Language change in the absence of demographic change?

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Post by murtabak »

Alright, since I was not making it clear on what I meant by major, I'd give it another try. Essentially I meant a new concept that hasn't been distinguished in the parent language.

1. How likely is it for an isolated language on an island, within a span of ~1000-1500 years, to develop either one of these things where there was none in its ancestral lang:

- New place of articulation for consonants
- Tone
- Vowel shift

- At least two genders
- At least two cases (e.g. nominative and oblique/accusative)
- Perfective/imperfective distinction
- Dual numbers
- Change in typology (e.g. from predominantly analytic to agglutinating or vice versa)
- Politeness distinction/markers

2. Now, how about the same isolated language losing either of these things?

3. Do you think that a mainland language (with all the interactions, conquests, migrations that it undergoes) is more likely to either acquire or lose either of these things within the same time span?

Hopefully I'm not being vague now.
Last edited by murtabak on Sat Mar 13, 2010 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by CaesarVincens »

murtabak wrote:Alright, since I was not making it clear on what I meant by major, I'd give it another try.

1. How likely is it for an isolated language, within a span of ~1000-1500 years, to develop either one of these things where there was none in its ancestral lang:

- New place of articulation for consonants
- Tone
- Vowel shift

- At least two genders
- At least two cases (e.g. nominative and oblique/accusative)
- Dual numbers
- Change in typology (e.g. from predominantly analytic to agglutinating or vice versa)
- Politeness distinction/markers

2. Now, how about the same isolated language losing either of these things?

3. Do you think that a mainland language (with all the interactions, conquest, migrations that it undergoes) is more likely to either acquire or lose either of these things?

Hopefully I'm not being vague now.
1.
New place of articulation, sure, but it will probably be only one phoneme (not a whole set) to start.
Tone is a bit trickier, it could happen though.
And vowel shift certainly.

Gender and cases, perhaps, I don't know of many languages that have been documented as gaining gender from a non-gendered parent lang.
Dual also seems rather unlikely, but possible.
Change in typology really depends on other factors (like case)
Politeness distinction is tricky because it depends on what you mean. Are we talking Japanese honorifics or Spanish (or so many others) usted?

2. Losing features is probably more likely than gaining a specific feature.

3. I really don't think a mainland language is more likely to gain any of these, and depending on the number of non-native speakers it gains who use it as their primary language, may or may not be more likely to lose features.

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Post by Travis B. »

Travis B. wrote:
Whimemsz wrote:You guys are talking about relatively minor phonological changes, though. I mean was THC really talking about the loss of /W/ or Canadian Raising when he mentioned the "major changes" that have happened to English since 1990? I sure hope not! But as I said, what else is there, really? Some new vocab to coincide with the use of personal computers and the internet? Maybe a further weakening of the subjunctive or something? I can't see how any of this can be considered anything close to major (I know you two weren't claiming otherwise, though--and I'm not disagreeing that languages do change within a generation, just that it's any level of significant change)
I was essentially saying what you are saying here - that while change has occurred, it has been on a scale of generations, and even then it really has not been all that major in the bigger scheme of things, in many ways being limited to, well, relatively minor phonological changes.
That said, I would have to say that some significant things have occurred at least in the English I myself speak, but the are not in terms of what has changed but what has not changed. That is, when things such as elision and assimilation occur, surrounding sounds that have undergone allophony conditioned by the sounds that have themselves changed very often do not change to reflect such. Hence one ends up with things such as distinctive vowel length and nasalization where such had previously not been distinctive (with historical phonemic vowel length having died out completely hitherto such changes). Such is a very major change in a truly phonemic analysis of said dialect, but I myself at least cannot sincerely subscribe to phonemic theory, as such conflicts directly with lexical diffusion, which seems to best describe how sound change actually occurs, and I myself have found that it has too many problems in practice to be workable; I for one have tried to phonemically analyze my own dialect, and have found it to simply be unworkable in practice without severely oversimplifying matters as a whole. Hence, from a lexical diffusion standpoint, such is not really a significant change at all but rather a non-change of sorts, as in reality most younger people here preserve the same vowel length and nasalization that their grandparents would have had.

