To counter the "getting simpler" argument, original Proto-Indo-European is theorised to have had two genders at an earlier stage, animate and inanimate. Then a three gender system developed in most branches and while much later Romance languages simplified it to two genders with articles, Slavic languages kept expanding the system with further distinctions being made between personal, animate and inanimate. These genders are highly fusional, but in for example modern Polish there exist five distinct grammatical "genders".
@@olkredesign2410It might look difficult when you first see it as a foreigner, but it’s not really bad at all when you get into it. Sz/cz aren’t any less logical than English sh/ch when you think about it, and at least they always make the same sounds. I’m not Polish either but it’s got a good system
@@maxf9291 I studied Polish so I know what I am talking about. English spelling is not predictable/logical at all, so its pointless to compare with it. In Polish sz and Ś make the same sound. So there are two ways to write same sound. In Czech or Slovak it makes a little more sense and it's not just a bunch of wovels
12:01 Yeah, languages get "simpler" as they get bigger, basically. Languages don't typically grow because their speakers breed much faster than others. They grow because their speakers become politically/culturally dominant, and other communities abandon their own language in favour of theirs. But people who have to learn a new language will gravitate towards the easier systems and ignore or simplify the more complicated and unfamiliar ones. And so widespread languages with lots of speakers tend to be "simple", while small isolated languages tend to be "weird". Modern Arabic is a good recent example. Most Arabic-speakers today are descended from people who spoke other languages, but switched to Arabic over the course of the Islamic expansion. And in the process they coloured Arabic with influences from their original native languages (so it very quickly split up into distinct dialects) and simplified the grammar of Classical Arabic. As a result, the modern spoken Arabics are significantly less "weird" than Classical Arabic. As for Latin, it definitely did change and simplify during its expansion, a lot of that is just masked by the conservative literary language. The case system was initially preserved (though there was a lot of phonetically-induced syncretism even during antiquity, we have records of contemporary grammarians complaining about it!) because the languages it usurped in Europe were mostly other Indo-European languages. They had basically the same case system, so picking up the Latin one would have been pretty straightforward for speakers of other Italic languages or Celtic. Where the similarities were smaller, like in the verbal system, we see more drastic changes and losses of Latin forms.
but once the new analytic system is stablished, if it becomes cumbersome, and all speakers are fluent fro. birth, could the excess prepositions and auxiliaries start to be appended to the core information and do the inverse tragectory?
That’s not necessarily true. With Romanian, which has had constant contact with Turkish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hungarian and other neighbours (and rulers), we see still a case system and suffix articles. So your argument is invalid for Slavic languages, German (which still has a robust case system), Romanian, etc.
@@masonharvath-gerrans832 But my argument isn't "languages lose all their inflection when in contact with other languages", it's "languages change to be easier to learn as they grow, because they grow by being learned, and learners tend to simplify or skip the hard parts." Romanian hasn't really grown since it split off from Latin, and the historical situation in the Balkans is characterized by multilingualism and code-switching. Giving us the Balkan Sprachbund (where languages in close contact become more similar over time because speakers don't like to change things up too much when switching languages or borrowing expressions from another language). So that's a very different dynamic. That said, Romanian is still a lot "easier" than its ancestor Latin in terms of abstract morphological rules you need to learn.
A language prof proposed that creolization motivates languages to simplify, as it helps non-native speakers forced to use the language. Middle English is a good example. It emerged after the the French-speaking Normans conquered England; a common language was needed, and in the space of two or three generations Old English lost a great many of its inflections and became much more analytic. As the base of native speakers increases, there is a tendency to transform periphrasis into affixes and to expand periphrasis to add shades of meaning. For example, "can't" is widely used in Modern English, but didn't (another example) exist in Middle English. Another example is how the choice of auxiliary verb can show mood: could, would, should, will, might, etc all show different types of future tense, a plethora of choice that did not exist in Middle English. Regarding why Latin did not start evolving until late, well, it DID start changing as the Empire spread out. The Vulgate spoken by the Legions and in colonial settlements outside of Rome was not the same as the official Latin preserved in monuments, literature, and official records and could vary widely in different parts of the Empire. It was not until the imperial infrastructure began to crumble, and the local vulgate became the language of local government, that we begin to see written records of proto-French, proto-Italian, proto-Romanian, and so on.
@@ukyoize I assume your question indicates a conservative attitude wherein language simplification (or maybe changes at all) are bad. I reject this idea - changes within a language, whether in the direction of more simple or more complex, are value neutral. They just happen, and we need not do anything to prevent nor encourage them. That aside, any argument that yields the conclusion "we should prevent people from learning x language" must necessarily have some absurdity within it to grant such an absurd conclusion.
Counterargument regarding your examples of auxiliary verbs of mood that supposedly didn't exist in Middle English. How come these exact same auxiliaries of mood/possibilty also exist in German - which obviously didn't undergo any creolization: could - könnten (inf.), would - würden (inf.), should - sollten (inf.), will - werden (inf.), might - möchten (inf.)
I’m not disagreeing with your comment. But it shows why it’s important to separate the idea of simplification without quotes from languages becoming less agglutinative. I don’t doubt that Middle English speakers were capable of communicating what Old and Modern English can about future moods etc. that’s more something I’d expect from a pidgin and not a common language. I guess what I’d be wanting to know is how languages go the other way- if those periphrases become agglutination over time otherwise how do agglutinative languages ever come about? But that’s on me that I’ve never looked into it. Swedish followed a similar timeline, and is about as simple as English and grammatically very similar (and verbs are simpler). English has a roundabout mannerism that came from the Norse and the Danes etc. that sounds more intelligent or polite or poetic to native English speakers. All the words are there in Swedish, but to draw words out just isn’t a thing and neither is colouring tenses. Eg. I don’t think progressive tenses are making up for shades of verbs lost in Middle English. Old English and Modern Swedish have them they just don’t care to use them much even though they’re not creoles.
@@ukyoize - I am not sure what you are asking. Languages change constantly, to the point where the Modern English of Shakespeare needs to be translated into the Modern English of today, and how today's spelling is weird but made perfect sense when spelling was fixed before the Great Vowel Shift.
Yes, seeing all the inflections that Finnish has retained, and coming to the conclusion that it hasn't become more analytic is a bit of a mistake. There are so many constructions that are becoming obsolete in favour of ones with more words and fewer inflections. For example, several of the 15 nominal cases are used only rarely. The abessive case (essentially "without") is generally avoided in favour of using the preposition "ilman". Talotta - > ilman taloa
That's more in the style of southern/western speech. The eastern dialects are more conservative. However, I'm starting to hear more and more young people speak the southern dialect in the east too
Finnish is not a real language though. "Kokoo koko kokko kokoon. Koko kokkoko kokoon? Koko kokko kokoon." I mean... They are not even trying to make it look realistic!
