zompist bboard

(Oh man, that title is ugly)

Okay, so one thing's been bugging me for the past day or two. Languages that are in a sprachbund can borrow morphology grammar in a way from the other languages in their sprachbund. The thing is, I'm having trouble envisioning how this could actually happen.

For example, most of us know about how French and German both began to use their past perfect as a simple past. Apparently this is because they are in the same sprachbund (If I'm wrong about this, please feel free to correct me) and therefore when one began this change, the other did in turn. But how exactly can language contact bring about a change to grammar like this? Obviously, not every German knew French and not every Frenchman knew German, so it couldn't have come to the speech communities being bilingual. It just seems very...odd that merely being next to or having some contact with another language can alter a language's grammar ("Oh shit, guys! The language next to us uses post-nominal relative clauses, let's stop using pre-nominal ones and copy them!")

I'm obviously not denying that this kind of change exists. It obviously does. But it seems strange that contact alone can bring about changes to grammar. In any case, I'm wondering: is there a sort of vague "limit" to how much a language will change due to contact, and how much contact is required for changes to start surfacing?

Just to throw a grenade in....

*cough* Japanese, Korean and Ainu *cough*

Chagen wrote:For example, most of us know about how French and German both began to use their past perfect as a simple past. Apparently this is because they are in the same sprachbund (If I'm wrong about this, please feel free to correct me) and therefore when one began this change, the other did in turn. But how exactly can language contact bring about a change to grammar like this? Obviously, not every German knew French and not every Frenchman knew German, so it couldn't have come to the speech communities being bilingual.

Not every English-speaker is bilingual in French, so how has it been possible for English to borrow any French words?

There's a difference between borrowing and naturalizing a word, and doing the same for grammar.

For one, normal people are easily cognizant of new words, but most people don't make a big deal about grammar as it changes. Only prescriptivists and linguists do.

(that was a badly worded sentence. I know)

Chagen wrote:There's a difference between borrowing and naturalizing a word, and doing the same for grammar.

For one, normal people are easily cognizant of new words, but most people don't make a big deal about grammar as it changes. Only prescriptivists and linguists do.

Sorry, what does "making a big deal about" something have to do with it catching on within a speech community? Most people don't make a big deal out of forms of payment. Only financial types do. Does this mean that we're still using paper money for every transaction?

Maybe you could explain in more detail the process by which you think lexical borrowings spread and then clarify how it is that this same mechanism does not work for grammatical borrowings?

That's a tricky question, but I'll try to answer it the best I can. Do note that I am not making any proofs here--I'm merely here to learn, not make statements.

Anyway, lexic borrowings seem a lot easier to happen than grammatical ones. It's a lot easier to, say, introduce "subsume" into another language and then simply state "it means 'to take/include into".

On the contrary, how exactly is the idea of "use the past perfect as a simple past" spread?

Seems pretty easy: the change is spread by bilinguals, who are normally in a good position to influence everybody else.

I'd suggest (just speculating) that grammatical changes can spread partly because of quick, somewhat literal translation. Everybody loves a fine free translation, but literal is quick & easy. Say Joe Frank is orally translating between French and German in 900. He hears "Le roy est venu." Maybe Joe could produce the 'right' tense if he thought about it, but he's tired and the German guy is breathing on him, so he just blurts out "Der kuning ist gekommen." At first it sounds strange to the Germans, but less so as they hear it a lot, and eventually Fred Deutsch finds himself using the same construction in monolingual context.

As for the other question, is there a limit? Well, no. The extreme case is that the people adopt the other language, and there's nothing unusual about that.

Chagen wrote:That's a tricky question, but I'll try to answer it the best I can. Do note that I am not making any proofs here--I'm merely here to learn, not make statements.

Anyway, lexic borrowings seem a lot easier to happen than grammatical ones. It's a lot easier to, say, introduce "subsume" into another language and then simply state "it means 'to take/include into".

On the contrary, how exactly is the idea of "use the past perfect as a simple past" spread?

That's not explaining your model... that's just saying that it's 'easy' whereas the other is 'hard'. You don't back this up with anything.

Chagen, it might be easier to understand if you consider just a single language at first, ignoring all language contact.

In a single language, how does a change develop? All of its speakers don't decide one day to do something differently at once. A change emerges in some locale or amongst some community, and then it spreads outward from there. Speakers in Town A start using the perfect as a simple past, and it spreads to Town B by people who frequently travel between the two places. Before too long, everyone in both Town A and Town B are doing it, even the people in Town B that have never met anyone from Town A.

Obviously that's a huge simplification, but the spread of a change within a single language is not all that different than between two languages, at least once the change has already taken hold somewhere.


Now look at a Sprachbund. Here you have monolingual speakers on both sides of a language divide, as well as a sizable community of bilingual speakers. These bilingual speakers will begin to slowly bring the two languages closer together in their own idiolectical usage, perhaps transferring some syntax from one language to the other so that the two languages will use similar constructions to express similar concepts. Once a development has "spread" into a new language via contact, you can essentially treat it the same as any other change—it may eventually spread and become dominant even among monolingual speakers, or it may fail to take hold and remain in localized usage or die out entirely.