(On the other hand, such changes have significantly increased the number of cases of pitch accentuation in my own dialect, even though such seems to again just be a direct consequence of the apparent overall rule in my dialect that pitch accentuation occurs when a formerly independent syllable nucleus is joined to the syllable with primary stress rather than any new phonological rules at work.)
Last edited by Travis B. on Sat Mar 13, 2010 7:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Post by murtabak »

CaesarVincens wrote:Politeness distinction is tricky because it depends on what you mean. Are we talking Japanese honorifics or Spanish (or so many others) usted?
I'm thinking more East/Southeast Asian honorifics actually. The "polite you" seems easy enough to develop (or lose).
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Post by Whimemsz »

That is actually much clearer. Woo! Here's my take on it, which to some extent is different from Caesar's.

New place of articulation for consonants. This can happen easily and quickly, though I suppose it depends to some extent on what new POA you're talking about. For instance, in many languages, combinations of r+consonant can coalesce into a series of retroflex consonants; this has happened in historical times in some Scandinavian dialects, for example Swedish nord "north" = [nuːɖ].

Tone. Also pretty easy. Tonogenesis can happen in several ways, most commonly either through the influence of a syllable-final consonant that is then lost (this happened in many Athabaskan languages) or the voicing or lack thereof of preceding or following consonants (as happened in Chinese). Cheyenne simply turned its long vowels into vowels with high tone. None of these kinds of changes require too much time to happen.

Vowel shift. This one is certainly possible, and happens all the friggin time. C.f. the Great Vowel Shift, the Greek Vowel Shift, the Cheyenne Vowel Shift, the Swedish Vowel Shift, etc. etc. etc.

The grammatical changes you have in mind would probably take longer than the phonological ones, but for the most part they're probably also possible, although these are areas where influence from other languages probably could effect the change much more quickly.

Most of the changes would presumably come about through the fusion of particles to nouns, verbs, or whatever (actually, you don't mention that these distinctions are encoded with affixes instead of, say, separate particles--if it's the latter, then the changes could happen even faster). The dual, for instance, could arise through the fusion of the number "two" to the plural form of the noun, with a simultaneous simplification of the form of that numeral. That's not too complicated, and given 1500 years it's quite reasonable. Also in that category are the creation of cases, politeness markers, and a perfective/imperfective distinction. I don't know too much about the rise of gender distinctions, so I can't really speak to that. The longest time would be required for the switch to an entirely new typology (say, analytic > synthetic), although I could imagine analytic > agglutinating happening within a reasonable amount of time. But none of it is implausible. English has changed from reasonably synthetic to fairly isolating in about 1200-1500 years, after all.

Do you think that a mainland language (with all the interactions, conquests, migrations that it undergoes) is more likely to either acquire or lose either of these things within the same time span? Since languages in contact with other languages can borrow various characteristics from them (whether phonological characteristics, new vocabulary, grammatical categories, grammatical morphemes, or whatever), I'd say it's easier for a non-isolated language to undergo fairly major changes within a reasonable time span. Saying that, though, doesn't mean that an isolated language cannot undergo those same changes in that same time span (though probably only a non-isolated language can undergo massive changes in a very short time span).

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Post by murtabak »

Whimemsz, that's very good input for me on the grammatical changes. But with all due respect, all examples you cited are mainland languages.... I know, data from (semi-) isolated languages (not language isolates) are scarce. Icelandic, Polynesian langs, anything else?

Aren't phonemic tones areal features par excellence though? There must be a reason why tones are concentrated only in some regions... is it somehow a feature that's easily borrowed but not easy to arise independently? What do you think?
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Post by Miekko »

murtabak wrote:Whimemsz, that's very good input for me on the grammatical changes. But with all due respect, all examples you cited are mainland languages.... I know, data from (semi-) isolated languages (not language isolates) are scarce. Icelandic, Polynesian langs, anything else?

Aren't phonemic tones areal features par excellence though? There must be a reason why tones are concentrated only in some regions... is it somehow a feature that's easily borrowed but not easy to arise independently? What do you think?
actually, the majority of languages in the world have tones, so ...
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Post by Radius Solis »

Tones being mainly an areal feature is a myth. You find tonal languages on every continent except Europe, and not just a few. Most African languages, and around half of languages in the Americas, are also tonal. So that's four continents where it's extremely common.

There's two other parts of the world where phonemic tones are rare, Oceania and Australia. All three toneless regions have something else in common, too: they are dominated by a single language family each. Oceania is dominated by Oceanic langs; Australia by Pama-Nyungan langs; and Europe by IE langs.