Bulgarian, which is the Slavic language that lost almost its entire case system but has kept a very complex tense system, mode, moods, gained definiteness, lost its infinitive, is a very good example of analytical language not gaining simplicity, just changing.
@@Miraihi Is it tho? I think it's mainly East Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian) that don't use it in present in the sense of 'to be' but rather use the 3rd person one extensively to say 'to have'.
I'm currently learning Bulgarian, as a Englishman who has also learnt Russian to a decent standard, and it's interesting seeing the differences between the languages, it does feel like modern Bulgarian might be closer to older Slavic languages, than say Russian. I am enjoying the fact that you use the "to be" as an auxiliary verb though, I really 'missed' that about Russian!
@@pgf289 Bulgarian is certainly the closest we have to the old church Slavonic. Cyril and Methodius, the creators of the Cyrillic script and its predecessor, Glagolitic script, have been the missionaries at roughly the territory of modern Bulgaria. You can say that Bulgarian for Slavs is a bit akin to Icelandic to Scandinavians.
@@pgf289 good luck with your studies of Bulgarian. I think that learning it for someone speaking English or French is easier than other Slavic languages, if the goal is to learn the basics but if you want to go deep into the language, it's not easy. It really depends what you mean closer to old Slavic languages though. In what sense did you main it? It's a very interesting observation.
Thought this was a viral video from a big established linguistics channel. Turns out it's a new channel with only 1 video so far and less than 500 subs. The creator, if you're reading this, amazing job, keep going, this can grow to be a massively successful channel. Big thumbs up
He got the Latin wrong: “domibus nostris” not “nostra”, to say nothing of “out houses” instead of “our houses”. Rather carelessly done IMO. And choosing “fart” is just childish.
@@john.premosethat’s a great verb. It’s a weak verb and one of the oldest reliably traceable Indo Europeans verbs (I haven’t watched the video so I don’t know the relevance of it here).
I think the Hungarian language is another good example of how a language has been able to remain relatively synthetic until now. Although the use of the archaic past tense has worn out and as far as I know it never had grammatical genders, the agglutination still remained as in Finnish. On top of that, there are two types of verb conjugations, definite or indefinite, and vowel harmonization in suffixes also helps to ensure that this complexity remains an integral part of the language.
Turkic languages as well kept their synthetic structure to this day though they did have influences from many indo-european and semitic languages over the milennia
It's also the dative plural btw. For most Latin declinations, the datives and ablatives (sg and pl) look the same. So besides -ibus implying the meaning of 'plural' and 'case', there is also ambiguity of which case this actually is 😅
@@nullings. yeah, in most romance languages, there are situations where the same words (and sentences) can mean different things depending on the context.
@@aureltoniniimperatorecomun4029 I can't find the form "domis" for the ablative anywhere. Not in my Rubenbauer Hofman grammar, not in wiktionary, nor on any other site that popped up when I googled it. Where did you find it?
As a native speaker of Turkish, which is an agglutinative language like Finnish, I think the agglutinative fusional explanation is the most reasonable one since all morphemes appear as suffixes, it is hard to think of that specific suffix for a case to disappear. I am not an expert either, just interested in linguistics and it is great to see such a channel.
This phenomenon has been long known and has deceived Europeans into thinking the trend is from Synthetic to analytic. This is not globally so. Modern Turkish is agglutinative and has 6 cases, and currently is developing slowly over many decades a seventh instrumental case as the particle "ile" ="with "is becoming an affix "-le" or "-la" obeying vowel harmony. This is an example of where becoming synthetic and "increasing complexity" actually simplifies the language. In recent decades we see "diyorsun" morphing into "diyon" in certain dialects - these trends will continue - this one is removing syllables. Some have even postulated that languages cycle through a circle of agglutinative -> separating - >isolating (Analaytic) -> agglutinative and that these cycles happen over many 1000s of years. The future of Europe may be a trend towards agglutination in the millenia to come. You can see it in English in "i am" -> "I'm" , "you all "->"yall"/"youse"/"you lot". "would not have" -> "would'na", "going to"->"gonna". This won't ever stop.
Wow! This was a _great_ video. I had no knowledge of synthetic vs. analytic languages, and this taught me a lot. Also, your voice is perfect for this sort of thing. Great pacing, clear pronunciation, wonderful. And your graphics matched up so perfect and clear with the points you were making (other than the outhouse error!). Well done.
The Bantu languages offer a nice non-Indo European example of agglutinating languages remaining stably agglutinating. The Bantu expansion began thousands of years ago (estimates vary on when exactly), and the daughter Bantu languages are reliably agglutinating. They also offer some interesting examples of grammaticalization. For example in Swahili several different verbs (in the infinitive form) can freely interchange with the phrase "more of" to form comparatives: "you are taller than she" could translate word-for-word as "you are tall more of she", but also "you are tall to conquer she" or "you are tall to pass she." ("Wewe ni mrefu [zaidi ya | kushinda | kupita] yeye.") It's also interesting to note that while the Bantu languages are reliably agglutinating, they have nevertheless grown apart in specific forms. For example Swahili indicates the simple past tense with an affix before the verb root, but nearby Lingala indicates the same simple past tense with a change to the end of the verb.
