek are not related any closer than Latin and Hittite or Latin and Sanskrit (which should really be spelled Sanskrt).
While certain things in Latin culture have been borrowed from Greek, the languages themselves are not related, apart from belonging in the Indo-European family.

Latin is a member of the Latin/Faliskic group, while Greek has no close relatives.

Furthermore, Romance languages are not that heavy on flection as Slavic ones, for instance... translation is so much more than 'knowing where to put the words', although I've stopped expecting most people to realise that - if it were just that, computer translators would be much more efficient, for one thing.

Re:Makes sense.

[Jesus 2.0]

While only a small percentage of Anglo Saxon words remained the lexicon, the syntax of the language stayed.

That's simply false. For example, here's an Old English version of the Lord's Prayer, with the vocabulary, but not the grammar, translated into Modern English:

Father our thou that art in heavens
be thy name hallowed
come thy kingdom
be-done thy will
on earth as in heavens
our daily bread give us today
and forgive us our sins
as we forgive those-who-have-sinned-against-us
and not lead thou us into temptation
but deliver us from evil. truly.

It's fascinating to study.

Then you should study it.

Re:Makes sense.

[mintrepublic]

Yea, I thought "lorry" referred to trucks.

Re: Makes sense.

[Black Parrot]

> Even in England, different regions use different words and pronunciations (which could count as different words). But we all use the same grammar. It's easy to change the sounds of a sentence, but to change the structure requires hefty evolution, and hence a separation of culture.

All the same, the various Indo-European languages vary greatly in grammar, and we might never have recognized the family's existence if grammar was all we looked at.

Re:Makes sense.

[drsquare]

Considering the French spoken in Canada, Australia actually has more English speakers. Also Canadians speak an English which is more American than anything, whereas Australia have a more unique dialect.

Re:Makes sense.

[Svartormr]

Yea, so take off!

Re:Makes sense.

[bar-agent]

Because we're all well aware of the fact that the American continent consists of the United States and the United States alone.

Damn straight. You betta reco'nize, foo'! Truth!

Re:Makes sense.

[jonadab]

> Latin and Greek are not related any closer than Latin and Hittite
> or Latin and Sanskrit

I'm not sure where Hittite fits in, but Latin and Greek are a little more closely related, and a good deal more similar, than Latin and Sanskrit. Yes, Sanskrit ultimately comes from the same indo-european roots, and no, Latin doesn't come from Greek, but nevertheless, the peoples who populated Greece and what is now Italy did have some common roots that were more recent than their connection to the Hindustani peoples.

> Latin is a member of the Latin/Faliskic group, while Greek has
> no close relatives.

"Close" is relative. Granted, Latin and Greek are nowhere near as closely related as, say, French and Italian. But Sanskrit is even more distant.

And, intuitively, you can actually tell this from the languages.

Just for instance, Latin and Greek both get their writing systems, ultimately, from middle-eastern peoples (traditionally, the Phoenicians are the usual guess as to the origin, but in any case it is clear that the alphabet was developed in the middle-east). The devanagari syllabary, and the various earlier scripts used to write the hindustani languages, appear to have been developed on the Indian subcontinent. The writing systems of course developed after the languages themselves were already differentiated, but the differences in the writing systems are indicative of important underlying linguistic differences. (The very idea of writing Latin or Greek with a syllabary seems a bit odd, because the languages aren't structured that way.)

Getting back to the sort of thing this article is talking about, then, Latin and Greek also, once you get past the obvious superficial differences, bear some striking grammatical resemblances, ties that are stronger than merely both being of distant indo-european origin. The grammatical structures are similar -- much more similar than, say, from either one to English. They're both, for instance, difficult to categorize in terms of SVO / SOV / OSV / OVS / VOS / VSO, and for largely the same reasons. (In layman's terms: you can't translate Yoda's speech into either of them, and get the same "weirdness" effect, because word order just isn't used that way in these languages; Yoda would blend right in with everyone else; if you turned his word order around the other way, to match English usage, he'd *still* blend right in with everyone else.)

Perhaps more interesting, both languages were *changing* in similar ways during the same time period. They both have morphological relics from earlier, now-unknown versions of the language that had additional phonemes and additional grammatical features (additional cases and tenses, for instance, e.g., Greek at one time had a pluperfect, but by the third century it had faded largely out of usage), and they both were in the process (during the time of the Roman empire) of losing some of their more complex grammatical features, such as some of the less common moods (e.g., the optitive), and eventually they both gave rise to modern languages with significantly less inflection and simpler grammars (respectively, the Romance languages, or modern Greek).

I would not dismiss the connections between Latin and Greek as "no more closely related than Latin and Sanskrit". They have too much in common.

Re: Makes sense.

[mlewan]

"All the same, the various Indo-European languages vary greatly in grammar, and we might never have recognized the family's existence if grammar was all we looked at."

I'm not sure what you are after here. Do you claim that there are no shared grammatical features between the Indo-European languages? There may be no single rule that applies to all IE languages, but there are a lot of things that are strikingly Indo-European.

* Verb conjucation by person (I am, you are, it is...) exists in all IE languages I know of, either now, or in a recent form. (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish have all but lost the feature in the modern standard form, but it existed until less than a hundred years ago, and some dialects still use it.)

* Noun gender exists in all IE languages I know of except English, and if you go back a few hundred years, you see it in English as well.

* Adjective-noun correlation is of course linked to gender, and that is also very common (un homme heureux/une femme heureuse).

* Special forms for cases (genitive, dative, accusative and so on) exists everywhere in the IE languages, afaik, even though it may be limited in the current forms of the languages.

* Subject Verb Object (SVO) word order is by a large margin the most common one among at least the European IE languages.

You will find some of those features in some non IE languages, but hardly the full set. Of those features Chinese has only SVO. Japanese has none.

Re:Makes sense.

[cp.tar]

Any typological features common to Greek and Latin can be explained by geographical and cultural proximity, and that would explain practically every point you're trying to raise in your post.

While it is possible to determine which group branched when, at least relatively, I don't think you'll find that Greek and Latin are as close as you suggest.

Furthermore, you appear to believe that just because there is no strict word order in a given language, there is also no preferred word order. You are, naturally, completely wrong. Yoda-speak translates to Croatian very easily, and I imagine it would translate to nearly any language in the world. You can always mangle the word order into something funny.

Furthermore, I think you might find interesting that the Latin alphabet is just an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, which has its origins in Semitic alphabet systems; nothing more, nothing less. The detailed development of the Latin alphabet actually constitued most of my first Greek lesson in college.

Therefore, much as you do raise some interesting points, Latin and Greek remain no more closely related than Latin and Sanskrit - at least not significantly. Most of the similarites you mention are not based on genetic relation, but rather on geographical (and, hence, cultural) proximity.

This was actually a nice chance for me to revise some things for my exam on Thursday... it's quite a pity my college is so strong on Indo-European linguistics, and far weaker on other linguistic areas... Ah, well...

Re:Makes sense.

[jonadab]

> Furthermore, you appear to believe that just because there is no strict word order in a
> given language, there is also no preferred word order. You are, naturally, completely wrong.
> Yoda-speak translates to Croatian very easily, and I imagine it would translate to nearly
> any language in the world.

It does not translate to common Greek. Or, rather, it doesn't seem unusual when translated. Subject first? Verb first? Direct object first? Indirect object first? It makes no difference; you say first whichever one you want to emphasize most, or just pick one. It doesn't even matter whether the subject or the predicate nominative is first in a sentence with an implied linking verb; even though the subject and the nominative both use the same case, there are other markers to determine which one is which, so the word order goes either way.

Word order doesn't matter for adjectives either; they go before or after the word they are modifying, whichever is more convenient. Either way is the attributive position if the adjective has the article (or the predicate position if the noun has it and the adjective does not; if neither has the article, it can go either way; if there's no noun, the adjective is being used as a noun, which is very common). All of this is true irrespective of whether the adjective is an individual word, a phrase (e.g., a prepositional phrase) or a clause.

There are places where word order matters, of course. Prepositions always precede their objects, for instance, and relative clauses are always introduced by the relative pronoun.

Re:Makes sense.

[neonsignal]

When linguists use lexicon to find the relationship between languages, they are looking at core lexical items that are very unlikely to be replaced (for example, 'sun', 'head', 'water' and so on). There are only a few hundred of these words.

The problem with determining language relationships is the length of the time frames. Languages can change radically in a thousand years. One of the slowest changing features are these core words, which are replaced more slowly than grammatical features (of course, sound systems can also shift). So in English for example, most of these core words are still of Anglo-Saxon origin, even with the influx of Norman French and Classical language items in the last thousand years.

Another issue is that features from languages can be borrowed from other languages, rather than undergo an 'evolutionary' change. An example is that of tonal systems, which tend to cross even language families. Just having features in common does not make languages more closely related.

So using grammar to relate languages raises complex issues. It might be suited to Papuan languages (where the time frame is reasonably shallow), and where borrowings are controlled because of short trade routes. But it is not the best approach in general.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is interesting is not that much that they use grammar features to do this, but that they seem to have given up using vocabulary as a help.

In other news, researchers find little evidence of English language roots in Slashdot postings.

Re:Huh?

[HugePedlar]

LOL ur so rite!

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL - exclamatory particle (interjection)
ur - 2nd person singular present tense copula (not marked for aspect like "ub")
so - intensifier (adverb)
rite - adjective modifying the subject of "ur"

Vocabulary is nearly arbitrary, but the range of grammar that is comprehensible to the human mind is limited. Sure, you get polysynthetic and analytic languages, but they are, in the final analysis, reducible to a limited set of methods for operating on vocabulary. Phylolinguistics knows this, and that's what TFA is talking about.

Ramsey Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

One can always, eventually, make out structure from random noise. At what point do you stop blindly searching for the sake of it?

Re:Ramsey Theory

[ciroknight]

The problem here is, we know it's not just "fuzz". These people are communicating, but like Dolphins (for a good example of undecypherable language), it's very hard for outsiders to have any clue of how to translate.

If we stop looking for how to translate it, we lose all that society has generated in terms of culture and myth, we lose another piece of humanity. Of course, people will argue that this doesn't matter, and I'm certain people will live without it, but it's still humanity, and we should be looking for ways to unite our people and not seperate ourselves.

Lastly, the tools we use to break the code of earthly languages will be invaluable if we ever make contact with other civilizations and intellegences. We can't even decrypt dolphin banter here on earth, and yet when ET phones us we're expected to pick up the phone and talk to him in plain English? Perhaps we've been bombarded by alien signals for hundreds of years now in a multitude of frequencies and different alien languages and simply can't decypher any of them because our linguistics aren't that well developed. And if our linguistics aren't that developed what does that tell you about the rest of our societies? Food for thought.

