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Old 12-13-2012, 06:08 AM   #11
SonofJohn
 
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Default Re: Guidelines for Linguistic Evolution

Another factor is that a written form tends to make a language more conservative with its grammatical structures. Also not only words loaned from one language to nother there is evidence that many european languages adopted a more complex grammar from latin.

If you have for example a big empire in the center of your setting like rome or imperial china, it will "export" its grammar and even parts of its phonetical spektrum to other contrys. Vietnamese for example adaptet its tonals from chinese.

Alphatbeths or Writing tends to rather be imported than develop regionally, Greek and Thai alphabeth can both be traced to mesopotamien alpabeths. Or chinese characters wich are in use from vietnam to japan.
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Old 12-13-2012, 07:26 AM   #12
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Also not only words loaned from one language to nother there is evidence that many european languages adopted a more complex grammar from latin.
I'm biting. Examples? I can give loads of counter-examples, notably that the Roman-dominated areas of Europe moved towards more synthetic tongues, abandoning highly analytic grammars like Latin's. By contrast, Eastern Europe's tongues (Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek) kept their synthetic grammars (other than Bulgarian/Macedonian, which is a special case); even the descendent of Latin in the area, Romanian, still has a noun case system, albeit greatly reduced.

Not only that, but the one really complex analytic grammatical construct of Latin (and Greek, and unique to these two branches), its way of handling indirect speech, has been ignored by every living tongue in Europe.

However, supporting the larger point, ultra-analytic English might have been influenced by the more analytic grammar of insular Celtic. Dutch, a fairly close relative of English, is much more synthetic. Another Englishism that supports this is the loss of "thou," carrying a French tendency to the extreme, even to the point of sacrificing intelligibility.

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Greek and Thai alphabeth can both be traced to mesopotamien alpabeths.
Actually, the origin comes from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but they do have a common origin.
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Old 12-13-2012, 07:50 AM   #13
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I'm biting. Examples? I can give loads of counter-examples, notably that the Roman-dominated areas of Europe moved towards more synthetic tongues, abandoning highly analytic grammars like Latin's. By contrast, Eastern Europe's tongues (Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek) kept their synthetic grammars (other than Bulgarian/Macedonian, which is a special case); even the descendent of Latin in the area, Romanian, still has a noun case system, albeit greatly reduced.

Not only that, but the one really complex analytic grammatical construct of Latin (and Greek, and unique to these two branches), its way of handling indirect speech, has been ignored by every living tongue in Europe.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "analytic" here. I understand "analytic" to mean that a language represents grammatical relations entirely by separate words such as prepositions and auxiliaries and by word order. English certainly is a long way toward analyticity: nouns inflect only for number and possessive, adjectives only for comparison, and even verbs (other than "to be") have no more than five endings. French is more synthetic, with elaborate verb paradigms, and Latin is even more synthetic, with five or six cases for nouns and adjectives and with word order much freer than English. I had the impression that Latin and Greek were as synthetic as European languages got.

Are you using "analytic" here to mean something different? Or are there European languages with more elaborate declensions and conjugations than Latin has, and less reliance on word order and prepositions? (I don't think there are any polysynthetic languages in Europe, are there?)

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Old 12-13-2012, 08:50 AM   #14
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Well, I gave you two full names to type into your local library catalogue and journal database or mention when you talk to your local reference librarian ... I can't do more than that for you because its not my specialty. I am an ancient historian not a philologist.

I think that one book you will want to read is Vennemann, Theo (1988), Preference Laws for Syllable Structure and the Explanation of Sound Change, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter There is also a forthcoming book P. Honeybone & J. Salmons, Handbook of Historical Phonology, Oxford: Oxford University Press .
Right and thanks for the recommendations. I'll look into them.

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I have a rule for myself: for mannish tongues, don't go against Greenberg's Universals. (Google it.) For the tongues of aliens, it's all fair game.

Of course, that is for grammar. For phonetics, I say the word aloud a few times.
Yeah the main problem with applying an artificial least effortification through saying it aloud is that it's best at producing an end result instead of a history of how it changed over time.