The Aramaic word for God is "Alaha". It's the word Isa PBUH used. Sounds familiar? Written without the confusing vowels it is written A-L-H ܐ ܠܗܐ (alap-lamed-he) as found in Targum or in Tanakh (Daniel, Ezra), Syriac Aramaic (Peshitta), reduced from the Arabic original (of which Aramaic is a dialect continuum as will be explained) it is written in the Arabic script 'A-L-L-H' (Aleph-Lam-Lam-Ha) add an A before the last H for vocalization. The word God in another rendition in Hebrew ʾĕlōah is derived from a base ʾilāh, an Arabic word, written without confusing vowel it is A-L-H in the Arabic script, pronounced ilah not eloah. Hebrew dropped the glottal stop and mumbled it, aramic mumbled a little less and it became elaha. Infact both are written written A-L-H in Arabic, it is pronounced i in Arabic and not A because it is an Alef with hamza below (إ أ ) They are two different forms of Alef. And it mean "a god", it is the non definitive form of A-L-L-H, in which the Alef is without a glottal stop/hamza,(ا), but this kind of nuance is lost in the dialect continua. infact "YHWH" itself is an Arabic word as discussed by Professor. Israel Knohl (Professor of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the paper" YHWH: The Original Arabic Meaning of the Name." jesus as his name is often misspelled due to the lack of the ayin sound in Greek, which was rendered to Iesous, coupling the nearest sound to ayin, same letter found in 'Iraq', which sounds entirely different in Arabic form 'Iran' in Arabic, with the -ous Greek suffix that Greeks typically add to their names 'HerodotOS', 'PlotinUS', 'AchelOUS' and later mumbled into a J. The yeshua rendition of Isa (his name in the Qur'an) PBUH which is purported to be the name of Jesus is KNOWN to had been taken from greek. Western Syriac also use "Isho". Western Aramaic (separate from Syriac which is a dialect of Eastern Aramaic) use "Yeshu". Western Syriac has been separate from Western Aramaic for about 1000 years. And sounds don't even match up. Syriac is a Christian liturgical language yet the four letters of the name of Jesus «ܝܫܘܥ» [ = Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic: «ישוע» ] sounds totally different in West vs East Syriac, viz. vocalized akin to Christian Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic «ܝܶܫܽܘܥ» (Yēšūʿ) in West Syriac, but pronounced more akin to Muslim Arabic Quran character name Isa in East Syriac «ܝܑܼܫܘܿܥ» (ʾĪšōʿ). The reason for this confusion is their dropping of phonemes. Only someone that has no idea what the letters are or how they sound would have a name ending in a pharyngeal fricative like the ayin, if it were to be used in a name it would have had to be in the beginning, thus the Arabic rendition is the correct one. An example in English is how the appended -d is a common error amongst the English pronouncing Gaelic names. The name Donald arose from a common English mispronunciation of the Gaelic name Donal. Just how it is with donal becoming donald and the two becoming distinct and the original being regarded as something seperate so too did Isa PBUH turn to Iesous turn to jesus and when they tried going back to the original they confused it for yeshua ( ysu is how it is actually written) for Isa PBUH ( 3'eysah ) Schlözer in his preparation for the Arabia expedition in 1781 coined the term Semitic language: "From the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, from Mesopotamia to Arabia ruled one language, as is well known. Thus Syrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Arabs were one people (ein Volk). Phoenicians (Hamites) also spoke this language, which I would like to call the Semitic (die Semitische)." -Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German By Han F. Vermeulen. He was only half right though, Arabic is the only corollary to "proto-semitic", infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical as will be shown. "protosemetic" Alphabet (28), Arabic Alphabet (28), Latin transliteration, hebrew (22) 𐩠 𐩡 𐩢 𐩣 𐩤 𐩥 𐩦 𐩧 𐩨 𐩩 𐩪 𐩫 𐩬 𐩭 𐩮 𐩰 𐩱 𐩲 𐩳 𐩴 𐩵 𐩶 𐩷 𐩸 𐩹 𐩺 𐩻 𐩼 ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي A b t ṯ j h kh d ḏ r z s sh ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ʿ ġ f q k l m n h w y א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת Merged phonemes in hebrew and aramaic: ح, خ (h, kh) merged into only kh consonant remain س, ش (s, sh) merged into only Shin consonant remaining ط, ظ (ṭ/teth, ẓ) merged into only ṭ/teth consonant remaining ص, ض (ṣ, ḍ/Tsad ) merged into only ḍ/Tsad consonant remaining ع, غ (3'ayn, Ghayn) merged into a reducted ayin consonant remaining ت, ث (t/taw, th) merged into only t/taw consonant remaining The reason why the protoS alphabet here is 28 and not 29, is because the supposed extra letter is simply a س written in a different position, but it was shoehorned to obfuscated. In Arabic letter shapes are different depending on whether they are in the beginning , middle or end of a word. As a matter of fact, all of the knowledge needed for deciphering ancient texts and their complexity was derived from the Qur'an. It was by analyzing the syntactic structure of the Qur'an that the Arabic root system was developed. This system was first attested to in Kitab Al-Ayin, the first intralanguage dictionary of its kind, which preceded the Oxford English dictionary by 800 years. It was through this development that the concept of Arabic roots was established and later co-opted into the term 'semitic root,' allowing the decipherment of ancient scripts. In essence, they quite literally copied and pasted the entirety of the Arabic root. Hebrew had been dead, as well as all the other dialects of Arabic, until being 'revived' in a Frankensteinian fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries. The entire region spoke basically the same language, with mumbled dialect continuums spread about, and Arabic is the oldest form from which all these dialects branched off. As time passed, the language gradually became more degenerate, Language; When one looks at the actual linguistics, one will find that many were puzzled by the opposite, that is, how the other "semetic" languages were more "evolved" than Arabic, while Arabic had archaic features, not only archaic compared to bibilical Hebrew, Ethiopic, "Aramaic" contemporary "semetic" languages, but even archaic compared to languages from ancient antiquity; Ugaritic, Akkadain. What is meant here by Archaic is not what most readers think, it is Archaic not in the sense that it is simple, but rather that it is complex (think Latin to pig Latin or Italian or Old English, which had genders and case endings to modern English), not only grammatically, but also phonetically; All the so called semitic languages are supposed to have evolved from protosemetic, the Alphabet for protosemitic is that of the so called Ancient South Arabian (which interestingly corresponds with the traditional Arabic origins account) and has 28 Phonemes. Arabic has 28 phonemes. Hebrew has 22, same as Aramaic, and other "semitic" languages. Now pause for a second and think about it, how come Arabic, a language that is supposed to have come so late has the same number of letters as a language that supposedly predates it by over a millennium (Musnad script ~1300 BCE). Not only is the glossary of phonemes more diverse than any other semitic language, but the grammar is more complex, containing more cases and retains what's linguists noted for its antiquity, broken plurals. Indeed, a linguist has once noted that if one were to take everything we know about languages and how they develop, Arabic is older than Akkadian (~2500 BCE). And then the Qur'an appeared with the oldest possible form of the language thousands of years later. This is why the Arabs of that time were challenged to produce 10 similar verses, and they couldn't. People think it's a miracle because they couldn't do it, but I think the miracle is the language itself. They had never spoken Arabic, nor has any other language before or since had this mathematical precision. And when I say mathematical, I quite literally mean mathematical. Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of years later in an alphabet that had never been recorded before, and in the highest form the language had ever taken? The creator is neither bound by time nor space, therefore the names are uttered as they truly were, in a language that is lexically, syntactically, phonemically, and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing. In fact, that writing appears to have been a simplified version of it. Not only that, but it would be the equivalent of the greatest works of any particular language all appearing in one book, in a perfect script and in the highest form the language could ever take. It is so high in fact, that it had yet to be surpassed despite the fact that over the last millennium the collection of Arabic manuscripts when compared on word-per-word basis in Western Museums alone, when they are compared with the collected Greek and Latin manuscripts combined, the latter does not constitute 1 percent of the former as per German professor Frank Griffel, in addition all in a script that had never been recorded before. Thus, the enlightenment of mankind from barbarism and savagery began, and the age of reason and rationality was born from its study. God did bring down the Qur’an, Mohamed is his Messenger.