Language and Communication are two of the most important and employable sciences we humans can study and use. But yes, there's always a chance you can be over examining the issue. I just feel that this isn't one of those cases.

Re:Ramsey Theory

[Mozk]

I would mod you up if I had mod points. Your post is very insightful.

Yeah, right.

[blair1q]

Aren't these the same guys who think English is grammatically closer to German than it is to Swedish?

Re:Yeah, right.

[nicklott]

I have no idea. Please, enlighten us...

Re:Yeah, right.

[0rionx]

The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages (probably from early Scandinavian), whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin (a good deal of it comes via French, thanks to the Normans). Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.

Re:Yeah, right.

[Arker]

Actually, although yes we do have a lot of vocabulary from Latin via Norman-French, it's far from the majority or 'core' - it's just an overlay. And English separated from other Germanic languages gradually after the invasions of Britain - in the early period what became the various Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, plus some minors depending on how you classify) were not really separated either. For instance, if you read Beowulf you'll find that the hero of the tale is a Dane, from what is now southern Sweden (Skåne) who served a Gothic (the part of modern Sweden just north of Skåne ) king, and he needs no translators to talk to any of the other characters, who come from areas that now would speak at least 3 or 4 different languages.

In the case of languages that close together, any attempt at the kind of analysis you're talking about is probably going to find the 'noise' outweighs the signal.

Re:Yeah, right.

[dajak]

The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages (probably from early Scandinavian), whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin (a good deal of it comes via French, thanks to the Normans). Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.

The core vocabulary, which is inseparable from the grammar, is clearly predominantly Germanic. There is no grammar left without to, of, a, the, and, or, etc. Core religious vocabulary like god and hell is also Germanic, just like the days of the week, the numbers, basic agricultural and hunting vocabulary etc. Just nouns and verbs are to a large extent derived from Latin, and remarkably it is the only Germanic language, as far as I know, that uses non-Germanic words and concepts for core legal vocabulary (law, violation, guilt, responsibility, liability, act, court, etc.).

German changed a lot over a long period during the High German consonant shift (look at the map) originating from northern Italy in the early Dark Ages. That is why nowadays you find so-called High German dialects, closely related to standard German, in the south, and Low German, which is more distant to standard German and closer to Dutch, and English, in the north. Morpholinguistic distances between (remnants of) dialects of villages from Austria to England are a lot less than the difference between standard German and English would suggest. English also changed a lot through Romance influence, but in another period and in a completely different way. English became much simpler: a kind of pidgin Germanic for French conquerors.

In my opinion, the Germanic core of English only appears to be more related to the Scandinavian languages, or minority languages in the Netherlands and Belgium like Frysian and coastal Flemish/Zeeuws, because these changed less than standard German or - to a lesser extent - standard Dutch. One of the problems facing Dutch linguists for instance is that old Dutch is completely indistinguishable from Old Kentish on the opposite shore of the North Sea, making it impossible to attribute sources. British historians unfortunately read too much into these modern similarities, and pretend that Angel, Dane and Saxon tribes tribes more or less jumped to England from southern Scandinavia.

A sideline: History makes a lot more sense if you note that people in northwestern France around Calais (where the Channel is at its narrowest) still spoke a - Germanic - dialect of coastal Flemish in the 19th century, and that the language border between Germanic and Romance languages hardly moved for two millenia. The burden of proof is on those that claim that whole nations moved and invaded areas not even adjacent to the area they were born in. There is little hard evidence for mass migrations before the modern colonial ones. The 'genetic evidence' for Germanic invasion based on the close relatedness of English and Frysians in the Netherlands overlooks the possibility that a 'Germanic' population already lived in England in Ceasar's time and gradually expanded over the centuries, even though there is as much Roman and Celtic lore about the 'Belgian' (Fir Bolg etc.) migration into Britain as there is for a Saxon invasion.

Re:Yeah, right.

[Krach42]

English grammar: I hope she makes it to the party

Swedish grammar: I hope to she comes to party-the (Jag hoppas att hon kommer på festen.)

--------

English grammar: I want to read the newspaper.

Swedish grammar: I want read newspaper-the. (Jag vilja läsa tidningen.)

Now, explain to me exactly *HOW* the Swedish grammar is closer to English grammar than German?

Or are you just up in arms about the V2 phenomena that German and Dutch have, but the Scandanavian languages don't? Because I'll tell you that all the Scandanavian languages have a grammatical feature where the "definite article" is actually a suffix upon the noun.

This neglects the whole issue of drastically different prepositional usage, and other grammatical forms. Scandanavian languages are not really any closer to English grammar than German grammar is. (For the record, I speak English natively, German at about a C1 rating at a quality of "ausreichend", and Swedish darn poorly likely around a lower B rating, but enough to know it's grammar is no closer to English's than is German's.)

Re:Yeah, right.

[Krach42]

yeah, after my post, I went back and read the things and saw that everyone was arguing the exact opposite point that I thought they were. Oh well.

My bad, anyways, at least it gets the facts on the table. I *have* had someone tell me before that if you word for word translate English to Norwegian it would be grammatically correct. Of course, now I would have the arms with which to argue the point, but at the time I didn't.

Re:Yeah, right.

[say]

[English] is the only Germanic language, as far as I know, that uses non-Germanic words and concepts for core legal vocabulary (law, violation, [...]

Nope. The Nordic languages have lov(Norwegian/Danish) and lag (Swedish). I also believe this word is very old in Nordic languages. Violation reminds me a lot of vold (Norwegian) which means "violence", but also in a rather metaphoric sense: volde skade means inflict harm, and forvolde means cause (in a legal context).

The other words, though, seems to match latin equivalents better.

Re:Yeah, right.

[say]

I *have* had someone tell me before that if you word for word translate English to Norwegian it would be grammatically correct.

That's a lie. Your sentence, for instance, would translate to Jeg har hatt noen fortelle meg før at hvis du ord for ord oversette engelsk til norsk det ville være grammatisk korrekt. A correct translation would be Noen har fortalt meg tidligere at hvis du oversetter engelsk til norsk ord for ord ville det bli korrekt.

There are quite a lot of grammatic differences. Most of them are positional. The sentence part "det ville være" (it would be) needs to be written "ville det være", for instance. The first would roughly translate back to "that would be". The construction "to have someone [verb] me" is also far from directly translateable.

Re:Yeah, right.

[dajak]

Nope. The Nordic languages have lov(Norwegian/Danish) and lag (Swedish). I also believe this word is very old in Nordic languages.

I Stand Corrected.

These Nordic, English and Romance words appear to be cognates. But related to what historical language?

Re:Yeah, right.

[jonadab]

> The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages
> (probably from early Scandinavian)

Probably from a mixture of several Northern-European languages, *including* Scandinavian ones, but likely others as well. However, significant modifications have occurred over the years.

> whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin

The bulk of our vocabulary overall comes from Greek, Latin, and French (probably in that order; if you count French words that are ultimately of Latin origin as Latin, then Latin etymologies certainly outnumber Greek ones, and they *might* anyway, depending on how you count), but a higher percentage of the *core* vocabulary (i.e., the couple hundred or so most common words, such as the articles, coordinating conjunctions, common prepositions, pronouns, and so forth) come from the Germanic languages.

> Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical
> structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.

It resembles it, but the differences are nonetheless significant. Adjective placement is handled differently. Word order has so increased in importance as to pretty much obviate inflectional case, resulting in the discarding of a number of inflectional features. Additionally, the influence of people educated in Latin on the way English grammar has been taught over the years has succeeded in transplanting some aspects of Latin grammar into English, e.g., the way certain sentence patterns involving verbals are handled.

Nonetheless, it's certainly true that English grammar derives largely from Germanic languages, while a lot of the vocabulary has been imported from elsewhere.

Re:Yeah, right.

[Krach42]

Yeah, I knew it was wrong now. Since I know Swedish I know a bit about Norwegian. (Not 100% the same/similar enough, but better than 90%)

Like I said, I'd argue it hard core with my friend now. I'd just simply point him to "Jeg har boket", and tell him that it doesn't work. Then suggest that perhaps he should actually study and learn a language before he makes such claims.

Question

[deutschemonte]

Why is there a story about grammar on a site whose editors can't understand the difference between "its" and "it's"?

Re:Question

[zootm]

The question mark should be placed inside the quotation marks.

That is a rule of english that has always annoyed me. If it isn't the quoted item which contains the question, I don't put the question mark inside it (same thing with full stops and quoted sentences). Regardless of correctness, I think it's clearer.

Re:Question

[alext]

It's a rule of American English. As I think noted in the US forward to "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", British English converged on the scheme you like ("logical quoting") some time ago.

Re:Question

[zootm]

Hmm. I'm Scottish, and semi-remember the rule being taught, but it's possible that I just don't recall correctly :).

Re:Question

[Peter La Casse]

Why is there a story about grammar on a site whose editors can't understand the difference between "its" and "it's"?

Perhaps they thought that the story was about actor Kelsey Grammer.

Re:Question

[alext]

Aha ok, well here's one item about it that implies that the change in UK journalism etc. is fairly recent so maybe we were mostly taught the old way as you say.

Re:Question

[bugmonkey]

Aye, but we speak 'scots'. Although whether or not we were taught that in school is another matter. I'm not a big fan of written scots, but a big fan of it spoken.

Re:Question

[jeisner]

Why is there a story about grammar on a site whose editors can't understand the difference between "its" and "it's"?

The question mark [in the above] should be placed inside the quotation marks.

Nope, not in this example. Any professional writer would leave it outside. I think you're overgeneralizing -- American English does override the logical placement for commas and periods, but other punctuation marks like ? and ) are always left in their logical position, which may be either before or after the close-quote.

Source if you need one: http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/quotation .htm

Re:Question

[zootm]

Since you were in my English class, I think you know that we were, in fact, taught nothing, Neil. :P

Re:Question

[gfreeman]

You probably mean foreword :-)

Re:US grammar rotting?

[agraupe]

Also, ending sentences with "at". That's the thing that pisses me off the most about American grammar. I find myself ocassionally using "like", but I wish I could stop.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[hunterx11]

The article is about studying the grammar of languages as they are spoken, not the prescriptive rules of formal language. All the examples you gave are bad examples of formal English, but they are not "wrong" in any meaningful sense of the word. "Man, like, he ain't got it," is just as valid English as, "He doesn't have it." Wrong would be something like, "He doesn't has it."

Language map

[Saiyine]

Could it be used to create a "language map" that shows the interactions across the history of the population of the continents? It would be cool.

--
Superb hosting 4800MB Storage, 120GB bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
Picaday!!! Strange & sexy pictures (Some NSFW!).

