Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

[Vijay]

I mean, I would like some serious discussion on it, but that's unlikely to happen given the ideological climate here.

"Ideological climate"? You mean the fact that necroing is a faux-pas almost everywhere on the internet?

Tbh I do find that people on this board can be very adamant sometimes and unwilling to listen to people who happen to have views different from theirs.

[mèþru]

That occurs in every community, Vijay.

[Vijay]

Yeah, it does, but I find that people here can be a lot more adamant and louder about it than I've seen at least in some other places.

[LinguistCat]

meanwhile, i've found that the zbb is one of the more accepting boards that i've had the pleasure of being on, especially for one that has been around for so long, with so many members and so active. then again, large number of members and level of activity may be due to the tolerance here, or conversely, it may be caused by it. it's certainly a big reason i've stayed a member so long

[Mike Yams]

As for the original argument pertaining to "language complexity" and societies, John McWhorter, in one of his books, made the argument that the more isolated a society is, the more irregularity its language will have. The reasoning is that irregularity is easily learned in infancy by L1 speakers, but will likely not be fully acquired by L2 learners, leading to regularization. Therefore, the fewer outsiders there are learning a language, the more irregularity said language will accumulate.

I'm not necessarily endorsing the idea, but it's not exactly in the realm of quackery.

(The two counter-examples to this being correlated to a society's social or material complexity I just thought of would be the existence of hunter-gatherer (well, technically garden agriculturalist) societies in places like, IIRC, Papua, Amazonia, and Central Africa where multilingualism is the norm and the fact that while millions of L2 English speakers may currently be learning the language, it seems doubtful that their speech patterns would have significant influence on monolingual L1 speakers' language.)

[Alon]

What is more likely is that in smaller language communities, trends toward regularization occur more slowly. Perhaps it's less about L1 vs. L2 speakers than about L1 speakers with different dialects. If some phonological feature that encodes grammatical data, e.g. final vowels in IE languages, tends to erode, as in the stress-timed Germanic languages, then dialectical differentiation can speed this process up. If I blur final /e/ and /i/, and you blur final /a/ and /e/ and /o/, and Zomp blurs final /o/ and /u/, then between us we can't rely on any final vowel-based syntax and have to come up with analytic constructions instead. It's possible that the loss of synthetic grammar in Early Middle English occurred specifically because the Norman invasion created a situation where for 100 years, there was no prestige dialect of English, just different varieties trying to communicate.

[mèþru]

For anyone wanting to know what book, it is in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English.

[Mike Yams]

I was actually thinking about What Language Is: And What It Isn't and What It Could Be, but perhaps I'm mixing up my McWhorter books...

[mèþru]

The one I mentioned is the only one I read, so I'm sure I'm not mixing it up with another book. He probably mentions this idea in multiple books.