The existence of substantial Balto-Slavic vocabulary and originality in Slavic inflection suggest that proto-Slavs had a creolized language (unlike Baltic ancestors, they were very exposed to Scytian, Sarmatic and Gothic neighbors) that got grammaticalized. The ability of moving parts of a sentence around has subtle advantages in expressing intentions and attitudes. For example, in a saying "kruk krukowi oka nie wykole" (raven raven eye not pierce out with inflections) can be permuted except "nie wykole" has to be together, but the proverb stresses "two of the same kind", e.g. internal conflicts stay within limits but placing both ravens at the beginning, and the fact that more usual order is "kruk nie wykole oka krukowi" points attention to "kruk krukowi". BTW, if you want to cite it, in Polish, like in German, "w" is like English "v".
I will admit that, despite finding this video a bit late, I immediately gravitated towards your content now. This video is a really good introduction into a topic that many people think has an answer, but really doesn't, plus your audio quality and voice really mix well with the background soundtrack. ¡Keep it up man!
Dative forms also become less frequent in German. E.g., nowadays we say "dem Volk" instead of "dem Volke", unless it's in an idiom such as "All state authority emanates from the people." Some would also say "dem Mensch" instead of "dem Menschen", etc. The dative is still present in the article "dem", but the inflection is gone. The genitive is not yet dying. Sometimes people even use the genitive with prepositions that require the dative, because they try to speak in an elevated manner.
I was just about to say this. My impression is that the genitive has been declared dead way too early, it seems to be going quite strong, mainly not in casual speech, but in any and all situations where people try to sound scholarly or to be authoritative, so much that it is used in some contexts where it originally wasn't. Also, in many cases the dative replacement for genitive possession ("von dem/der") still seems very childish or outright wrong. While saying "das Haus von meinem Vater" instead of "das Haus meines Vaters" ('my father's house') might be pretty much normal nowadays, saying "die Hauptstadt von dem Land" like in the video is fine colloquially, but wouldn't be used in any formal setting, and giving LotR the title "Der Herr von den Ringen" would sound like a complete parody, because it lacks any kind of poetic sound to it. So I can't imagine these latter kinds of uses of the genitive possessive being replaced anytime soon. Regarding the replacement of dative -e, this is a process that has been going on for more than 100 years, and leaving it out has been pretty much standard since at least the 60s/70s, I would say. It won't take long, I think, until this will no longer be regarded as correct outside of the idioms you mentioned ("wie es im Buche steht" or "im Sinne" are other ones). Not so sure about "dem Menschen" though
Schlözer in his preparation for the Arabia expedition in 1781 coined the term Semitic language: "From the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, from Mesopotamia to Arabia ruled one language, as is well known. Thus Syrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Arabs were one people (ein Volk). Phoenicians (Hamites) also spoke this language, which I would like to call the Semitic (die Semitische)." -Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German By Han F. Vermeulen He was only half right though, Arabic is the only corollary to "proto-semitic", infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning mass between their ears. hebrew, aramaic, rest of madeup dialect continua only have 22 letters of the 29 protosemitic letters Arabic has all 29. The difference betweeen Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as that between Latin and pig latin or italian. |Classical Arabic | 28 consonants, 29 with Hamza and 6 vowels; some consonants are emphatic or pharyngealized; some vowels are marked with diacritics | Complex system of word formation based on roots and patterns; roots are sequences of consonants that carry the basic meaning of a word; patterns are sequences of vowels and affixes that modify the meaning and function of a word | Flexible word order, but VSO is most common; SVO is also possible; subject and object are marked by case endings (-u for nominative, -a for accusative, -i for genitive); verb agrees with subject in person, number, and gender; verb has different forms for different moods and aspects | | Akkadian | 22 consonants and 3 vowels; some consonants are glottalized or palatalized; vowels are not marked | Similar system, but with different roots and patterns; some roots have more than three consonants; some patterns have infixes or reduplication | Fixed word order of SVO; subject and object are not marked by case endings, but by prepositions or word order; verb agrees with subject in person, number, and gender; verb has different forms for different tenses and aspects | | Aramaic | 22 consonants and 3 vowels (later variants have more); no emphatic or pharyngealized consonants (except in some dialects); vowels are not marked (except in later variants such as Syriac) | Simple system of word formation based on prefixes and suffixes; some roots or patterns exist, but are less productive than in Arabic or Akkadian | "Semitic" is just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed and simplified grammar. That's Aramaic, Hebrew, etc. For example, combine T and D into just T; there's no need to have 2 letters. The same goes for i, e, y - they should all be just y from now on, etc., etc. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-Semitic. In fact, the whole classification of Semitic languages is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning brain. Hebrew, Aramaic, and the rest of these made-up dialect continua only have 22 letters out of the 29 proto-Semitic letters. Arabic has all 29. The difference between Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as the difference between Latin and pig Latin or Italian. "Phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, and not only that, it is pidgin. It is simplified to the point of stupidity. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this clearly. What happened was that Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of Scottish Twitter spelling, with added mumbling due to phonemic mergers (22 letters, not 29), and mistakenly thought they were seeing a different language." Let's start with a simple sentence: ## The house is big Arabic: البيتُ كبيرٌ al-bayt-u kabīr-un Proto-Semitic: *ʔal-bayt-u kabīr-u Hebrew: הבית גדול ha-bayit gadol Akkadian: bītum rabûm Amharic: ቤቱ ገደሉ betu gedelu As can be seen, Arabic and Proto-Semitic have the same word order (noun-adjective), the same definite article (al-), and the same case endings (-u for nominative). Hebrew and Akkadian have lost the case endings and changed the definite article (ha- and -um respectively). Amharic has changed the word order (adjective-noun) and the definite article (u-). But Arabic is not only similar to Proto-Semitic, it is also pre-Semitic, meaning that it is the original form of Semitic before it split into different branches. This is because Arabic preserves many features that are not found in any other Semitic language, but are found in other Afro-Asiatic languages, such as Egyptian and Berber. These features