So if you think about it, all the really toneless parts of the world only got that way because a single toneless language family became dominant. I conclude that widespread use of tonality is the most normal situation, not an exception.

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Post by Travis B. »

And even in the case of Europe, do not forget that there are IE languages with pitch accentuation, even though such tends to be overlooked more than more overt phonemic tone per se.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Post by psygnisfive »

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Post by murtabak »

Miekko wrote:actually, the majority of languages in the world have tones, so ...
Point conceded.
psygnisfive wrote:Do Language Change Rates Depend on Population Size?

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Post by Whimemsz »

murtabak wrote:Whimemsz, that's very good input for me on the grammatical changes. But with all due respect, all examples you cited are mainland languages.... I know, data from (semi-) isolated languages (not language isolates) are scarce. Icelandic, Polynesian langs, anything else?
None were changes that can easily be said to have been influenced by other languages, though. At least as far as I'm aware? I mean, no languages bordering the Scandinavian languages have a retroflex series, so you can't point to areal influence there (even leaving aside the fact that the r+consonant > retroflex thing is a common change crosslinguistically)--as opposed to, say, Indo-Aryan languages, which acquired a retroflex series through contact with Dravidian languages.

As you say, though, it's much easier to come up with examples from languages in regular contact with other languages. But ultimately the point is that any change that can happen through contact can also happen on its own, so even if the changes I've mentioned are due to contact, it doesn't mean it's implausible for them to happen in an isolated language (after all, the feature being borrowed by one language from another had to have evolved at some point in the past in some language, by virtue of the fact that it exists at all).

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Post by linguoboy »

Whimemsz wrote:As you say, though, it's much easier to come up with examples from languages in regular contact with other languages.
Couldn't the reason for that simply be that coming up with languages which weren't in regular contact with other languages is no easy task? Even the Icelanders were in regular contact with Scandinavia and Britain for most of their history. In the early modern period, they even developed a pidgin to communicate with Basque whalers!

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Post by Whimemsz »

linguoboy wrote:
Whimemsz wrote:As you say, though, it's much easier to come up with examples from languages in regular contact with other languages.
Couldn't the reason for that simply be that coming up with languages which weren't in regular contact with other languages is no easy task? Even the Icelanders were in regular contact with Scandinavia and Britain for most of their history. In the early modern period, they even developed a pidgin to communicate with Basque whalers!
Sorry I didn't make it clear: that's exactly what I meant. It's easier to come up with examples from languages in regular contact with other languages because they comprise the vast majority of languages.

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Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

Whimemsz wrote:Sorry I didn't make it clear: that's exactly what I meant. It's easier to come up with examples from languages in regular contact with other languages because they comprise the vast majority of languages.
But then, you have the problem that if you do know about a language, you obviously have a contact with it.

You'd have to find a region where you could take info on its local language, then having it left alone for the next couples generations, and then describe the local language again. Good luck in finding that...

Edit : Then again, you DO have a case well described of cultural isolation, for a little more than 150 years, with Japan. And do we find a lot of evolution? Yes, especially a complete overhaul of pronouns, grammar that fell into disuse and other bits that came to be used wildly. But then, it'S not perfect, so it will not satisfy your criteria.
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Re: Language change in the absence of demographic change?

Post by Skomakar'n »

murtabak wrote:First post in quite a while.

I'm wondering if demographic change is actually prerequisite to (major) language change. I know, for example, that English is very different from other Germanic languages due to interaction with Celtic peoples, French (Norman) invasion, etc. And the Great Vowel Shift was thought to be due to mass migration after the plague.

So let's suppose a colony was established on an empty island, and subsequently it had limited contact with other peoples. Should we expect the island's language to remain conservative? There is of course a well known European example of this, it's called Icelandic. And it is in some respect more conservative than other Scandinavian language, according to Wikipedia at least.

What's your opinion on this?
Note, however, that Icelandic has had changes on its own, and that it has had changes that have actually not happened in other Northern Germanic, or even Germanic languages in general.

For example, the Icelandic cognate of English "can" is barely used, other than in the sense of knowing a language or having some other skill. Instead, the verb "geta" is used, which, interestingly enough, puts the following verb in the supine rather than in the inifinitive, which the other word does. In all other Germanic languages, the cognate of English "can" would be the common verb to use.

The cognate of English "eat" is only used for animals. There is another word (borða) for people. This has not happened in the other languages.