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Fnkmaster]

Actually, a linguist would tell you this is just the natural way language evolves. What you call a grammatical error in the second case, a linguist would call the creation and adoption of a new word to fill an important gap in the language. Previously, there was no simple way to communicate the concept of informal or inexact quotation - in other words, when you aren't quoting a person but paraphrasing their responses or words. It is quite awkward to say "He said something along the lines of..." or "He said something like..." repeatedly, so the phrase "He was like..." developed in response to a clear need in the language, which I think in part explains its rapid adoption around the US (though still stronger in certain regions, perhaps) and its stickiness as an informal usage.

The former example, take vs. bring, is a case in which a distinction between two similar words is so obscure as to be effectively meaningless for most communications. That one may be considered "proper" by a grammarian is irrelevant to a linguist if both easily communicate the same concept to a speaker of the language. This is one way in which language regularly evolves.

I appreciate that certain usages may sound grating on the ears to somebody who had that particular point beaten into their head as a schoolchild (i.e. take vs. bring). But this is part of the continuous process of linguistic evolution, NOT some sudden degradation in American English indicative of the downfall of our society.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[lav-chan]

Technically, 'he ain't got it' is just as wrong as 'he doesn't has it', considering that 'ain't' means 'am not'. The only difference between your examples is that one error (he ain't) is widely accepted in every-day speech and one (doesn't has) isn't.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

"Can you bring the table downstairs?" (The asking party is to stay upstairs.)

To me, the grammar is still wanting here and wrong; the party should have said, "Can you take the table downstairs?"

From answers.com:

bring: To carry, convey, lead, or cause to go along to another place
take: To get into one's possession by force, skill, or artifice


I would say that the usage of bring is the more correct choice. I think this is a case where the grammar nazi's pedantic and inflexible rules concered with wherefors, first persons, possessives and participles will actually casue them to chose the least correct word in certain circumstances.

The purpose of language is to convey meaning from my head, to your head, via speech text or some other medium. Trying to do so while conforming to arbitrary and often excessively complicated grammar rules of one dialect will often impair the first objective, making you less understandable.

For example, consider the following sentences. Which is more grammatically correct, and which conveys the writers meaning more aptly.

"Grammar rules are unnecessarily complicated, and restrictive."
"Grammar goons is da suX0rs!"

Not a chance.

[dhasenan]

Traditional methods for tracking language relations are based on vocabulary. That's because every language has a rich vocabulary based on sound and meaning; and sound changes are usually widespread (that is, one sound change occurs wherever it can, changing perhaps every 'd' into an 'n'). So you can usually corrolate the basic vocabularies of two related languages rather predictably.

Grammar, on the other hand, is much smaller and more limited. It's possible for two unrelated languages to have very similar grammars, but much more difficult for them to have similar basic vocabularies. There's an Austronesian language which has a word 'dog' that means 'canine', but that's practically the only shared word between it and English. Usually you won't have more than a couple dozen shared words between unrelated languages.

Also, when two different languages interact, the result is usually grammatical simplification--even if both grammars are quite complex, you might drop a few cases and inflections. So it's extremely surprising that linguists could track language change via grammar in this case.

Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

English has roots in ancient Saxon. Its vocabulary is largely from Latin via French. The grammar is still largely based on Saxon though. If you analyzed the vocabulary, you would conclude that English was a derivative of French. If you analyze the grammar, you conclude that it came from Saxon.

It's also interesting to look at traditional rites, which don't change as rapidly as the rest of the language. For instance, there are lots of Christmas carols which have English usage that hasn't been used in everyday speech for hundreds of years. (This also holds for musical scales.)

Re:Makes sense

[Lillesvin]

If you analyzed the vocabulary, you would conclude that English was a derivative of French.

That's not entirely true. Yes, you'd see that English has a lot of words from French, but then you'd iterate further and find out where French has it from etc.

Besides, when trying to determine language roots by using vocabularies, you'd use a core vocabulary, ie. words that are likely not to be borrowed from other languages. (Using words like prime minister, bulldozer etc. makes no sense, since they are very new words.) So with English <-> French, it could look a little like this:

• head (En.); tête (Fr.)
• foot (En.); pied (Fr.)
• hand (En.); main (Fr.)
• one (En.); un (Fr.)
• two (En.); deux (Fr.)
• three (En.); trois (Fr.)
• ...

From this you wouldn't immediately say that English was a derivative of French, because of the major differences in the words head, foot and hand, but rather that French and English probably branched from the same language. Note that regarding the numbers 1-3 there are similarities, which can probably even be boiled down to a few morphophonemic rules, but that's not necesarilly indicating that English derived from French, but might as well support the claim that it branched from the same language as French. However, even though the term foot in English is the commonly used term, we see the French influence in eg. biped.

Additionally, if you compared English to Danish, then you'd learn that English has a lot of common words from Danish, like get, give, take, they, both, dirt, egg, seat, sister, skin and sky. All of which were probably incorporated into Old English as a result of the Danish occupation of eastern Britain around 850 AD. (Source: Hudson, Grover: Essential Introductory Linguistics, 2000)

So did English derive from Danish? Not likely, but it was influenced by it. The vocabulary method of determining language roots isn't as simple as you indicate.

Using core vocabularies to determine language roots has been common practice for a long time, but using grammar also is a very welcome addition in diachronic linguistics. Fortunately, you don't have to use one over the other - the two methods can easilly co-exist and be used to supplement each other hopefully resulting in even more accurate determinations of language roots.

Re: Makes sense

[Black Parrot]

> English has roots in ancient Saxon. Its vocabulary is largely from Latin via French. The grammar is still largely based on Saxon though.

Au contraire, modern English sentence structure is far more like French than like its own ancestral forms.

Also, our core vocablulary is still mostly Germanic (pronouns, articles, prepositions, names for relatives, etc.), and for other words we have so many lexical borrowings from French and Latin that we essentially have a dual vocabulary system.

Sorry to say, but you have it almost exactly backwards.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[TheRealMindChild]

To me, the grammar is still wanting here and wrong; the party should have said, "Can you take the table downstairs?"

This all really depends on where in location the speaker is in relation to the listener. "Bring" would most certainly be appropriate if the speaker is at the bottom of the stairs and the listener was at the top. On the other hand, "Take" would be appropriate if the listener AND the speaker were at the top of the stairs, or the speaker was at the top and the listener was at the bottom.

The difference between "bring" and "take" are something you seem to be ignoring on purpose... "bring" means start at a destination away from me, and approach. "Take" means to start at a destination (usually implied close by, but not always), and move to a location away from me.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

All these are wrong folks.

The error isn't about which folks, or what kind of folks they are. The error is the grammar.

Japanese and Korean

[line.at.infinity]

It has long been known that Japanese and Korean have had similarities in grammar, but both have been classified as language isolates as a result of not being able to find strong vocabulary links as nice as Indo-European languages. Some consider the two languages to be a part of the larger Altaic language group. Maybe this new method of investigation will turn up more useful results than the vocab link which is increasingly becoming a dead end.

Re:Japanese and Korean

[antifoidulus]

The reason that Japanese and Korean are both considered "isolates" and not related to each other is more political than anything else. Koreans are still a bit sore about that whole subjugation thing, and (especially older) Koreans really do hate the Japanese. The older generation of Japanese aren't too fond of Koreans either, so they both refuse to admit that their languages(which is much more a part of cultural identity than in the west I think) are related purely on political grounds. Koreans especially don't want to relate the languages because the Japanese tried to destroy the Korean language(classes were all in Japanese, all published material was in Japanese etc), so by saying the languages are related they feel that it would be justifying Japan's cultural imperialism.
There are some attempts outside of that sphere to relate the language, but it's difficult considering that most experts on the 2 languages are in either Korea or Japan.

Re:Japanese and Korean

[Kilpus]

"Japanese and Korean have had similarities in grammar, but both have been classified as language isolates as a result of not being able to find strong vocabulary links"

Actually, the real reason they are considered isolates is because of political reasons. During the Japanese occupation of Korea, any Japanese linguistic who said that Japanese and Korean were related would have been executed. These days the Japanese linguist may not be physically executed, but claiming a relationship between Japanese and Korean would probably be career suicide.

Among Korean linguists, Japanese and Korean are considered strongly related. The Korean political slant is to claim that Japanese is a 'daughter' language of Korean with Korean being the 'Father' parent language.

I was fluent with Japanese and spoke a good bit of Korean while living there (in both Japan and Korea for linguistic study). The differences between Japanese and Korean are comparable to the difference between French and Spanish.

Re:Japanese and Korean

[Kilpus]

I would recommend that you read "PEAKCHE OF KOREA AND THE ORIGIN OF YAMATO JAPAN" by Wontack Hong. Study some good Japanese and Korean grammar books. The Yale University Press "Japanese: The Spoken Language" grammar series is the best I've seen. For Korean Grammar books I would recommend the "Speaking Korean" series by Francis Y.T. Park. I can only wish that Yale University Press would release a Korean grammar series. *sigh*

Re:Japanese and Korean

[niktemadur]

...the Japanese tried to destroy the Korean language(classes were all in Japanese, all published material was in Japanese etc)...

That sounds very similar to what happened in Euzkadi (the basque land) during Franco's government, which attempted to assimilate the basque culture. Euskera (the basque language) was banned from schools, from church, from television and radio, from the printed page, etcetera. After much violence over the years, this situation has thankfully come to pass.

Maybe the grammar database method could shed some light on the origins of Euskera, an isolated language that cannot be linked, via vocabulary, to any other language in Europe, or the rest of the world, for that matter. How did that come about? Where did these people's ancestors come from?

Re:Japanese and Korean

[Kilpus]

Also, should recommend "The Japanese Language Through Time" and "A Reference Grammar Of Korean: A Complete Guide to the Grammar and History of the Korean Language". Both books are by Samuel E. Martin. You will find them very enlightening as to how Japanese and Korean are related.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[TheRealMindChild]

While the origin of "ain't" means 'am not' (not sure why it wasn't "amn't"), the meaning today certainly means 'does not'.

Similarly, if you are an american, you will notice the meaning of "ignorant" changing from 'Ill informed' to 'Asshole'

Grammar changes too

[CreateWindowEx]

Well, maybe not quite the same:

UK: I haven't got a nose. US: I don't have a nose.

UK: Microsoft are delaying Longhorn. US: Microsoft is delaying Longhorn.

Also, grammar certainly does change quite a bit even in the course of a thousand years. E.g., "With this ring I thee wed" is a remnant of when English used Subject-Object-Verb ordering (like German) instead of Subject-Verb-Object, whereas most of the so-called "strong irregular verbs" in English can be traced back to proto Indo-European (~7000 BC). English has also lost almost all of its declinations for case, except for pronouns.