Thank you, Mecislau...I think I understand it better, now.

Mecislau wrote:Now look at a Sprachbund. Here you have monolingual speakers on both sides of a language divide, as well as a sizable community of bilingual speakers. These bilingual speakers will begin to slowly bring the two languages closer together in their own idiolectical usage, perhaps transferring some syntax from one language to the other so that the two languages will use similar constructions to express similar concepts. Once a development has "spread" into a new language via contact, you can essentially treat it the same as any other change—it may eventually spread and become dominant even among monolingual speakers, or it may fail to take hold and remain in localized usage or die out entirely.

Here's where the social position of bilingual speakers is crucial. In the case of French, who were the Germans who were historically the most likely to speak it? The best-educated, most powerful, wealthiest, most travelled, most cosmopolitan, etc. Naturally their usage had more of an effect on the greater community than the usage of those who were bilingual in Slavic or Romany.

BTW I didn't bring up the spread of non-cash payment types idly. Social scientists have developed a model for the spread of innovations among human communities that works regardless of the actual nature of the changes introduced. It was originally developed by observing the adoption of seed corn varieties among farmers but it can equally well explain the spread of Facebook and dubstep.

linguoboy wrote:BTW I didn't bring up the spread of non-cash payment types idly. Social scientists have developed a model for the spread of innovations among human communities that works regardless of the actual nature of the changes introduced. It was originally developed by observing the adoption of seed corn varieties among farmers but it can equally well explain the spread of Facebook and dubstep.

Link or reference? Sounds intriguing.

Ulrike Meinhof wrote:

linguoboy wrote:BTW I didn't bring up the spread of non-cash payment types idly. Social scientists have developed a model for the spread of innovations among human communities that works regardless of the actual nature of the changes introduced. It was originally developed by observing the adoption of seed corn varieties among farmers but it can equally well explain the spread of Facebook and dubstep.

Link or reference? Sounds intriguing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations. Everett M. Rogers is the name of the rural sociologist who developed the model while at Ohio State University.

While the responses are good, I don't think they fully answer the question, perhaps because the given example was a case of grammatical calquing. So, what about grammatical changes where the adopting language has nothing equivalent to build the borrowed structure from?

For example, a language with a series of instrumental prefixes on the verbs that classify the motion of the verb, where these affixes are not obviously related to any particular nouns. A contact language previously lacking instrumental affixes develops a set, by influence from the first... how does this happen? Of course sometimes the actual morphemes of the source language are borrowed directly, but this doesn't account for all cases. Furthermore it involves adding not just a single new structure but a new paradigm to the verb. Will this happen piecemeal over centuries or can it somehow be an all-at-once thing?

Radius Solis wrote:For example, a language with a series of instrumental prefixes on the verbs that classify the motion of the verb, where these affixes are not obviously related to any particular nouns. A contact language previously lacking instrumental affixes develops a set, by influence from the first... how does this happen? Of course sometimes the actual morphemes of the source language are borrowed directly, but this doesn't account for all cases. Furthermore it involves adding not just a single new structure but a new paradigm to the verb. Will this happen piecemeal over centuries or can it somehow be an all-at-once thing?

I'm having difficulty imagining a case where a language has "nothing equivalent" with which to calque a structure in another language. Instrumental prefixes don't have to be built from nouns--verbs or adverbs would work as well. It sounds like you have a specific historically-attested situation in mind. If so, what is it?

Radius Solis wrote: For example, a language with a series of instrumental prefixes on the verbs that classify the motion of the verb, where these affixes are not obviously related to any particular nouns. A contact language previously lacking instrumental affixes develops a set, by influence from the first... how does this happen? Of course sometimes the actual morphemes of the source language are borrowed directly, but this doesn't account for all cases. Furthermore it involves adding not just a single new structure but a new paradigm to the verb. Will this happen piecemeal over centuries or can it somehow be an all-at-once thing?

I think those cases definitely tend to happen where there is widespread bilingualism - if there is then it is easy to transfer an entire grammatical construction that exists in one language to that of the other since one's bilingual interlocutors can be expected to understand it. I think this happens intuitively in bilingual children who simply generalize grammatical rules across linguistic repertoires without respecting language boundaries. If the entire community is bilingual I think entire paradigms can probably jump between languages within a single generation.

@ Radius: In general, I'd assume that the transfer of the kind of structure you describe will happen more rarely and would indicate a higher level of integration / bilingualism than in many other sprachbund areas. In the loaning hierarchy, grammatical morphemes normally come last. OTOH, if the prefixes are still analysable (e.g. if they are visibly related to other elements of the lexicon or if they are in non-bound or derivational use somewhere, it would be easier to calque them). As Radagast said, do you have a concrete case to illustrate what you're thinking about?

hwhatting wrote:As Radagast said, do you have a concrete case to illustrate what you're thinking about?

Curses! I've been unmasked!

linguoboy wrote:

hwhatting wrote:As Radagast said, do you have a concrete case to illustrate what you're thinking about?

Curses! I've been unmasked!

Sorry!