Like in Faroese, the words corresponding to "we" and plural "you" have been replaced by the old dual forms, and the other ones, of which at least the word for "we" is cognate to the English word and the word in all of the other Germanic tongues, that are still in use in these languages, have fallen out of use in Icelandic.

And, obviously, just as with any other language, there are a lot of slang words.

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Post by Travis B. »

I would not say that English's being an atypical Germanic language has anything to do with contact with Celtic languages. Sure, the use of progressive may have something to do with contact with Brythonic, but that is about the end of it, and even that is sort of doubtful. If one looks at Middle English, for instance, it is not an atypical West Germanic language aside from the loans from Old Norse and Old Norman, with even much of the Romance loans found in New English being largely absent, as such only occurred later, during the Early New English period. I would say that it is really the development of English during the Early New English period that separated it from the other Germanic languages, and that is far too late for, say, Brythonic influence to have had much impact upon it aside from the most westerly dialects thereof.
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Post by TomHChappell »

murtabak wrote:Alright, since I was not making it clear on what I meant by major, I'd give it another try. Essentially I meant a new concept that hasn't been distinguished in the parent language.
And by "concept", I assume, you don't mean merely new vocabulary, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives having to do with technological advances? Instead, you mean new major grammatical categories (parts of speech) or new minor grammatical categories (accidents -- things words inflect for)? Or, perhaps, new grammar of some kind -- not only new morphology, but, for instance, the introduction of co-ordinating conjunctions where previously there had been only comitatitive prepositions and associative numbers and so on? Or an ability to have actual subordinate clauses instead of just clause-chains?
murtabak wrote:1. How likely is it for an isolated language on an island, within a span of ~1000-1500 years, to develop either one of these things where there was none in its ancestral lang:
murtabak wrote:- New place of articulation for consonants
One phoneme may drift in certain environments from where it used to be articulated to some more convenient P.o.A., like early Latin "honosius" become Classical Latin "honorius".
That drift could have been in an M.o.A. instead.
A phoneme like Old English /f/, which formerly was voiceless when next to a voiceless consonant but was realized as its voiced allophone intervocalically, could split into two different phonemes /f/ and /v/, one voiced and one voiceless, so that "luff" and "love" were now different words.
In English it didn't take anywhere near 1000-1500 years; less than 500, in fact.
I don't see why it couldn't happen with an isolated language, either. The shift from "honosius" to "honorius" appears to have been motivated by "laziness" -- or, to be more charitable and probably more accurate, economy of effort on the part of the speaker. Italian's "dottore" instead of "doctor" is a similar thing.
How likely is it? I don't know. How much time would it take? I don't know.
But pick any one particular feature; I don't see why that one feature would necessarily be conserved for longer than one lifespan plus one generation, if the population were small enough -- say, around 100 speakers. Naturally, most of the features would be conserved over that short a time, especially if the speech community were large enough -- say, 10,000 speakers or more. But note how different the English of 1810 sounds from the English of today; we're not mutually unintelligible, but we have very different preferred choices of constructions and words, though probably everything either period preferred is still or already allowed in the other period. The English of the 1700's, OTOH, would have taken some practice and explanation for us to understand. Some people pronounced "free" the way we now pronounce "fray". Some people pronounced "sought" as if we would spell it "soft". And so on.
Now you may point out that English wasn't isolated, even though it was insular. Still, I think a quarter of the time-span you mention (that is, 250-375 years instead of 1000-1500 years) might be entirely adequate for your speech-community's language to drift to the point of not being immediately and effortlessly mutually-intelligible with the earlier version. It might be that time be at the edge between being a very different dialect or a very similar language.
murtabak wrote:- Tone
Tonogenesis is thought to come about when syllables lose some of the distinctions between their coda-consonants, especially when many of them lose their codas entirely, so that words that were previously not homophones become homophonous, and need to be disambiguated from each other. Syllable-codas have an effect on the pitch of the syllable-nucleus vowels; if the consonant is no longer there, the pitch-effect may be retained and exaggerated. When it is, that leads to tonogenesis.
Nothing in that requires any language-contact. If China had been an island with a small population, there's no reason to believe that Mandarin would not have evolved tones.
murtabak wrote:- Vowel shift
Why do New Zealanders pronounce "dress" the way most of us would pronounce "drees"? Do you think that's because of language-contact with the Maori or something? Or that they were settled from parts of the British Isles where that pronunciation was already in effect? Neither of those is true, AIUI; the vowel shifted.
murtabak wrote:- At least two genders
I do not know how genders come about. As I.E. languages make clear, over a period of 4000 years they can appear and disappear nearly without limit, but over a period of 1000-1500 years, I don't know. I don't know how it happened in any natlang diachronological instance.
murtabak wrote:- At least two cases (e.g. nominative and oblique/accusative)
This could easily happen in many ways.
(1) If word-order changed from SVO to SOV, there would be a motivation to mark one of the S or the O as being in the role it's in -- especially if OSV were an allowable, though marked, alternative.
(2) If the difference in case-roles were already marked by means of adpositions, the adpositions could easily become proclitic or enclitic on the object noun, and then become an affix.