Nevertheless, this new technique does sound like a promising tool for historical linguistics.

Re:Grammar changes too

[ikkonoishi]

UK: I haven't got a nose.
US: I don't have a nose.
Alabama: I don't got no nose, boy. It done got bitt off by Bubba's houn' dawg.

(I'm a resident. I can say this sort of thang, and get away with it y'all.)

Re:Grammar changes too

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Any of those sentences is perfectly understandable by a speaker of either British and American English, and in fact I've heard all those forms on both sides of the Atlantic. One or the other may be more common in one location than the other, but it's by no means exclusive.

Re:Grammar changes too

[Mozk]

One day when I was bored a compiled a list of all of the differences between American English and UK English.

http://s95353305.onlinehome.us/british

Some may be old or unused...

Re:Grammar changes too

[Jesus 2.0]

Regarding "forwards", "backwards", and "afterwards": Which are those supposed to be, American or British?

If British, uh, Americans use them too.

If American, what are the British equivalents?

Re:Grammar changes too

[cp.tar]

Damn, I do wish I didn't spend that last mod point...

On a sidenote, as a non-native English speaker, I have to ask: where would you put 'I ain't got no nose'?
Geographically, I mean.

Re:Grammar changes too

[poopdeville]

It's the latter. Forward, backward, afterward.

Re:Grammar changes too

[Jesus 2.0]

Americans say those too.


Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.

It's been 9 seconds since you hit 'reply'.

Chances are, Slashdot's posting rules idiotically assume some crap about you being behind a firewall or proxy and having hit the back button to reuse a form.

Re:Grammar changes too

[poopdeville]

I got it backwards. Toward is "more common" in the US, but both are acceptable in both places. http://www.bartleby.com/64/C003/040.html

Re:Grammar changes too

[bentcd]

US: I don't have a nose.

Hmmm . . . I could have sworn it was "I don't have a nose, you know what I'm saying?" . . .

Re:Grammar changes too

[Damer Face]

Microsoft is a bunch of fecking eejits.

The collective noun in UK-style action.

Re:Grammar changes too

[CagedBear]

UK: I haven't got a nose.
US: I don't have a nose.
Alabama: I don't got no nose, boy. It done got bitt off by Bubba's houn' dawg.

New Jersey: BAM BAM BAM Stare at my nose now - bitch!

Re:Grammar changes too

[The Original Yama]

No, it's "I don't have a nose, already!"

Re:Grammar changes too

[cagle_.25]

Arkansas. The nose, however, would go in Tennessee in the stomach of the ex-wife's dog.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[ornil]

The sense of the word "technically" depends on what your standard is. As someone upthread pointed out, we study languages as they are, not as they should be. It is perfectly grammatical to use a double negative, if that is what your grammar requires. In fact, in, say, Russian, double negatives are required and are grammatical, and single negatives (in this context) are wrong and ungrammatical. Your uneducated guy saying "I ain't done nothing" is perfectly right according to his grammar which is different from yours. Notice that he normally won't say "I did not do anything", as that is incorrect from his point of view.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[lav-chan]

It used to be amn't (or an't). It changed to ain't later, probably because of the way they talked. :shrug: Anyway, the meaning would depend on who you talk to. Some people will say it's completely wrong no matter what, some will say it's fine for 'am not', and others will say it can mean any of those things (am not, is not, does not, do not, whatever). I guess most people do fall into the latter, but most people probably suck. :/

Prescriptive grammars are always wrong

[Reality Master 201]

You're not really talking about grammar. You're talking about stylistics. True, it's often called grammar when taught in schools, but it's mostly a set of prescriptive rules defining how one OUGHT to talk in a given (generally, socially advantageous) dialect of a language.

Grammar as linguists use the term (at least since the mid 1950s) is focused on descriptive rules. Rather than being the kind of thing you consiously learn, grammar is something that is developed, somehow, during first language acquisition. So, splitting infinitives, while prescriptively incorrect, is perfectly acceptable and grammatical in common English. The only reason why that particular school marm bugaboo exists is because it's not possible to split infinitives in Latin, and so the traditon was that stylistically, one ought not to do the same in English, despite the fact that we have a periphrastic infinitive and it's perfectly common as a structure.

For an example of ungrammatical sentences, consider the following:

I fed the cat with the fluffy tail

* I fed the cat with the fluffy it.

I've only substituted a pronoun for a single noun in the sentence above, but it's clearly incorrect to a native speaker of English, whereas in the sentence:

I see the tail.

I see it.

The mistake in the first example is an error no speaker of English would ever really make. Not because it's stylistically incorrect, but because it somehow violates a fundamental structural rule of the language.

Unsound methodology

[kurisuto]

The article reports that "the researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French."

Unfortunately, these aren't reliable characteristics for determining language relatedness. For example, English and German are both undisputably West Germanic languages and are very closely related, having branched less than 2000 years ago. Nevertheless, German nouns have grammatical gender, while English nouns don't. German verbs come at the end of the clause (except in the main clause), while in English the placement of the verb is much more flexible but rarely at the end of the clause. Other examples could readily be given.

There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field: namely, by identifying a core of lexical and morphological items which show systematic correspondences in their sounds between languages (e.g. English father, fish, Latin pater, piscis), and which can't reasonably be attributed to borrowing or to chance.

Of course it would be nice if we could show relatedness between languages which branched further back than 10,000 years or so. Because of the way in which languages change, it's very unlikely that we'll ever be able to do so, at least if we are observing accepted standards of scientific rigor. Approaches roughly similar to the one described here have been attempted repeatedly in recent years, and have been repeatedly answered in the literature. You don't earn brownie points for sexing up an unreliable methodology by involving computers.

IAAPHCL (I am a professor of historical and comparative linguistics).

Re:Unsound methodology

[Anonymous Coward]

while in English the placement of the verb is much more flexible but rarely at the end of the clause. Other examples could readily be given.

Example given, you have.

Re:Unsound methodology

[sentientsoil]

You made many good insights in your post, and the fact that you have at least some familiarity with linguistics shows, which would make sense if you're indeed a professor of linguistics. :) I admit no such claim for myself but do readily confess an interest in the field which I plan to pursue through a SIL course as soon as finances permit. I wonder though if perhaps a comparative grammar would have more weight in a comparative study of linguistic origins rather than just the lexical origins of a language. The case you cite as an example is really it's own rebuttal, is it not? Perhaps I'm misguided (I am an amateur) but every source I've read, as well as the weight of history, seems to point to English having a root in the Germanic branch, yet the words you cite as examples are Latin. As a matter of fact, a vast number of english nouns are borrowed either from Greek or Latin, as a light familiarity with either language would bear out to an english speaker. I've also noted a number of english or latin words were borrowed into Russian when I spent some time familiarizing myself with it last year.

I wonder, are verb forms less likely to be borrowed from outside languages? I haven't noticed as many verbs being borrowed as I have nouns, but perhaps that depends on the context of the borrowing language, and the way they structure their sentences?

*shrugs in ignorance* blah di dah. :)

Re:Unsound methodology

[RevMike]

The article reports that "the researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French."

Unfortunately, these aren't reliable characteristics for determining language relatedness.

You don't mention whether you evaluated the research itself, or merely the report of the research. I get the sense from our post that you are commenting on the data that was presented by the journalist, and not the data that was presented by the researchers.

You demonstrate that the two features listed in the news article, when applied to English and German, don't demonstrate a relationship that we know is there. It is possible, however, that the remaining 123 features that the article did not list would correctly show the close relationship between Engish and German.

There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field: namely, by identifying a core of lexical and morphological items which show systematic correspondences in their sounds between languages (e.g. English father, fish, Latin pater, piscis), and which can't reasonably be attributed to borrowing or to chance.

The fact that there is "one, and only one" in the past does not mean that this must always be the case.

Approaches roughly similar to the one described here have been attempted repeatedly in recent years, and have been repeatedly answered in the literature.

A good reason to be skeptical. But I don't think that an academic such as yourself should be utterly dismissive without reading the actual literature and evaluating whether the researchers answered the criticisms of prior research.

Re:Unsound methodology

[Krach42]

The relation of father->pater, and fish->piscis are a nature of English having gone through the first sound shift of German languages. This is where the Germanic language as it existed at that time underwent a general change different from Latin, such that Latin ended up with "pater" with a P sound, while English ended up with "father" with an F sound at the beginning.

A better example would be to show the other languages that are more closely related to English: German: Vater (pronounced fater), Dutch vader (again pronounced fader as an f), Swedish fader (or shorter far), Norwegian and Danish can be presumed to be the same.

The habit is of linguists to present a contrasting element, English father, Latin pater, while leaving it assumed that the listener is already aware of the reasons why they differ, and not to make the assumption that they are descendents.

English did not get the word "father" from Latin "pater" because it has undergone the germanic sound shift. If we had taken the word modern from latin, we would have a word like: "priest", "paster" or "padre". Note that all three of these words are decended from the Latin word "pater". But "father" is definitely not.

Re:Unsound methodology

[mce]

Dutch vader (again pronounced fader as an f)

You got the pronounciation wrong for that one. It is pronounced vader with a v. I should know: Dutch is my mother tongue. And I speak English and German (and French, but...), so I know the difference in pronounciation in all these languages first-hand.

Re:Unsound methodology

[KH]

Nice to see a fellow graduate from PENN. I did part of my studies on the sixth floor of the Williams, too. I'm not a linguist, but a Sanskritist.

Anyhow, I always had the impression that historical linguistics had an easier time establishing methodologies depending on Indo-European languages. Those languages don't take a pro to notice similarities between its family members. Using one of your examples, stuff like father vs. pit.r (skt), mother vs. maat.r (skt) are easy enough to figure out they are related. It looks like Indo-European languages are easier to work out because they are rather young (9000 years old?).

However, being a native speaker of the language that the talks about its origin become often political (Japanese), I felt methodologies established using Indo-European languages were not working well in some other areas. Probably because languages like Japanese borrowed so many words from surrounding languages. People probably kept coming in waves. (I note the language is your field as well. I followed your link. BTW, I spent my childhood in Kumamoto.) So, I'm curious if the method mentioned in the article will be widely accepted.

Re:Unsound methodology

[GrumpySimon]

The "one and only" method is the "comparative method" and this does NOT just rely on lexicon and morphological items, it also takes into account typological/structural/grammatical features too.

Next, why *aren't* these characteristics suitable? Many researchers ( Joanna Nichols being the poster scientist ) think that grammatical characters are much more stable than lexicon based characteristics which other computational phylogenetic studies of language evolution have relied on ( including my own work ). Also - Dunn, Terrill & Reesink are very highly regarded Austronesian linguists, so they do have some idea of what they're talking about.