include: - The definite article al-, which is derived from the demonstrative pronoun *ʔal- 'that'. This article is unique to Arabic among Semitic languages, but it is similar to the article n- in Berber and the article p-, t-, n- in Egyptian. - The dual number for nouns and verbs, which is marked by the suffix -ān or -ayn. This number is rare in other Semitic languages, but it is common in other Afro-Asiatic languages, such as Egyptian and Berber. - The imperfective prefix t- for verbs, which indicates the second person singular feminine or third person plural feminine. This prefix is unique to Arabic among Semitic languages, but it is similar to the prefix t- in Berber and Egyptian. - The passive voice for verbs, which is marked by the infix t between the first and second root consonants. This voice is unique to Arabic among Semitic languages, but it is similar to the passive voice in Egyptian and Berber. Finally, a more complex sentence: The letter was written with a pen. Arabic: كُتِبَتِ الرِّسَالَةُ بِالقَلَمِ kutiba-t al-risāla-t-u bi-l-qalam-i Proto-Semitic: *kutiba-t ʔal-risāla-t-u bi-l-qalam-i Hebrew: המכתב נכתב בעט ha-michtav niktav ba-et Akkadian: šipram šapāru bēlum Egyptian: sḏm.n.f p-ẖry m rnp.t Berber: tturra-t tibratin s uccen Here, Arabic and Proto-Semitic have the same word order (verb-subject-object), the same passive voice marker (-t-), the same definite article (al-), and the same preposition (bi-). Hebrew has changed the word order (subject-verb-object), lost the passive voice marker, changed the definite article (ha-) and the preposition (ba-). Akkadian has changed the word order (object-subject-verb), lost the passive voice marker, changed the definite article (-um) and the preposition (bēlum). Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of years in a language that is lexically, syntactically, phonemically, and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing? Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of years later in an alphabet that had never been recorded before, and in the highest form the language had ever taken? The creator is neither bound by time nor space, therefore the names are uttered as they truly were, in a language that is lexically, syntactically, phonemically, and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing. In fact, that writing appears to have been a simplified version of it. Not only that, but it would be the equivalent of the greatest works of any particular language all appearing in one book, in a perfect script and in the highest form the language could ever take. It is so high in fact, that it had yet to be surpassed despite the fact that over the last millennium the collection of Arabic manuscripts when compared on word-per-word basis in Western Museums alone, when they are compared with the collected Greek and Latin manuscripts combined, the latter does not constitute 1 percent of the former as per German professor Frank Griffel, in addition all in a script that had never been recorded before. Thus, the enlightenment of mankind from barbarism and savagery began, and the age of reason and rationality was born from its study. God did bring down the Qur’an, Mohamed is his Messenger.
@@MrNathanael94I'd say if you look at modern Dutch it showcases a state when this change is complete. Dutch lost the case system, and it is only found in fixed expressions, and the replacement for cases are much like this change that is now affecting German. The preposition 'van' for marking the possessor, 'aan' as a replacement for dative, and accusative doesn't really have or need a replacement, even in modern German only masculine looks different from the nominative versions.
You just admitted that genitive is being lost in spoken German and is increasingly being restricted to formal or literary contexts. This is especially true for masculine/neutral nouns, so it's more common to hear "das Haus von meinem Vater" but "das Haus meiner Mutter" rather than "von meiner Mutter". I also agree that the few remaining nouns that are inflected in dative and acusative are being lost, and people increasingly say "ich habe Herr Müller gesehen", "das Fell von dem Bär", etc. The process of losing -e at the end of nouns in dative started in the Middle Ages btw. @@MrNathanael94
Turkish is great example of a language becoming more synthetic over time. I think the word order is factor in that development. Turkish only makes use of post positions and they may turn into a suffix over time. Personal endings during the conjugations of the verbs come from personal pronouns. For example I come = gelir men (lit. comes I) became gelir-im You come = gelir sen > gelir-sin We come = gelir miz > gelir-iz You come = gelir siz > gelir-siniz They come = gelir onlar > gelir-ler I am good = edgü erir men > iyi-yim (er = the verb be over time it was dropped and the pronoun became a suffix: erir men > erir-im > -ir-im > -im) You are good = edgü erir sen > iyi-sin (erir sen erir-sin > ir-sin > -sin) As you can see "am" can only be turned into a contraction like I'm. If the word order in English were in Turkish, it prpobably would have become a suffix as in Turkish. Instead of "I am good", "I good am" would probably be turned into "I good-am".
I have studied Chinese in school - in the Sino-Tibetan language family (Chinese, Cantonese etc) the tones do not convey grammatical meaning and therefore are not related to whether the language is analytic or synthetic. Instead the tones are used to differentiate words with the same pronunciation to give them different meaning. For example saying a certain word going low to high means something different than saying it from high to low. Now on the question of whether they are analytic or synthetic, the Chinese languages are analytic. They do not have lots of endings added to the same word but instead use lots of adverbs to convey grammatical meaning like English (they use even more in fact). Japanese and Korean on the other hand are their own respective language families and are unrelated to the Chinese languages, and they are synthetic.
Very occasionally, there are relics of exoactive derivations with the reconstructed Old Chinese suffix *-s, which is purportedly responsible for the difference in tone between 買 (OC *mˤrajʔ "to buy") and 賣 (OC *mˤrajʔ-s "to sell"), and other exoactive-endoactive pairs. Otherwise, it's much rarer to find morphology coded into tone in East Asia and MSEA. Typologically, the northern branches of Chinese are less analytic than the southern varieties. However, I think you might still be interested in the fossilised remnants of proto-Vietic infixes in modern Vietnamese. These typically did not result in tonal alternations but did give rise to pairs of related words with different initials. A pair like chết "to die" (from PV *k-ceːt), without lenition, and giết "to kill" (from PV *k-pr-ceːt), with post-sesquisyllabic lenition *c > *ʝ > z/j, is most commonly cited.
Though it is less obvious than Indo-European language, modern Japanese becomes simplifier over time. Compared to Classical Japanese, It has less variety of conjugation patterns (9→5) and no distinctive forms between terminal form and attributive form. However, the biggest difference is a phonetic aspect. Classical Japanese had 8 vowels (now 5) . Considering Classical Chinese had much complex phonetic system (it had double consonants and ending consonants), Simplification of East Asian languages is more obvious in the phonetic aspect.