PIE supposedly had no cases; but lots of extant IE languages have at least four (NADG) and Latin had seven.

As long as it took English nouns to go from eleventh-century Old English's five (NADG+Insturmental) noun cases to 14th-century late Middle English's (three? or two? or one?), is probably a good estimate of how long it would take a language to gain two new cases -- 200-400 years.
murtabak wrote:- Perfective/imperfective distinction
Surely the semantic distinction always exists. You mean, I think, that the language develops an obligation to express that distinction probably morphologically, but maybe lexically or syntactically.
I'm going to assume you mean "the verbs start having to inflect for aspect".
How long did it take French to go from usually using its simple past to usually using it's composite past? Or take English speakers from saying things like "they say" to saying "they're saying"?
About that long is about how long it would probably take your islanders' conlang's verbs to develop an obligatory aspect-inflection.
murtabak wrote:- Dual numbers
You mean, assuming they start with just singular and plural?
English changed from having a dual to having only a singular and plural as a result of simplifications driven by contact with the Danish. The two languages were quite similar but they didn't do exactly the same things in response to grammatical number; and if a Saxon was selling a Dane a horse, but the Dane thought he was buying two horses, there might be a fight.
I don't know how long it would take dual grammatical number to appear in an isolated language. I can point to an instance of dual grammatical number disappearing due to language contact. I don't know if that will help you. But I figure almost all of these changes probably could happen in 200-400 years.
murtabak wrote:- Change in typology (e.g. from predominantly analytic to agglutinating or vice versa)
In 4000 years practically anything can happen, if you side with the "splitters" instead of the "lumpers", to the point that it is no longer possible to prove any relationship. Languages go from isolating to agglutinating to fusional back to isolating over and over again, so it is said. So, in a quarter to a third of that 4000 years, I expect any quarter to a third of that cycle could indeed take place; whether or not it could happen without language contact, I can only guess, but I stronlgly suspect no language-contact is necessary to cause it.
murtabak wrote:- Politeness distinction/markers
These could easily develop from native vocabulary that already has some other function; "Your Grace", "His Highness", "Their Majesties", "Your Honor", etc. How long did it take English to go from "thou" to "you"? How long did it take Spanish to go to "Usted" from what it was before? Surely not over 1500 years; probably less than 500.
murtabak wrote:2. Now, how about the same isolated language losing either of these things?
My best guess is "about as long".
murtabak wrote:3. Do you think that a mainland language (with all the interactions, conquests, migrations that it undergoes) is more likely to either acquire or lose either of these things within the same time span?
Yes, language contact does speed up language change; but I think change would be almost as fast even without contact.
Cultural innovations, for instance new technology or new epics or new sagas or whatever, probably drive language change more even than languag-contact, IMO.
Migrations and colonizations are thought to drive language-change more than anything else; that is, when the speech-community splits so that one part of it no longer needs to, and is no longer easily able to, speak to another part of it, then their languages will diverge.
Wars change languages no matter who wins. You pick up the vocabulary of the enemy; and of the native allies in the battle country. Also, there are going to be memorable phrases said in speeches, that will gain more currency than they had before. And there will be new poems and story-cycles and epics and legends etc. about the deeds done in the battles.
Of course, if you conquer new territory without wiping out the natives, and there are things in the new area that you didn't have at home, you'll pick up the words for them from the natives. Or, if invaders come in and settle part but not all of your land, and then peace breaks out and you and they start making money off of trading with each other, a trade-language will develop that might have vocabulary from both languages (but more from yours than theirs), and will probably have a grammar very similar to, but noticeably simpler than, one of the original languages.