This research is interesting precisely because it uses many data types, and appears to show some signal at MUCH greater time depths than most historical linguists would have predicted.

I think that linguisitics has a major hang-up about "magic bullets" i.e. one or two characteristics proving or disproving the rule. Surely the better approach is to take a statistical analysis. In fact, these methods (phylogenetic techniques from evolutionary biology) that they ( & our lab ) are using are very accurate and capable of detecting these false similarities, and providing an understanding based on ALL the evidence and not one or two examples plucked from a hat.

Anyway, if anyone's interested I wrote a paper earlier this year on these methods applied to the Austronesian language family and early human settlement of the Pacific here (Sorry - PDF! )

As for "being answered" in the literature many times and "sexing up an unreliable methodology by involving computers" - not really no. It's NOT lexicostatistics or glottochronology or any of those 1950s era techniques which are crap, these methods are far more realistic and sensible (and used by evolutionary biologists every day). The computers are not just used because they're sexy, but because analysing all that data by hand is hard.

--Simon

Re:Unsound methodology

[belmolis]

The comparative method as applied in Indo-European has been shown to work quite nicely for non-European languages. The state of work on the Algonquian languages (such as Massachusett, Cree, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Micmac, Western and Eastern Abenaki) is comparable to that of Indo-European, as is that of Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mordvin, etc.), to take just two examples.

Re:Unsound methodology

[nkuitse]

English did not get the word "father" from Latin "pater" because it has undergone the germanic sound shift. If we had taken the word modern from latin, we would have a word like: "priest", "paster" or "padre". Note that all three of these words are decended from the Latin word "pater". But "father" is definitely not.

Padre is from Latin pater via Spanish; the others aren't from pater at all. Pastor is a borrowing of the Latin word for "shepherd" and priest is ultimately from Greek presbyteros "elder".

Re:Unsound methodology

[XNormal]

Because of the way in which languages change, it's very unlikely that we'll ever be able to do so, at least if we are observing accepted standards of scientific rigor.

Unfortunately, when studying the past you can't make experiments, reproducible or not. As a result, fields like evolution or linguistic history will always be less scientifically rigorous than other fields.

There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field: namely, by identifying a core of lexical and morphological items which show systematic correspondences in their sounds between languages

There are documented cases of languages gradually adopting most of the vocabulary from another dominant regional language while retaining their original grammatic structure nearly untouched. Why is grammatic structure not valid evidence for the origins of languages? Can't you offer anything better than invoking the old argument from authority?

Re:Unsound methodology

[honeypea]

English did not get the word "father" from Latin "pater" because it has undergone the germanic sound shift

I'm not sure the parent (father) post was directly implying it had, but oh, the ambiguity of English! I'm also not sure any had disentangled the cluster of probably cognate words everywhere that denote th concept of parenthood of any gender.

Greek: pater, Latin: pater, English: father, (Greek & Latin nursery words for daddy: tata), Gothic: atta, Hittite: attas, Old Irish: attir, Gaelic: athair, Welsh, Cornish: tad, Sanskrit: attas. Many sources thing they probably all descend from pre-articulate words from proud parents to their babbling babies in.. Indo-European or some common ancestral tongue. Same for "mother".

Re:Unsound methodology

[Krach42]

My bad, my guide for the Dutch language says that "v" is pronounced somewhere between "f" and "v".

Re:Unsound methodology

[Eivind Eklund]

The question that intrigues me is how come languages get simpler grammer over time--if this always happened, how were the earlier languages with complex grammar created?

There are some documented cases of languages "spontaneously forming" in very small populations. There was one case with a population of deaf children somewhere in africa, for instance. This was formed with a complete, complex grammar (in the second generation of children, I seem to remember, with the first generation having some weird anomalities.)

Sorry for the vague references - this is really not my field.

Eivind.

Indonesian language

[koinu]

I find the article interesting, because it mentions Indonesian. I've learned Indonesian, because of my ex-girl-friend. It's very interesting and much easier than English. When you take a closer look at it, it seems as someone really thought about it and removed every trace of difficult grammar. The one thing you have to learn is the vocabulary.

When I travelled to Jakarta (capital of Indonesia) the first time, I found out that that noone really speaks Indonesian there. The whole beautiful language does not exist, because everyone speaks slang there and this is difficult. Indonesian is only being written and not talked.

Two years later I got to know my current girl-friend. She is from same island as Jakarta (Java). She speaks Javanese and I realized that all my efforts to learn Indonesian have been waste of time. The vocabulary is completely different (remember what I said before about the vocabulary being the only thing you really have to learn). The easy kind of grammar is the only thing both these languages have in common.

Re:Indonesian language

[dajak]

It's very interesting and much easier than English. When you take a closer look at it, it seems as someone really thought about it and removed every trace of difficult grammar. The one thing you have to learn is the vocabulary.

When I travelled to Jakarta (capital of Indonesia) the first time, I found out that that noone really speaks Indonesian there.

Bahasa Indonesia is a derivative of what we used to call Dienstmaleis ('service malay') in the Netherlands. This is the standardized language taught in the Netherlands to civil servants who were sent to the Netherlands Indies, and it is based on similarities between Malay dialects of Islamic merchants who travelled between the islands. It became the national language of Indonesia because it was the only language, besides Dutch, that the native civil service class on the islands shared with eachother. This precursor language has never been a living language; It was designed at the universities of the colonial oppressor. Indonesia doesn't like to acknowledge this, because these mythological Indonesian-speaking merchants who existed before the Dutch are central to the claim of being a historical 'nation'.

Re:Indonesian language

[koinu]

I always suspected that this language has been designed in a university. There are too many untypical grammar rules that come from Europe (latin). And there are of course many typical asian influences as well (mostly used in colloquial language). What's missing there are the most difficult parts of European grammars: genders, tenses, plural forms and much more. Everything is simple and follows one typical sentence order that you can learn within minutes.

This is far too good to be an old natural language.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[at_slashdot]

"I appreciate that certain usages may sound grating on the ears to somebody who had that particular point beaten into their head as a schoolchild (i.e. take vs. bring)."

English is my second language, I still shudder every time I hear "He was like.." Maybe because it is an illogical construct that would sound like hell in my native tongue too, I don't know. But I think that considering a mistake
"a creation and adoption that fill an important gap in the language" is extremist and silly at the same time.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[josh82]

"Technically, 'he ain't got it' is just as wrong as 'he doesn't has it', considering that 'ain't' means 'am not'. The only difference between your examples is that one error (he ain't) is widely accepted in every-day speech and one (doesn't has) isn't."

How about something like: "Aren't I supposed to go to school?"

This is perfectly standard English, though "aren't" is a contraction of "are not". So, the sentence, when changed into a statement rather than a question, says: "I are not supposed to go to school".

Strange, at first glance. However, contractions don't have to do precisely what one might say they're supposed to do. The evolution of language need not be absolutely precise.

Still, language does precisely what it's supposed to do--convey meaning. So, meaning is use, and language evolves, regardless of how prescriptivists would have it.

The Nature Article is Badly Misleading

[belmolis]

That Nature article is badly misleading in claiming that traditional historical linguistic methods are based on vocabulary and that it is an innovation to use grammar. It is true that amateurs' ideas about linguistic relationship are based almost entirely on vocabulary, but that isn't true of what professional historical linguists do.

To begin with, there are two different problems to be addressed. The first is, given a bunch of languages, are they related at all, where by "related", we mean "descended from a common ancestor". The second problem is, given that a bunch of languages are related, HOW are they related, that is, what is the family tree, in what order did they separate?

To determine whether languages are related, we look at "similarities". I put this in scare quotes because the relevant sorts of "similarities" are more accurately described as congruences, that is, systematic relationships between languages that may not necessarily be "similar" in the usual sense. For example, English and Armenian are distantly related members of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Indo-European *dw appears in English as /t/, as in "two", while in Armenian it appears as /erk/ as in /erku/ "two". Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk is a regular sound change in that it happens in all of the attested cases in which that sequence of sounds is found. It is almost certainly the result of a series of less peculiar changes of which the intermediate stages happen not to be attested. The point is that this kind of systematic relationship is evidence of historical relationship between languages but is not a similarity in the usual sense.

Given some similarities or congruences between languages, the first question that arises is whether they might be due to chance. It is easy to find examples. For example, the Korean word for "language" is /mal/, as is the Icelandic word. There is no other reason to think that Korean and Icelandic are related, so this is written off as a coincidence. Amateurs tend not to realize how high the probability is of chance resemblences - there is a large crank literature in which people list words that they consider similar in sound and meaning in two languages and offer this as evidence of relationship.

One reason that historical linguists look for regular sound changes like Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk, or less exotic, Proto-Indo-European *p -> English f (e.g. English "father", Latin "pater", Sanskrit "pitar") is that regular sound changes, which are reflected in regular sound correspondences among the daughter languages, greatly reduce the number of degrees of freedom and therefore provide evidence that the similarities observed are not merely coincidences.

A first point, then, is that even to the extent that historical linguists rely on vocabulary for establishing relationships, what they rely on are the regular sound correspondances, not raw similarities in words.

Now, given that we have reason to believe that there are similarities between two languages that are unlikely to be due to chance, we still have to determine their origin.One possibility is that they are due to common descent,in which case we have evidence of a genetic relationship. The alternative is that the similarities are due to diffusion. Diffusion can consist of outright borrowing, e.g. English acquiring karate from Japanese, or it can be less direct, e.g. Amharic and Tigrinya shifting away from the old Semitic verb-initial word order to verb-final word order under the influence of the neighboring languages in Ethiopia and Eriterea. The problem is, how can we tell whether a given similarity is due to genetic relationship or to diffusion?

The answer is, sometimes we can, but often it is hard, maybe even impossible. If you have multiple sets of regular sound correspondances, at most one of them can be genetic. The others must reflect borrowing. If the vocabulary that show

Re:The Nature Article is Badly Misleading

[darrylo]

Someone please mod this up!

Re:The Nature Article is Badly Misleading

[mibus]

One of the things that immediately convinced most scholars that Hittite was an Indo-European language was the fact that Hittite has what are called "r/n stems", words that have /r/ at the end of the stem in certain forms and /n/ in others,

Yeah, it's such a pain handling \r vs. \n when changing between platforms regularly...