@@ether6107 Korean and Vietnamese shall be similar to Chinese. They only dropped the Chinese characters but not the language itself. They only changed the Chinese writing to a different form.
@@CN_SFY_General that's compete nonsense and 100% of linguists will say the exact same thing They evolved from completely different sources and are from different families entirely. This means their vocabulary is completely different and the differences cannot be due to gradual pronunciation changes. For example the English word "father" comes from the old German word "fæder", and that comes from "pater" in Proto Indo-European. Meanwhile father in Korean is "abeoji", in Mandarin it's "fuqin", and in Vietnamese it's "bo". There is no way to connect these words at all, so they obviously came from different sources while the Germanic languages did not. Also, just because they are neighbors does not mean they are from the same family. Cantonese is more similar to Mandarin than Korean even though they are from farther apart geographically because they are from the same family. The writing system has nothing to do with the family of the language as well. For example, Turkish used to use the Arabic script but now uses the Latin script - that doesn't make Turkish a Semetic language.
Besides the analytic vs. the synthetic ( grammatical) aspect, there is the phonetic and spelling ones. For example, English is less inflected than Spanish , but when it comes to pronunciation Spanish is easier than English, French or Russian. There are only 5 vowel sounds in Spanish vs 14 in English and 19 in French. The correlation between spelling and pronunciation is extremely straightforward in Spanish. Every single letter is pronounced the same way . There is no silent letter with the exception of the "h" , but the h is ALWAYS silent. Besides, the B and V are pronounced the same way nowadays and something silmilar is happening with the s and z in now, so there is oversimplification of consonant sounds, too. You can master the correlation between spelling and pronunciation of Spanish in a couple of lessons, but that is not the case in some European languages. . To top it off, Spanish-speaking countries have Academias de la Lengua Española and they have international meetings to agree on changes and when a change in spelling is accepted , it is for all the countries, so there is no change in spelling regardless the country. No wonder la gente piensan que aprender español es fácil😊
My wild guess is that languages becomes simpler and more analytical when they become bigger, more standardized and more culturally imposed. And, vice versa, new cases, like our Russian "neo-vocative" (I am a native Russian speaker), arise in extremely informal contexts, in small communities, when people feel free to experiment with the language.
I would compare Russian and Bulgarian, which has lost all its cases, but developed (THE only one of the Slavic languages) a definite article. It's obvious how much bigger Russian is, but it's retained almost all the pra-Slavic cases, whereas Bulgarian - the source of most of our literary vocabulary - has lost cases. I think there is no single answer here, and each case must be studied separately.
Should Neo-vocative even count as a new case? It only happens in short diminutive forms (that are always full of new, exiting ways to address someone), in very casual setting, and cutting happens only in names ending in "а", where with "я" it changes into "ь"... and with that we come full circle and just using Plural Accusative case for a single person. Partitive case on the other hand.... in most cases (huh) just repeats Genitive Case. So we also don't bother. I just don't get it. Why Neo-vocative is a new candidate when it used in a very specific circumstances. Unlike when we use partitive with "tea" e.g. Regardless of where we are, who we are and with whom we drink it ;)
@@somestuff7876 It does not matter in how narrow circumstances a new case is used - it is still a new case, a distinction of forms which did not exist previously. Of course, the cultural norm pressure restraints its acceptance as a new norm. But there is always a chance that at some point in the future people stop bothering and start counting it as one of the normal cases.
@@somestuff7876 Neo vocative does not cut ending only names ending with -a. It's because -a requires the "hard" consonant before it, and -я requires a "soft" one, so when the vowel is removed from -я, soft sign is put there because the consonant still remains "soft". In other words, neo vocative is actually consistent with the way it changes words prononciation
For many years, I've been interested in grammatical development of languages over time. Apparently, a frequent claim is that languages move in a circle- from analytic to agglutinative to fusional and back to analytic. I'm honestly fascinated by thoughts of a future "Japanese" which has complex noun grammar, or maybe even verb conjugation like Romance or Slavic languages. Korean is quite agglutinative like Japanese, and even has cases, but no verb conjugation.
Korean DOES have verb conjugation, it just conjugates for different features than Indo-European languages. For example "seung-chuhn-hae" and "seung-chuhn-hae-yoh" are two conjugated forms of the same verb. I thought Japanese did something similar. Whether the semantics could drift toward Indo-European version, I don't see why not. In my little time studying Korean I noticed that one of the more humble verb forms tended to be used for the first person, which makes sense. It's not hard to imagine that system realigning to a first person vs non-first-person, and maybe a second person vs. third person split happening later.
The Aramaic word for God is "Alaha". It's the word Isa PBUH used. Sounds familiar? Written without the confusing vowels it is written A-L-H ܐ ܠܗܐ (alap-lamed-he) as found in Targum or in Tanakh (Daniel, Ezra), Syriac Aramaic (Peshitta), reduced from the Arabic original (of which Aramaic is a dialect continuum as will be explained) it is written in the Arabic script 'A-L-L-H' (Aleph-Lam-Lam-Ha) add an A before the last H for vocalization. The word God in another rendition in Hebrew ʾĕlōah is derived from a base ʾilāh, an Arabic word, written without confusing vowel it is A-L-H in the Arabic script, pronounced ilah not eloah. Hebrew dropped the glottal stop and mumbled it, aramic mumbled a little less and it became elaha. Infact both are written written A-L-H in Arabic, it is pronounced i in Arabic and not A because it is an Alef with hamza below (إ أ ) They are two different forms of Alef. And it mean "a god", it is the non definitive form of A-L-L-H, in which the Alef is without a glottal stop/hamza,(ا), but this kind of nuance is lost in the dialect continua. infact "YHWH" itself is an Arabic word as discussed by Professor. Israel Knohl (Professor of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the paper" YHWH: The Original Arabic Meaning of the Name." jesus as his name is often misspelled due to the lack of the ayin sound in Greek, which was rendered to Iesous, coupling the nearest sound to ayin, same letter found in 'Iraq', which sounds entirely different in Arabic form 'Iran' in Arabic, with the -ous Greek suffix that Greeks typically add to their names 'HerodotOS', 'PlotinUS', 'AchelOUS' and later mumbled into a J. The yeshua rendition of Isa (his name in the Qur'an) PBUH which is purported to be the name of Jesus is KNOWN to had been taken from greek. Western Syriac also use "Isho". Western Aramaic (separate