Languages subject to a lot of language-contact will, my guess is, probably be simpler than languages that develop in isolation. Who knows if I'm right? But that's my guess.
murtabak wrote:Hopefully I'm not being vague now.
I don't think so.

I stand by my earlier remarks about how fast language, in particular English, has changed. I didn't list all the changes that have happened. We have language now in American English that came from the Mexican War, from the Spanish-American War, from the World Wars, from Korea, from Vietnam, and from Iraq. We have cultural innovations from them too; mustaches and cigarettes (Mexican War), sideburns (Civil War), chewing-gum and yo-yos and knowing what a "concentration camp" is (Spanish-American War), "dropped his trousers" and "opened his kimono" (WW II), "didi mao" (Vietnam), "mother of all X" (pre-first-Gulf-War), etc.

And British English has many, many more sources, from all over the former Empire and current Commonwealth, for vocabulary. Australian E. probably has completely different sources from American E.

But you wouldn't regard new vocabulary as "major".

The most recent changes that you would regard as major, that I know about, are the vowel-shifts (and other phonology shifts, including prosodic shifts) which have happened between the 18th century and today. But for new grammatical constructions, I think you'd have to go back to the times between Charles I Stuart and William and Mary of Orange. That'd be from just before the English Civil War to just after the Glorious Revolution, if I'm not mistaken.
One of the Charleses -- I think it was Charles I, might have been Charles II -- complained that some of his buildings were "going to" certain other possessors. Before he was born, the idea that a building could "go" anywhere, even figuratively, was never expressed in writing in English, as I understand it. So, the English "going + infinitive" future was established between the time of his birth and the end of Cromwell's Protectorate, AIUI.

Thus at least one "major change" in English grammar happened in the past less than 400 years.

Between about 1066 and about 1470, English changed from an SOV language to an SVO language, and I think you'd think that was major. According to W. Lehmann of the U. of Texas, word-order-change (sometimes? usually?) helps drive the development of full clausal subordination, and it may have in this case as well. And surely the loss of case would have been retarded and limited if the word-order had stayed verb-final, and was probably accelerated by the change to verb-medial.


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If I were you I'd count on at least one "major" change every 300-400 years.

---------------------------------

Hope that helps?

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Post by TaylorS »

Not to nitpick, but IIRC Old English was V2, which is a variation on SVO.

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Post by Whimemsz »

I think trying to pinpoint whether one individual change is "major" or not isn't very helpful. What makes changes "major" in my view is the accumulation of a lot of separate changes. So it seems meaningless to talk about whether the Great Vowel Shift was a "major" change...but we can certainly say that ALL the various pronunciation, semantic, and grammatical changes that happened from Middle English to Modern English constitute a "major" amount of change.

On the other hand, it's still quite possible to read Chaucer with only a little practice and training. Middle English is still recognizably "English", even if it would take us a while to get used to it and use it fluently if we were dropped into the 14th century. But Old English is completely foreign. Totally foreign. The grammar is very different, the pronunciation is very different, and the vocabulary differences are truly immense. Clearly under pretty much anyone's criteria the changes from Old to Modern English are "major". And they happened just in the last millennium or so. Now, obviously, English has been in contact with other languages during that time (and the most significant change in the last thousand years--the influx of Romance vocabulary following the Norman Conquest--happened as a result of significant contact), maybe it can still help us moving forward. At least it can perhaps help us in defining "major" as the cumulative effects of changes, rather than individual changes themselves.
TomHChappell wrote:How likely is it? I don't know. How much time would it take? I don't know.
Well, changes like you describe (assimilation and rhoticization) can happen very easily and quickly (like, within a few decades maybe?). And can easily happen without outside influence--especially assimilation, which is definitely one of the most common sound changes in any language. However, see my thoughts above.
TomHChappell wrote:As long as it took English nouns to go from eleventh-century Old English's five (NADG+Insturmental) noun cases to 14th-century late Middle English's (three? or two? or one?), is probably a good estimate of how long it would take a language to gain two new cases -- 200-400 years.
Ehhhh...I'm not so sure about that. I mean, losing a case distinction through things like loss of posttonic syllables can happen pretty quickly, but it seems to me like it would take significantly longer to fully gain new cases. On the other hand, I'm not actually familiar with any real-world examples to help out here, so...
TomHChappell wrote:How long did it take Spanish to go to "Usted" from what it was before? Surely not over 1500 years; probably less than 500.
That's actually a really good example. The change and instability of Spanish (and other Romance languages too--like Portuguese) second person pronouns is a good demonstration of the kinds of changes possible in about 600 years or less (there's nothing to suggest any outside influence in these changes, that I know of). Old Spanish had one 2sg pronoun (), and one 2pl pronoun (vos), although vos could be used in deferential contexts. Eventually vos lost its deferential value, and new forms of deferential address came to be used--the one finally settled on was vuestra merced "your mercy" (plural vuestras mercedes) which was soon simplified to usted (pl ustedes). Around the same time, vos in its plural familiar sense was expanded to vosotros ("you others") to distinguish it from the singular familiar vos. This all happened between ~1300 and ~1500-1600.