Re:The Nature Article is Badly Misleading

[SilverspurG]

Quite nice. Linguists rule.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[booc0mtaco]

You are missing the point. The only 'wrong' grammar results in ambiguity. If, in your example, the party being addressed could not carry out the desired action, then there is a breakdown in communication. The ability for language, and grammar, to be agile in this fashion allows us the freedom to create AND UNDERSTAND dialects over time. Look at language purification attempts of the past: Sanskrit, Latin, and some others to be sure. It doesn't work, and should not be expected to.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[yossarian dent]

Actually, some current thought interprets the frequent use of "like" as the language developing a sort of verbal opening quotation mark.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Kakurenbo Shogun]

From answers.com:

bring: To carry, convey, lead, or cause to go along to another place
take: To get into one's possession by force, skill, or artifice

From the dictionary widget in MacOS X:
take: [2nd definition] to remove (someone or something) from a particular place
bring: [1st definition] come to a particular place with someone or something

Consider these phrases: "take away", "bring here", "take here", "bring away". The first two are common. The last two...I don't think so.

Yes, languages evolve, and the rules and meanings of words can change. But if in the process of evolution, we lessen our ability to express and understand our thoughts precisely, then that evolution is not progress.

"Grammar rules are unnecessarily complicated, and restrictive."
"Grammar goons is da suX0rs!"

These aren't equivalent statements at all. One is talking about grammar rules, and the other, I presume, about people who try to enforce grammar rules. One is an opinion regarding specific aspects of grammar rules, and the other a general opinion of grammer (or it's enforcers) as a whole. One attempts clarity, the other emotion. Something closer to the second might be stated in the language style of the first as "I hate grammar rules" or "I can't stand people who try to enforce grammar rules".

Which is more grammatically correct, and which conveys the writers meaning more aptly.

The first is more grammitically correct. Which conveys the writer's meaning more aptly? That depends on the writer's intended meaning. The two styles of expression certainly communicate different things about the personality of the writer, and if one wishes to include that aspect in their communication, then one should choose the style that best conveys it. So sure, correct standard grammer is not always the best way to express the totality of one's intended meaning, but that doesn't lessen the value of having a widely recognized set of standard gramatical rules.

Consider this--if there were no grammar rules and the two statements written above were both considered equal, would not the second one lose some of its flavor? And if there were 25 different ways of expressing that same idea ranging from the first to "Gram's da gurk!", and none of them was condsidered "correct standard language" which was taught to everyone, how much effort would be wasted learning a multiplicity of ways to express simple ideas at the expense of the ability to express (and comprehend) more complex ideas?

Before I finish, here's and example of my latest grammatical pet peeve: "The thing is is ...". What's with the extra "is"? The funny thing about this one is that if you call people on it, they don't even realize (and even deny) that they're doing it.

Re:Context is everything

[Elad Alon]

I often check the dictionary for words I'm about to use, as opposed to words I've only just encountered. But I wouldn't say that I don't know what they mean, only that I am unsure they are the perfect match, that they embody the nuances I think they do and not others, or that their connotation is the right one. But never words whose meaning I don't "consciously know", only, sometimes, words whose meaning I couldn't explain in other words (I'm big on hand gestures). Also, this only applies to English, not to my native tongue.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Red Flayer]

"'Can you bring the table downstairs?' (The asking party is to stay upstairs.)
To me, the grammar is still wanting here and wrong; the party should have said, 'Can you take the table downstairs?'"

The grammar is the same in both cases. The difference is the vocabulary used. "to bring" has replaced "to take." Your discomfort with their usage helps affirm what the researchers are doing -- multiple people from the same population subset use vocabulary differently.

Imagine if the asking party had said "Downstairs, the table can you bring?"

Other than on Dagobah, this syntax (part of grammar) would be unacceptable to most English speakers. However, in an isolated population, this could conceivably become common usage -- which is why the researchers are using grammar to study the Papuan language family.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[bogaboga]

I agree...though a comma would have made he difference thus:

These are wrong, folks.

How about that?

MOD PARENT UP

[WilliamSChips]

-nt-

Re:US grammar rotting?

[hunterx11]

"Technically?" The article is about linguistics, not about composition. You are using the word "wrong" in the sense of "not accepted by convention." I am talking about wrong in the sense of "not following the rules of a language." Rules are not invented by writers and teachers, but rather are internalized by the speakers of a language. "Rules" and "grammar" do have different meanings when it comes to composition, but trying to apply those meanings here would be like saying that this post has bad syntax because I don't end every logical statement with a semicolon.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Fnkmaster]

You missed the point. It's not a mistake, it has a common usage of the word in a grammatically distinct role in colloquial American English. It may be a particularly grating one, but a linguist would say it is no more or less "right" or "wrong" than any other linguistic development.

The American Heritage dictionary lists it as an informal usage at this point and explains the subtleties of its meaning in this form in an explanatory note. See dictionary.com's entry for more.

Remember that English is just a fallen/corrupted/dirtied mix of German dialects with a healthy mix of Romance (Latin-derived) influence. There's nothing so pristine about it to begin with.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[hunterx11]

The only extremist and silly thing is that people always assume that language change is bad. I'm not going to say it's good, because that would be just silly. It is what it is. It's funny that people often consider adaptive change to be "progress" until it comes to language, in which case we must always strive for the language of the past which was better and more pure and is being corrupted today.

Saying that "He was like..." is illogical makes as much sense as saying that the French are crazy for calling bread pan. "Don't they know it's really called bread?" The particulars of any language are arbitrary, and saying that one instance is objectively better than another is like saying that red is a better color than blue. They're both just colors.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[at_slashdot]

Me was very creative here: maybe if we sprache like this it were still korrects in the eyes of linguists.

Probably a mixture of both

[theolein]

I speak German, Swiss-German, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, English and some Spanish and Turkish. One thing that really amazed me about Turkish is that, despite being seperated for over 1000 years, a Turk can still make himself understood throughout central asia from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. The languages have changed very little from proto-Turkic. Whats more, once you learn the grammatical system on which Turkish is based, you immediatley notice the exact same or at least very similar features throughout the Ural-Altaic language group, from Finnish, Hungarian, through to Turkish and Mongolian: The way that these languages almost uniformally have no concept of grammatical gender (no word for he or she), the way that these languages universally use the concept of adding prepositions as suffixes onto the end of words instead of being seperate as is generally the case in Indo-European languages, the very large case system also added as suffixes to the ends of words, and the concept of vowel harmony, where, in the beginning of a word which has back vowel such as a,o and u, or front vowels such as ä, ü or ö, will force the rest of the word to also change their vowels to fit in with the pattern.

It is amazing that this structure of these languages has remained so solid such that Hungarian and Finnish, which have no common words, have a very similar grammatical structure after having being seperated for almost 3500 years.

This is absolutely not the case with Indo-European languages where a modern English person can usually not understand their own language from 1200 years ago, much less German or Dutch which were both very closely related to Old English at the time. Granted Old English changed very much with the viking invasions when it mixed with Old Norse and then once again when it mixed with old French after the Norman invasion, such that the structure of a modern English sentence resembles Scandinavian more than it does German, but its vocabulary resembles German/Dutch and French.

In summary, I think that language is a reflection of both society and environment. People will make up new words to fit changing circumstances, and language structure will change when different languages meet. Simply trying to match grammatical patterns will work well on some language groups such as Ural altaic, but not so well on others, such as Indo European where vocabulary patterns are better matched (try matching English's almost complete lack of grammatical cases with Czech's 7 cases). Pattern matching on languages should try to take not only historical environmental situations into account, but also language group mixing, language evolution patterns if possible, and integrate those with vocab and grammatical patterns.

For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.

Re:Probably a mixture of both

[Ironsides]

I speak German
This is absolutely not the case with Indo-European languages where a modern English person can usually not understand their own language from 1200 years ago, much less German or Dutch

I think you missed another great point to make. The variety of German dialects in Germany. [side note, how the heck did English get Germany as the name for Deutschland?] Especially since (as I understand it) it is very hard for two people in Germany speaking there native dialects (as opposed to High German) to understand each other if they are speaking different dialects.

On a slighty different note, I can understand the syntax of Shakespear (16/17c) and the "Canterbury Tales" (14c) untranslated. The words themselves have changed (and pronunciation probably has as well), but I can still understand the syntax. Some of the words I have trouble with as they are either no longer used or the modern versions have changed too much. In fact, looking over the Cantebury Tales, I can still understand most of the words.

Re:Probably a mixture of both

[grikdog]

Excellent! Thanks for this post. I've lost my meager mod points, or you'd get them all. As for the last point, I'd suggest that "complexity" is in the ear of the beholder. Anyone who has ever blundered through the social pitfalls of Japanese personal pronouns (which exist but aren't used in polite conversation) learns to appreciate the verbs of social direction (ageru, etc.) in direct proportion to personal embarassment, but Japanese kids pick these nuances up by osmosis. Unless you are referring (in the realm of IndoEuropean languages) to the "complexity" of Sanskrit, which is about as "natural" as Esperanto. Even a language as deceptively simple as Mandarin Chinese, which bears enough resemblance to English word order to support "pidgin" dialects, reveals a bewildering sophistication in its sentence particles -- which is why the "pidgin" not only sounds odd but gives English speakers a decidedly tonedeaf impression of fluent speech. It should also be pointed out that grammatical structures are nearly imperceptible to native speakers, who only notice them when foreigners Yoda-speak produce, so the emphasis on vocabulary is both uninteresting from the evo devo linguist's point of view and naive.

Re:Probably a mixture of both

[Krach42]

For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.

This isn't actually all that accurate. For instance, many would say that Latin is more complex than Spanish. But then you get into all the features of Spanish that aren't in Latin, and make Spanish more difficult than Latin.

While English has lost it's case system, it's gender system and numerous other Germanic features, it has gained a massive complexity in word ordering and sentence construction. While in German it's fairly rule based what goes where, in English it's all meaning based. Placing this word here means this, but placing it there means this. Or even so much in that placing the word here makes the sentence grammatical, but if you change this other word, you have to change the position of that word so that the sentence remains grammatical. This is why broken English is so broken. The person has learned the words, and the simple grammar structure, but has failed to grasp that there is an intricate rule set behind the English language of what goes where.

Now, let's jump ship and go to some other languages. People almost universally say that Chinese is hard, because of the tone system where *how* you pronounce Ma changes its meaning between horse, mother, and hemp (just to name the three I remember off the top of my head.) Ok, damn, that *is* hard for someone who isn't used to it. But consider that it has no plural system (thus no mouse/mice exceptions to exist) a regularized orthography (limited number of syllables), etc, etc, etc. And you start learning that once you get past the facade, the language is actually relatively simple.