from Syriac which is a dialect of Eastern Aramaic) use "Yeshu". Western Syriac has been separate from Western Aramaic for about 1000 years. And sounds don't even match up. Syriac is a Christian liturgical language yet the four letters of the name of Jesus «ܝܫܘܥ» [ = Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic: «ישוע» ] sounds totally different in West vs East Syriac, viz. vocalized akin to Christian Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic «ܝܶܫܽܘܥ» (Yēšūʿ) in West Syriac, but pronounced more akin to Muslim Arabic Quran character name Isa in East Syriac «ܝܑܼܫܘܿܥ» (ʾĪšōʿ). The reason for this confusion is their dropping of phonemes. Only someone that has no idea what the letters are or how they sound would have a name ending in a pharyngeal fricative like the ayin, if it were to be used in a name it would have had to be in the beginning, thus the Arabic rendition is the correct one. An example in English is how the appended -d is a common error amongst the English pronouncing Gaelic names. The name Donald arose from a common English mispronunciation of the Gaelic name Donal. Just how it is with donal becoming donald and the two becoming distinct and the original being regarded as something seperate so too did Isa PBUH turn to Iesous turn to jesus and when they tried going back to the original they confused it for yeshua ( ysu is how it is actually written) for Isa PBUH ( 3'eysah ) Schlözer in his preparation for the Arabia expedition in 1781 coined the term Semitic language: "From the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, from Mesopotamia to Arabia ruled one language, as is well known. Thus Syrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Arabs were one people (ein Volk). Phoenicians (Hamites) also spoke this language, which I would like to call the Semitic (die Semitische)." -Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German By Han F. Vermeulen. He was only half right though, Arabic is the only corollary to "proto-semitic", infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical as will be shown. "protosemetic" Alphabet (28), Arabic Alphabet (28), Latin transliteration, hebrew (22) 𐩠 𐩡 𐩢 𐩣 𐩤 𐩥 𐩦 𐩧 𐩨 𐩩 𐩪 𐩫 𐩬 𐩭 𐩮 𐩰 𐩱 𐩲 𐩳 𐩴 𐩵 𐩶 𐩷 𐩸 𐩹 𐩺 𐩻 𐩼 ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي A b t ṯ j h kh d ḏ r z s sh ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ʿ ġ f q k l m n h w y א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת Merged phonemes in hebrew and aramaic: ح, خ (h, kh) merged into only kh consonant remain س, ش (s, sh) merged into only Shin consonant remaining ط, ظ (ṭ/teth, ẓ) merged into only ṭ/teth consonant remaining ص, ض (ṣ, ḍ/Tsad ) merged into only ḍ/Tsad consonant remaining ع, غ (3'ayn, Ghayn) merged into a reducted ayin consonant remaining ت, ث (t/taw, th) merged into only t/taw consonant remaining The reason why the protoS alphabet here is 28 and not 29, is because the supposed extra letter is simply a س written in a different position, but it was shoehorned to obfuscated. In Arabic letter shapes are different depending on whether they are in the beginning , middle or end of a word. As a matter of fact, all of the knowledge needed for deciphering ancient texts and their complexity was derived from the Qur'an. It was by analyzing the syntactic structure of the Qur'an that the Arabic root system was developed. This system was first attested to in Kitab Al-Ayin, the first intralanguage dictionary of its kind, which preceded the Oxford English dictionary by 800 years. It was through this development that the concept of Arabic roots was established and later co-opted into the term 'semitic root,' allowing the decipherment of ancient scripts. In essence, they quite literally copied and pasted the entirety of the Arabic root. Hebrew had been dead, as well as all the other dialects of Arabic, until being 'revived' in a Frankensteinian fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries. The entire region spoke basically the same language, with mumbled dialect continuums spread about, and Arabic is the oldest form from which all these dialects branched off. As time passed, the language gradually became more degenerate, Language; When one looks at the actual linguistics, one will find that many were puzzled by the opposite, that is, how the other "semetic" languages were more "evolved" than Arabic, while Arabic had archaic features, not only archaic compared to bibilical Hebrew, Ethiopic, "Aramaic" contemporary "semetic" languages, but even archaic compared to languages from ancient antiquity; Ugaritic, Akkadain. What is meant here by Archaic is not what most readers think, it is Archaic not in the sense that it is simple, but rather that it is complex (think Latin to pig Latin or Italian or Old English, which had genders and case endings to modern English), not only grammatically, but also phonetically; All the so called semitic languages are supposed to have evolved from protosemetic, the Alphabet for protosemitic is that of the so called Ancient South Arabian (which interestingly corresponds with the traditional Arabic origins account) and has 28 Phonemes. Arabic has 28 phonemes. Hebrew has 22, same as Aramaic, and other "semitic" languages. Now pause for a second and think about it, how come Arabic, a language that is supposed to have come so late has the same number of letters as a language that supposedly predates it by over a millennium (Musnad script ~1300 BCE). Not only is the glossary of phonemes more diverse than any other semitic language, but the grammar is more complex, containing more cases and retains what's linguists noted for its antiquity, broken plurals. Indeed, a linguist has once noted that if one were to take everything we know about languages and how they develop, Arabic is older than Akkadian (~2500 BCE). And then the Qur'an appeared with the oldest possible form of the language thousands of years later. This is why the Arabs of that time were challenged to produce 10 similar verses, and they couldn't. People think it's a miracle because they couldn't do it, but I think the miracle is the language itself. They had never spoken Arabic, nor has any other language before or since had this mathematical precision. And when I say mathematical, I quite literally mean mathematical. Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of years later in an alphabet that had never been recorded before, and in the highest form the language had ever taken? The creator is neither bound by time nor space, therefore the names are uttered as they truly were, in a language that is lexically, syntactically, phonemically, and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing. In fact, that writing appears to have been a simplified version of it. Not only that, but it would be the equivalent of the greatest works of any particular language all appearing in one book, in a perfect script and in the highest form the language could ever take. It is so high in fact, that it had yet to be surpassed despite the fact that over the last millennium the collection of Arabic manuscripts when compared on word-per-word basis in Western Museums alone, when they are compared with the collected Greek and Latin manuscripts combined, the latter does not constitute 1 percent of the former as per German professor Frank Griffel, in addition all in a script that had never been recorded before. Thus, the enlightenment of mankind from barbarism and savagery began, and the age of reason and rationality was born from its study. God did bring down the Qur’an, Mohamed is his Messenger.