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One of the recurring patterns is that. You start out, let us say, with an idea that you want to convey, and you adopt a phrase that conveys it: I will go = I will go [despite obstacles or opposition] or [ego] cantare habeo, "I to sing have [that is, before me as a task]." Through repeated use, the force gets worn down to where will or habeo becomes a marker of simple futurity; this is grammaticalization. Then, because it's no longer an independent semantic element, the word becomes unstressed in pronunciation, and worn down to a clitic, such as 'll in I'll go, or a prefix or suffix, such as -ai in je chanterai. That's as far as it's gone in contemporary European languages, but it can go further: suffixes and prefixes tend to get slurred or dropped entirely in hasty pronunciation, which eventually becomes standard pronunciation (as it has to some degree in Black English Vernacular). But then you're no longer conveying the grammatical information, and sometimes you may want to be more explicit. So you develop new ways of stating the idea, such as I am going to go => I'm going to go => I'm gonna go => I gonna go => I gon go, and the cycle starts over.

Traugott and Hopper found that there are words expressing fully meaningful concepts that habitually get worn down into prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, and so on. (For example, "He is on the out side of the door" => "He's outside the door.") Those patterns can be used to develop word endings and other grammatical elements.

Bill Stoddard
Great examples. Can anything meaningful be said about how long a full cycle takes or how long before something should happen with grammaticalization?
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Old 12-13-2012, 09:33 AM   #15
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Those sound useful. Hopper and Traugott aren't focused on sound change but on reinterpretation of the grammatical roles of words and morphemes.

Bill Stoddard
It so happens that I took my one historical linguistics course with a specialist in preference laws for sound change, so I have a good bibliography for that. I don't have such handy references on borrowing, assimilation, grammaticalization, or syntax changes.

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Is this a general book, or focused on PIE? That's Vennemann's specialty.

This thread really should be in Roleplaying in General, since it's not GURPS-specific.
I think its general: a model for which types of sound changes are plausable and natural, and which rare and demanding of special explanation. But I haven't read it: I plucked it out of a footnote in my lecture notes.

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Actually, the origin comes from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but they do have a common origin.
I thought that the evidence leaned towards something invented independently by people from the Levant in Egyptian service.
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Old 12-13-2012, 09:34 AM   #16
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Can anything meaningful be said about how long a full cycle takes or how long before something should happen with grammaticalization?
I seem to remember some years ago seeing the claim that languages evolved cyclically from analytic to agglutinative to inflectional and back to analytic, taking a couple of thousand years. This is relevant, because an analytic language is one where all the grammaticalized forms have worn down to nothing and new ones are just starting to emerge from lexical words, still heard as independent words; the phonetic wearing down of grammaticalized words is thought to give rise to agglutination and inflection.

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Old 12-13-2012, 09:38 AM   #17
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I seem to remember some years ago seeing the claim that languages evolved cyclically from analytic to agglutinative to inflectional and back to analytic, taking a couple of thousand years. This is relevant, because an analytic language is one where all the grammaticalized forms have worn down to nothing and new ones are just starting to emerge from lexical words, still heard as independent words; the phonetic wearing down of grammaticalized words is thought to give rise to agglutination and inflection.

Bill Stoddard
Excellent. I'll keep an eye out for that.
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Old 12-13-2012, 10:12 AM   #18
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Default Re: Guidelines for Linguistic Evolution

Three suggestions:

1) Narrow your search. You probably don't need to know everything about how all the ways that any language could change. What kind of change do you want to bring to your language? Some sound changes? Grammatical evolution? Vocabulary innovations? If you are happy with some parts of your language (perhaps the pholology, for instance), then don't worry about that kind of language change.

2) Find a conlanging community, and ask there. The readership of this subforum can be surprisingly knowledgeable about a lot of things, but we're united by our interest in GURPS, not language.

3) Buy a used freshman introduction to linguistics text on Amazon. These things get replaced by new editions every few years, so the older ones are cheap, and they don't assume any prior knowledge of the field. It should have a section on language change, and that should be enough to get you going, or at least let you know what kinds of things you want to learn more about.
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Old 12-13-2012, 10:25 AM   #19
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1) Narrow your search. You probably don't need to know everything about how all the ways that any language could change. What kind of change do you want to bring to your language? Some sound changes? Grammatical evolution? Vocabulary innovations? If you are happy with some parts of your language (perhaps the pholology, for instance), then don't worry about that kind of language change.
I don't really have anything specific in mind. Like with my Modelling History Through Cycles thread the idea here is really to be able to take a language and advance it a millennium (Or alternatively run it backwards a millennium.) and know what sort of default changes should happen so things aren't unrealistically static if I don't have anything in mind.
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Old 12-13-2012, 11:45 AM   #20
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I had the impression that Latin and Greek were as synthetic as European languages got.
I got the terms reversed. Early morning posting.
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Last edited by Rasputin; 12-13-2012 at 11:47 AM. Reason: Fixed quoting.
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