Now, jump around to Japanese. Japanese has a highly regularized verb grammar, no real plural, and simplified word order. This makes it *very* easy to pick things up. Once you know a word, you can disect out it's regular grammatical structures, and then look up the word for its meaning. Now what could be so hard about *this* language that would make this heavy regularity hard (actually, Japanese regularity is so strong that at least one Japanese book that I learned from taught you patterns, not grammatical structures. Like "verb~ta no ga aru = I have done verb", where as if you look at it, it means, "I have verb-ed". So Japanese is VERY regularized compared to Indo-European languages.) Well, you start learning that there are tons of different words for usually some of the same things that are completely phonetically unrelated, and are used in different SOCIAL situations. For instance, words for "I": watashi, watakushi, atashi, atai, boku, ore, kore, kochira, and literally as many words as Japanese has names, considering that it's not rude in Japanese for a female to "refer to herself in the third person." (which they don't actually do, they just use their name as "I/me") This has generally been considered a feature of high-class females. Now verbs. "kure" is the verb for "to give down", "ageru" is the verb for "to give up", people always "kure" things to you, and you always "ageru" things to others. Do not attempt to tell someone to "sore o agette" (give that "up to" me) Because it's *rude*. Ok, so now "kure" even has a form that is called honorific, it is "kudaseru", who's imperative form is "kudasai", which is now mostly used by them for "please". But now look at what you're saying, "koko ni itte kudasai." (come here) you're literally saying: "here to come-*linking give-down-to-me-most-honorable-one." (drastically overreaching the translation there so you get the idea.)

So, the thing you have to learn is that vocabulary isn't getting any smaller, in fact it's getting larger. It's just also shifting away from certain words, and grammar isn't getting any simpler. (If you want a post about that, ask me about Ebonics being a simplified English.)

Re:Probably a mixture of both

[niktemadur]

For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.

You seem to have a unique, inter-related perspective on languages, given the number of them that you know. I speak a measly two languages, Spanish and English, which makes me feel quite poor, as if there's a banquet of humanity and all I have is a loaf of bread and a glass of water.

Yes, it's a good question, but I'm not clear on what you mean by 'old languages', I am assuming you refer to the very beginnings of language itself. In that respect, when you say 'complex grammatically' I am understanding 'chaotic', lacking structure at first then congealing over time into an organized whole, with the flexibility to contain countless new concepts. How does one go about achieving a grand structure for vocabulary, putting into place rules that apply everywhere within the language, seamlessly?

But then again, the challenge was probably not as daunting as it would be today, considering there were far fewer concepts that needed to be articulated in those days. Words for concepts arise as fast as the need for concepts themselves, be they concrete or abstract. As an example, we still need the concepts "water" and "fire", but my ancestors had no use for "combustion" or "interest rate" or "ironic".

Also, in regards to grammatical complexity, I'll cite the example of modern spanish, which has no less than sixteen defined verbal tenses, and if that's not grammatical complexity, I don't know what is.

So I'm not sure that there is a simplification of grammar as compared to ye olden days, as we humans have both ornate and practical tendencies in the usage of language, and language balances itself accordingly every time, but never reverting quite the same.
I say this because I see tendencies towards simplification, as in OMG, WTF, LOL, in a nutshell, 133t!, a century and a half before we had Ludwig Zamenoff with Esperanto, Basic English in the 1930's, and Standard English in the 1950's and 60's (developed for aerospace industry manuals).
Accordingly, we also witness simultaneous tendencies towards non-ironic adornment.
This constant dynamic may have, from time to time, produced great leaps in standarization, while also producing things like the sixteen verbal tenses in spanish.

In historical terms, to steal a phrase from Will Durand, it can be described as a systolic and diastolic effect. Put in another way, and I don't mean this in a bad way as I love both: for every Bob Dylan, there's a Monty Python to take the piss back out of language again.

Re:Probably a mixture of both

[zsau]

Just a couple of points: Languages today aren't grammatically simpler than they used to be. Many languages have whittled down old case systems with more cases to ones with less (or, as in English, none), and similar things have happened to verbs. Meanwhile, though, those same languages have done horrible things to their word order, prepositional and modal/auxilliary verb systems. What's the difference between 'shall', 'will', 'going to' and 'gonna' when expressing something in the future? And that's only four options. Furthermore, languages like Finnish have actually increased the number of cases they have at the same time as English and French have reduced them.

Secondly, the concept of a unified Ural-Altaic language group is not really that well accepted. The languages do have similar aspects to their grammar, but that doesn't mean the languages are related (I'm quite sceptical of the article this article is based on). As for Finnish and Hungarian having no common words, I'm not sure what you mean. No words that are pronounced the same? Well, English and French don't, but there's very many words that you can trace a relationship between, either for borrowings (which are about 800-years-separated) or from inheritance (which are many, mayn more). Of course, Finnish and Hungarian have fewer if any borrowings between them, but they do have a reasonable amount of shared vocabulary.

Re:Probably a mixture of both

[Moridineas]

a Turk can still make himself understood throughout central asia from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. The languages have changed very little from proto-Turkic.

Somewhat true but misleading. Proto-Turkic is a different beast from all modern turkic languages which have huge amounts of Persian and Arabic vocab, and even grammar, added in. You're correct though, an educated Turk from Turkey and an educated Uyghur from China will have a fairly high degree of mutual understanding.

The way that these languages almost uniformally have no concept of grammatical gender (no word for he or she),

Neither does Persian, a very Indo-European language. Come to think of it, I'm not sure Latin does either. Not a unique feature. That is IF you're talking about 3rd person pronoun gender. Grammatical gender is different. Latin has grammatical gender, english doesn't, Persian doesn't, Turkish doesn't, etc.

his is absolutely not the case with Indo-European languages where a modern English person can usually not understand their own language from 1200 years ago

Woaaaa now, this is very misleading. The average Turk from Turkey will not be able to read a document from 100 years ago without lots of training. Well ok you say, this is because they changed scripts. They changed a lot more than script too though, so even if you transcribe Ottoman Turkish to modern standards, it will be difficult to understand. Certaintly a text from 400 years ago is very much inaccessible without learning an entirely different script, vocabularly and even grammar. If you're talking Chaghatai Turkish (from Central Asia) or even farther back--say the few Turkic Runic writings we have, again, completely unintelligible.

For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.

I'll make some suggestions--all those languages that we have WRITTEN records of (which goes back at most what--4000-5000 years?) is the first modification I would make. Then I would also note that I don't believe your statement is uniformly true. Thirdly I would say that the earliest writings are often religious in nature, or otherwise official--where the "high language" which is often very different from actual spoken language would often be used.

Enjoyed your post!

Re:US grammar rotting?

[hunterx11]

Your post doesn't follow the actual rules of English, however. English has rules; it's just that these rules are not the rules your teachers taught you. In fact, native speakers are not usually consciously aware of the rules, myself included. You can even say something that follows prescriptive rules but is incorrect, such as, "He has a green big ball."

Re:US grammar rotting?

[billyj]

"Can you bring the table downstairs?" (The asking party is to stay upstairs.)

The above usage has little to do with what's traditionally considered grammar. You are confusing syntax with semantics.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[demonlapin]

I believe the best on this is James D. Nicoll, with:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

Re:US grammar rotting?

[cp.tar]

Actually, IIRC this doesn't exactly follow prescriptive rules: size precedes colour, texture &c.

If my room wasn't such a mess, I'd be able to find the exact ordering of seven or so categories... but I think I made my point anyway.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Ironsides]

The only 'wrong' grammar results in ambiguity.

As the joke goes:
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle jack off a horse".

As for ambiguity, a lot of language is context sensitive. Even in Japanese and German this is so. And example from German is this. There is no future tense of words. It drove one of my german teachers nuts (he husband is german and the other german teacher, she is from the US). Her husband would say "I go to the store" [in english]. In german, it can mean either he is going now or in the future. In english, it means he is going now.

Look at language purification attempts of the past: Sanskrit, Latin, and some others to be sure. It doesn't work, and should not be expected to.

French.....

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Jesus 2.0]

Can you bring the table downstairs?" (The asking party is to stay upstairs.)

To me, the grammar is still wanting here and wrong; the party should have said, "Can you take the table downstairs?"

Ridiculous, on multiple levels.

First, using "bring" for what has typically been regarded as the purview of "take" is not a difference of grammar. It's a difference of vocabulary. A difference of grammar would be "Table can you downstairs take".

Second, and more importantly, words change in meaning over time. This is completely natural, it has been happening ever since there was language in the first place, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. Such a change is currently happening to "bring". Get over it.

Re:A really good book you might read ...

[Guido von Guido]

English and French almost certainly have a common parent. The thing is, it was a couple of millenia before the Norman Conquest. Look up Proto-Indo-European or whatever they call it nowadays. You probably knew that but it's not clear from your post.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Jesus 2.0]

Actually, some current thought interprets the frequent use of "like" as the language developing a sort of verbal opening quotation mark.

Maybe, but typically, I see "he was like" more along the lines of "he used the mannerism that I am about to imitate and said", as opposed to just "he said".

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Jesus 2.0]

Me was very creative here: maybe if we sprache like this it were still korrects in the eyes of linguists.


If we actually did sprache like that? Then yes, it would be korrects, to the extent that language can be in the first place.

"Correct" is not really an applicable term for language. "Accepted" is more accurate, and the two are not at all the same.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Fnkmaster]

Steven Pinker presents a bunch of examples of sentences like this that follow strict grammatical rules but don't make sense in English in his book The Language Instinct, and relates it to the difficulty of dealing with ambiguous parsings of English sentences in computer language programs. A fascinating book, even if you don't agree with all of it.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Jesus 2.0]

Consider these phrases: "take away", "bring here", "take here", "bring away". The first two are common. The last two...I don't think so.

Yes, languages evolve, and the rules and meanings of words can change. But if in the process of evolution, we lessen our ability to express and understand our thoughts precisely, then that evolution is not progress.

Please. If "bring" and "take" suddenly become perfect synonyms, we do not "lessen our ability to express and understand our thoughts precisely". We just continue saying "take away" and "bring here", and perhaps start saying "bring away" and "take here".

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Jesus 2.0]

Her husband would say "I go to the store" [in english]. In german, it can mean either he is going now or in the future. In english, it means he is going now.

No, him saying "I am going" means he is going now. Saying "I go" means that going is something that, in a general sense at a nonspecific time, does.

Re:Context is everything

[Krach42]

Oddly, I had a person at a cat rescue tell me that my cat might be "Laconic". I remembered this word from my GRE exam:

Laconic: Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise. See synonyms at silent.
(source: http://www.answers.com/laconic)

I just had to kind of wonder how my cat was going to be using a lot of words and thus, be anything but laconic.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[booc0mtaco]

Sure, cap.s are important. When read, they can help with garden-path sentences, and the like. Context takes the place of grammar in cases where there is no grammar to mark concepts. You are right to note japanese, as it has its many particles. Not sure why you bring up french. By age, it doesn't nearly fit into the same class as Sanskrit or Latin even...

