Do Languages Get Simpler When They Get More Complicated?
Do Languages Get Simpler When They Get More Complicated?
Oh, a minor diversion from the usual political economy stuff that goes up here.
This is triggered by an article in last week’s The Economist on the nearly dead San language, Nluu. It has only two living fully fluent speakers alive, both in their 80s. The San languages are among the world’s most ancient, although arguably reflecting a simpler world than the one we live in, although certainly with many complications we know nothing of. But the point that caught my attention was that it has 45 distinct click sounds, along with 114 basic sound units. It is one of only three languages in the world (all of them San) that have something called the double lip-full kiss click, whatever that is. I only know that if one sees an exclamation point that means some sort of click. So probably the most numerous living San group are the !Kung, yeah, some sort of click on the front end of that name.
I have known about this matter of clicks in southern African languages for some time but had no idea there were so many different ones. Not only the San languages but also the Khoechan (or Khoi khoi) languages have lots of them. Some clicks can also be found in the much more widespread Xhosa languages, one of which was the mother tongue of Nelson Mandela, who almost certainly had some Khoi or San ancestry. But beyond these languages, I am not aware of any others that have any clicks. They have disappeared in later languages, and I am unaware of any other language having anywhere near the number of basic sound units that apparently this nearly extinct Nluu language has.
I have not heard anybody theorize about simplifying sounds over time in languages, but I know there is an academic argument about grammar becoming more simplified, especially when two languages are combined as with creole or pidgin languages, something is written about by John McWhorter in hi The Creole Debate. Pidgin languages, artificially created to allow communication between groups and drawing on each other’s languages, tend to be especially simplistic in grammatical terms.
It occurs to me that this might apply to English, which is itself a sort of creole out of Germanic Old English and Latinic Norman French, with some other elements. In a way it may be the world’s most complicated language in some forms, notably in probably having more words than just about any other language, drawing on so many inputs from so many parts of the world and fields. But in grammatical terms, it is rather simple, with only a few cases and having eliminated gender from most words. In contrast, Lithuanian, thought to be the closest to the original proto-Indo-European has seven cases, more than any other, although Russian is not too far off. However, despite this relative grammatical simplicity, English is hard to learn, not only because it has so many words but because it violates its own supposed rules so often, in contrast with Spanish, for example, reputedly one of the easiest languages to learn.
So, there is no big profound point here, but just that I find this curious: that it seems that as languages evolve and interact with each other and encounter more and more influences, they seem to drop elements they previously had, whether these are sound units or grammatical forms and cases.
Barkley Rosser
Probably so. What we lack in linguistic elegance must be compensated with verbose elaboration. So, why would the diversity of semantics fade in advanced civilizations? The lives of people grew apart, became compartmentalized within society, isolated and personal with less shared common experience upon which language with broadly understood meaning could be nailed down. However, what we may lack in socialization, then we more than make up for with secrets and identity crises.
Pardon my irony, but this is a fun premise.
Primitive people understand each other and understand everything that they experience to the extent that they share a WYSIWYG world. They may not know why it rains, but everyone knows that it is rain and that rain is necessary for life.
Living in modernity, then most people do not understand most things. Most of us do not understand psychology, economics, physics, biology, or politics. Many believe in God, yet do not understand their own religion nor anyone else’s religion. Meaning has lost its meaning, so they need fewer different words because everything is the same wrapped in mystery and confusion.
The primitive mind cannot be lost because it knows that it is always where it is. The modern mind is always lost because it does not know who it is.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2021/05/22/the-struggle-to-save-a-south-african-language-with-45-click-sounds
The Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania also use clicks. With regard to English, grammatical simplification began before 1066, with absorbtion of Danes in the Danelaw. While languages tend to simplify as dialects merge, there is also a tendency to complexify in isolation, as general habits of language become fixed into community-specific idiosyncrasies (like irregular verbs). Incidentally, although English has no sex gender, it does have a continuity gender, in which quantification adjectives must agree with the valence (continuous or discrete) of the antecedent noun.
I am 72 YO and my wife will be 63 in 3 months. My semantics capability is yet undiminished, but my social communication capability began to erode after returning from the Vietnam War. My wife often uses the wrong word or struggles to find the correct word, but her social communication skills more than compensate on her job as an IT project leader for Anthem. So not all meaning is lost when one is at a loss for words if their socialization remains effective.
Perhaps a better question is “Do people get simpler when they become more complicated?”
Psst! Tsk Tsk! Cluck! Hmmm?
@Fred,
Yes, exactly!
One thing one learns in linguistics is that there are no hard and fast rules. All sorts of features come and go. Look at tonality. Some languages have tones, some more, some fewer, but there’s no real rule about whether tonality will appear, add tones, remove tones or disappear.
Creoles tend to eliminate certain kinds of linguistic complexity, but they add other kinds, if nothing else because the overall potential vocabulary expands.
There’s some evidence that Africa was dominated by click languages until the arrival of the Bantu group, a group that includes Xhosa, but there’s no way to argue that click languages are older than, let’s say, Indo-European or Sino-Tibetan languages. Clicks could have been introduced only a few thousand years ago, and no one living now would be the wiser.