The postscript concerns how complex the different results of this process are in various dialects. Castilian Spanish has lost vos and thus has the system: 2sg informal ; 2sg deferential usted; 2pl inf. vosotros; 2pl def. ustedes. Andalusian Spanish and all American dialects have lost vosotros, and have ustedes as the only plural form, and all retain usted as the deferential 2sg pronoun. But there's a lot of variation in whether or vos is used, or both, or which verb conjugation is used along with it. See here.
TomHChappell wrote:Wars change languages no matter who wins. You pick up the vocabulary of the enemy; and of the native allies in the battle country.
I don't think that's necessarily true. In part simply because not all languages are as prone to borrowing features from neighboring languages as others are. The Ojibwe, for instance, despite several centuries of warfare with speakers of Dakota and Iroquoian languages have adopted virtually no vocabulary from those other languages. The single example I'm aware of is ogichidaa "warrior" (Dakota akičita), but it's possible that the Ojibwe term is native and was borrowed *into* Dakota.

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Post by linguoboy »

Whimemsz wrote:I don't think that's necessarily true. In part simply because not all languages are as prone to borrowing features from neighboring languages as others are. The Ojibwe, for instance, despite several centuries of warfare with speakers of Dakota and Iroquoian languages have adopted virtually no vocabulary from those other languages. The single example I'm aware of is ogichidaa "warrior" (Dakota akičita), but it's possible that the Ojibwe term is native and was borrowed *into* Dakota.
IAWTC. I think I've come across all of five or six loanwords in the entire Osage vocabulary. One is from English (i.e. htąwą < town), the rest are from Spanish (e.g. hkawa < caballo) with the exception of one or two ethnonyms (e.g. Sakiwo "Sac and Fox" < Sac Asakiwaki "yellow earth people"). Even words for such obviously borrowed items as "potato", "book", "coffee", "match/lighter" and so forth are all transparently derived from native morphemes.

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Post by sangi39 »

TomHChappell wrote:
murtabak wrote:- At least two cases (e.g. nominative and oblique/accusative)
This could easily happen in many ways.
(1) If word-order changed from SVO to SOV, there would be a motivation to mark one of the S or the O as being in the role it's in -- especially if OSV were an allowable, though marked, alternative.
(2) If the difference in case-roles were already marked by means of adpositions, the adpositions could easily become proclitic or enclitic on the object noun, and then become an affix.

PIE supposedly had no cases; but lots of extant IE languages have at least four (NADG) and Latin had seven.
Just to be picky, PIE is generally reconstructed with the nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, dative, ablative, instrumental and vocative cases, IIRC.
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Post by zompist »

sangi39 wrote:
TomHChappell wrote:PIE supposedly had no cases; but lots of extant IE languages have at least four (NADG) and Latin had seven.
Just to be picky, PIE is generally reconstructed with the nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, dative, ablative, instrumental and vocative cases, IIRC.
Mostly because Sanskrit has these cases. Lehmann suggests that PIE had just nom/acc/gen, the others being formed in the descendant languages via postpositions.

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Post by sangi39 »

zompist wrote:
sangi39 wrote:
TomHChappell wrote:PIE supposedly had no cases; but lots of extant IE languages have at least four (NADG) and Latin had seven.
Just to be picky, PIE is generally reconstructed with the nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, dative, ablative, instrumental and vocative cases, IIRC.
Mostly because Sanskrit has these cases. Lehmann suggests that PIE had just nom/acc/gen, the others being formed in the descendant languages via postpositions.
I have seen that but either way, the statement that PIE had no cases seems a tad off.
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