Re:US grammar rotting?

[JimBobJoe]

The other sayings I hear are: "He was like...", "I am like...",

I don't really hear "I am like" all that often, I would be more likely to hear "I was like."

Linguists take a very neutral approach to grammar changes, but it's true that grammar in the Americas changes faster than grammar in Europe (though this may change in time.)

The concept of a "correct grammar" is often rooted in class--the "correct" language is spoken by the upper classes, so the lower social classes attempt to imitate it.

Class structures in the Americas are a lot more flat and less important.

Re:A really good book you might read ...

[Lillesvin]

Flamebait, sure, I'll bite...

English and French did not evolve from a common parent.

I understand why you posted anonymously...

How would you explain the obvoius similarities in the basic numbers from English and French (and a lot of other European languages?) You don't think English had words for 1, 2 and 3 before they required it via French in 1066 or perhaps from the Danes around 850 AD?

Of course English and French evolved from the same common parent. Just as most other European languages did... Surprise, surprise, the Indo-European language family! Here's the linguistic lineage for French and English.

... written history trumps linguistic theories (well understood or not) any day of the week.

In what respect? That's like saying "leather belts are better than oranges"... If you don't define a context for your comparison it's pretty useless. Besides, written history might include linguistic data as well.

Re:That's true but

[Guido von Guido]

I'm just saying it's more complicated.

Anyway, I think you might have missed the point of the original poster. It seemed to me that he/she/it was critiquing the methodology. If you only look at the vocabulary, you might get an impression of the origins of English that turns out to be historically incorrect in the way that you describe. This does show some of the limitations of linguistic analysis (through either grammar or vocabulary).

There's way more to it than that

[wfolta]

From what I understand, javanese is an honorific language. That is, the words you choose depend on the relative class of yourself and the one you are addressing. So you may have six ways to say exactly the same thing -- which words you choose depend on whether you are honored more, less, or the same as your listener and to what degree.

Re:There's way more to it than that

[koinu]

So you may have six ways to say exactly the same thing -- which words you choose depend on whether you are honored more, less, or the same as your listener and to what degree.

Yes. But these are 6 (or even more?) different Javanese languages. My girlfriend only speaks simple Javanese "Ngoko". If she speaks to persons of respect, she wouldn't use that of couse. She uses plain Indonesian. She cannot speak any other type of Javanese language. Other people, mostly older people or people in cities like Yogyakarta, speak Krama that also has different levels of respect. When you look at one kind of Javanese language, you would recognize parallel grammar structure. As far as I have seen it, Krama and others have also this simple Indonesian grammar, but the vocabulary is totally different. I also mentioned that Javanese, being an older and natural language when you compare it with the artificially made Indonesian, is more "polluted" with some kind of traps in its grammar.

Jeepers! What's not to understand?

[Swave An deBwoner]

Her tits are beautiful. Her right tit's bigger than her left tit's .

Re:US grammar rotting?

[BrianB]

"Can you bring the table downstairs?"

Others have commented on the nature of language change and whether the change in vocabulary here is correct or not, but I'd like to say something about usage and nuance. Both verbs here could be correct in individual situations and which is chosen provides extra information.

Can you bring the table... says that one or both of us is going downstairs and you will need to "bring along" the table.

Can you take the table... implies that I may be staying here and I need you to transport the table.

Both are correct grammar, but say somewhat different things.

The reason for English lacking its grammar

[DECS]

As I understand, the northern Germans brought their language to what is now the UK, and for centuries the language we now call Old English retained the same complex grammar as German.

Since Latin was the language associated with classical study and learning, intellectuals brought a lot of vocabulary into English, resulting in the original German vocabulary being considered rough, while the smarty Latin based words were considered sophisticated. We still use a Latin-based English word over a German-based English word when trying to sound smart:

God vs Deity
Earth vs Terrestrial
Father vs Paternal
Shit vs Excrement
Blood pressure vs Hemostat
Iron vs Ferrite

But English lost the structural grammar of German when the ruling English kings switched to speaking French, leaving English to the commoners, who found little use for keeping up with 16 ways to say "the", and needing to change verbs, adjectives and nouns to indicate tense, case, gender (three genders in the case of German!) and number.

When the intellectuals picked English back up, its grammar was streamlined dramatically, making it simpler but leaving more room for ambiguity.

So a comparison of languages based on grammar rule matches would have to take into account the history involved in the evolution of the language, particularly involving who spoke the language and how much effort the intellectual or scribe class put into playing the role of grammar nazi to protect the structure of wording.

The complexity of a grammar is likely to be related the tenacity of a culture's grammar keepers; even so, it appears there are natural human instincts that introduce rules of grammar, even amoung people without a classical education. It also seems like ancient languages frequently had arcanely complex grammars, indicating that grammar is not a recent invention, and that languages are not necessarily growing increasingly more complex in the obvious ways one might guess.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[zsau]

Actually, 'aren't' in this context could easily be a contraction of 'am not' -> amnt -> ant -> a:nt (like 'aunt') which is homophonous with 'aren't' in non-rhotic dialects and was then borrowed based on its orthography by rhotic dialects like American English. American English used to borrow a lot of changes from American English. (See also 'can't' which has a similar pronounciation.)

Re:Interesting...

[Arker]

Umm no schön in Swedish is skön. Skåne is a very old name, I know in English it's Scania, I'm not sure what it is in German and have no clue whatsoever what it might have originally meant I'm afraid.

US Southeastern Grammar is very different

[billstewart]

The verb tenses I learned in my school books in the Northeastern US didn't *always* match the way the kids on the street or the people on TV spoke, and most people didn't use the more complex Latin-like forms (subjunctives and optatives and the like) very much. But Southerners have all sorts of different verb forms, especially for future or potential future events. I'm not just talking about uneducated-white-boy Ebonics-equivalent or "ain't" or the assertion that a Southern accent is like losing 20 IQ points (which I've mainly heard from Southerners :-). It's forms like "I might could do that" or "I might coulda done that" or "I'd been fixin' to get around to that." Some of this is because of insular communities that have been around from various sets early-colonial British-Isles immigrants, and some probably has African influences, and some just kinda happened.

The artlicle suggests 23 languages for Papua...

[Butt]

Yet Ethnologue suggests that there are 820, making it the highest density of languages in the world:

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=PG

Does anyone know what's up with that?

Re:The artlicle suggests 23 languages for Papua...

[khanyisa]

I would believe the Ethnologue above this article, especially as its not an explicit claim with any evidence... See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papuan_languages

Re:You're right about the dual vocabulary

[honeypea]

We often have two words for the same thing derived from Saxon and Norman. For instance: "Beef and cattle"

Other way round for those two I think: "bouef" in French. Interesting to note that English usually uses the French word for the food derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for the animal, e.g.

English: calf French: veal
English: pig French: pork
English: lamb French: mutton

I've always thought this speaks wonders for why English people eat rubbish compared to the French, and feed their pets much better.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[jistanidiot]

From http://www.drgrammar.org/faqs/#82

Bring and take? According to Theodore Bernstein, author of Dos, Dont's, & Maybes of the English Language. "Bring and take both involve direction when they denote physical movement: bring means movement in the direction of the speaker or writer, take means movement away from the speaker or writer.... When no physical movement is involved, bring may properly be used in the sense of produce as a result: 'The President's message is expected to bring the whole issue to a climax'" (32). Patricia O'Connor, author of Woe Is I, asks, "Which way is the merchandise moving? Is it coming or going? If it's coming here, someone's bringing it. If it's going there, someone's taking it. ( 'Bring me my slippers,' said Rhoda, 'and take away those stiletto heels!' ) That much is pretty straightforward, but there are gray areas where the bringing and the taking aren't so clear. Say you're a dinner guest and you decide to tote a bottle of wine along with you. Do you bring it or do you take it? The answer depends on your perspective--on which end of the journey you're talking about, the origin or the destination. 'What shall I bring, white or red?' you ask the host. 'Bring red,' he replies. ( Both you and he are speaking of the wine from the point of view of its destination--the host. ) Ten minutes later, you're asking the wine merchant, 'What should I take, a Burgundy or a Bordeaux?' 'Take this one' she says. ( Both you and she are speaking of the wine from the point of view of its origin. ) Clear? If not, pour yourself a glass, take it easy, and say what sounds most natural. You'll probably be right" (93).

If both people are upstairs and one wants the other to get the table downstairs, yeah it probably is take. However in both people's mind, the center of action is probably downsairs at the big party they're having. Thus the table is going to the center of action which is the prespective used. As someone else pointed out. The distinction isn't big enough of a deal for anyone to get worked up over. It's kinda like the folks who say you shouldn't end a sentence with a prepresition. However no one in their right mind would say "At where is it?" you only will hear "Where is it at?" Big deal. Get over it. Let the language evolve.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[gfreeman]

What's wrong with: "Ich werde zum Speicher gehen"?

Your complaint is no different from a typical English exchange:

A: "I am going to the store"
B: "When? Now, or in 20 minutes?"

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Ironsides]

Not sure why you bring up french.

The 40 Immortals are why. Pretty much it's a group of 40 people who have been tasked with keeping the French language "pure" for the past ~375 years.

Side note, you do realize French (along with Spanish and Italian) is decended from Latin, right?

Re:US grammar rotting?

[booc0mtaco]

Hmmm, quite interesting. I didn't realize their effort had been continuing for so long. However, is 'purity' merely subjective to their collective opinions? Look at the case of courriel. what they do seems to be reactionary, and not necessarily suited to anything but their own ambitions. Sanskrit in its classical form had much the same problem with vedic sanskrit. The outer edges of the Roman empire faced constant influence for the germanic languages. Both gave way to modern languages like hindi gujarati, and the 'romance' languages respectively. Side note, you do realize French (along with Spanish and Italian) is decended from Latin, right? My point exactly. It CAME from latin, so it does no good to compare it to latin. Oh, and don't forget romanian.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Fnkmaster]

Obviously you must be a scholar of linguistics. Thanks for sharing your insights.

Re:US grammar rotting?

[Ironsides]

However, is 'purity' merely subjective to their collective opinions? Look at the case of courriel. what they do seems to be reactionary, and not necessarily suited to anything but their own ambitions.

Unfortunately, they technically control the national language. So anything they say in a way has the force of law. From what I was told by my German German teacher, the 40 immortals try to replace any word that comes into popular use from English with one that they come up with. So pretty much instead of letting the masses come up/adopt a word, they come up with one and (probably) has to be taught that way in the language classes [this part is my guess, so take with a grain of salt].

Oh, and don't forget romanian.

Interesting, didn't know that there was a fourth romance language that came from latin.