It's usually a cycle. Small language has unique grammar but vocabulary split off from previously dominant language. Population expands and more non natives learn the language. Language simplifies so everyone can communicate easily. Smaller and isolated group changes their dialect so much that it becomes a new language, and repeat. Obviously there are many local languages that never really expand much outside of their own demographics and those languages often stay much more complex over time since they rarely ever speak to a nonnative speaker. A language like Navajo is a perfect example, that language is extremely specific and probably the most complex language still spoken today. Then there's a language like Japanese that is still complex, but slowly losing that complexity now that they are receiving more attention on a global scale. English is an interesting case as we are seeing that cycle on the opposite side where smaller communities are creating their own English based languages and adding complexity and new vocabulary into the language that only they understand.
Hi, thank you for the video! I can provide some infomation about Manchu - a kind of Altaic-Tungusic language. Basically, the Tungusic languages are all agglutinative which use mainly suffixes. Manchu started the writting system from the 17th century. Scince that, the Manchu literature didn't show any remarkable change on suffixes. In spoken language, for example, Sibe, as the robustest dialect for now, a few verbal suffixes did lose vitality. Through in Sibe there ARE some new constructions have been developed, but most of them are expressed with converbs or auxilaries instead of suffix. On the other hand, when comaparing with other Tungusic Languages like Nanai and Oroqen, which are both considered to be descended from the same ancestor of Manchu - the Jurchen, we found Manchu is tremendously 'simplified'. Almost all personal references, and nearly 2/3 converbal suffixes are dropped. So, I think for Manchu, it is getting more analytic.
Good video. One piece of advice I have would be that any and all sources or resources you use should be listed in the description. It helps give you additional legitimacy and can be helpful for people looking to get into linguistics.
Great video! Praise the algorithm for showing me your channel, you earned a subscriber! 6:48 Regarding the reinventing of a synthetic future tense in Romance languages, it’s worth point out that the languages that do it share the shifting of the stress/accent on the last syllable: English: I will sing French: chanterai Spanish/Catalan: cantaré Italian: canterò Could “y’all” be an regional English example of creating new synthetic forms? It distinguishes the second person plural from the second person singular (both are “you” in standard English)
This is the best video I've seen on UA-cam that both explains this phenomenon, and that does a good job of debunking why it's not true. Most others seem to simply say, "No, languages do not *necessarily* get more analytic over time," but then the evidence they bring up isn't very good at showing why many languages get more analytic, but others don't. From my perspective as someone who just enjoys linguistics as a hobby, so many I.E. languages *_do_* seem to have gotten simpler. Old English --> Modern English; Latin --> every modern Romance language; Classical Greek --> Modern Greek; Old Norse --> modern Scandinavian languages (except Icelandic); Old Persian --> Farsi; It's nice to see an explainer that tries to explain why a language may get grammatically simpler and isn't just "Nuh-uh, just because some languages have gotten simpler doesn't mean they have to by necessity."
An example from Italian. The language has undergone analytical simplification from Latin, but has at the same time developed some curious agglutinations. Take the phrase "pass it to me": One could translate it with "passa quello a me" pass=verb root , a=suffix for imperative 2nd person singular, quello= it/that (bent for mascuilne singular), a=to, me=me But no one would ever say that. The common expression is "passamelo": pass=verb root , a=suffix, me= to me, lo= it (masculine singular).
@danijeljovic4971 they meant that the -a of "pass(a)melo" is the suffix they referred to in the previous example and it stands for the 2nd person imperative singular. Morphologically, in the original verb, "-a" is the suffix, and it remains the same in the new agglutinative form.
Same in French - albeit with a slight difference in the sequence of the (in effect) pronouns at the end. We would typically (in the imperative) say "passe le moi" (it is still written as separate words in French, rather than stuck together) - though in some dialects (such as here in Canada), it's not uncommon to hear "passe moi le" (ear-grinding as that is to me...) On the other hand, we DO say "passe-moi ça" and "passe-moi [l'objet]" so there are idiosyncratic agglutinations at work here... The sequencing, placement before/after the verb (and often the form of the pronoun used) also depends on the verb mode and tense: in the infinitive, it would be "me le passer" and in the indicative it would be "tu me le passes" (or "vous me le passez" for the equivalent plural or formal forms). My castillian is getting rusty (and my Italian is very basic) but my impression is that something similar is true (with slight differences) in the other Latin-derived languages.
What you’re saying about English being a very analytic language is very interesting, because English has quite a lot of compound words like ‘i’ll’ ‘you’ve’ and ‘he’s’ where the oxilery verb is turned into a suffix, these and there ilk though are relatively un-interesting as the whole purpose of oxilery verbs is to move around in order to signify if a statement is a question, what is more enticing is the suffix ‘nt’ which is deriven from the word not (but now it’s a suffix) and it can be applied to the oxilery verb of a sentence to make it un-true, and the suffix ‘d’ derived from the word ‘would’ is basically the Spanish ‘ia’ suffix, but it goes on pronouns, Now i’m thinking of a hypothetical Anglic language which is just as synthetic as the Rommance languages, except that unlike other Endo-European languages, the conjegation goes on the pronouns not the verbs Also the words ‘wanna’ ‘needa’ and ‘gonna’ Exist
It's funny because the Spanish "ía" suffix actually stems itself from an analytical root, much like the synthtization of future suffixes he mentioned in the video. Where "cantaré" (I will sing) stems from Latin "cantare habeo" --> Old Spanish "cantar he", "cantaría" stems from another form of "habere", the old pluperfect indicative: Latin "cantare habia" --> Old Spanish "cantar hía" --> modern Spanish "cantaría".
4:26 All Indo-European languages have at least one case - the Nominative. If you chose not to count it, then for all the languages that have other cases, the number need to be lower by one. Together with that Bulgarian has got the vocative case apart from the nominative, meaning depending on how you count it, it has one or two cases (not zero as shown on the map).
if you don't distinguish cases, that means there are no cases; Nominative only exists if there is something to compare it to, like Accusative. You cannot say that in "the house of Matthew", "Matthew" is nominative cause really it would be dative, it just isn't distinguished on account of the ending falling out. however a kind of distinction between nominative and other cases is retained in all ie languages at the very least through pronouns (and in english i guess there is a kind of genitive case, the so-called Saxon genitive)
In Japanese, positional relations are expressed by adding auxiliaries. For example: 米田さんの家から。 米田さん[Mr Yoneda]の[possessive('s)]家[house]から[from] There is no similar expression in Chinese, which explains the preceding action by adding a sentence For example: 是人出其家，故至此。 是人[That man]出[go out]其[possessive('s)]家[house]，故[ergo]至[get]此[here]
possibly just longevity in locale. someone else here suggests its expansion which simplifies. in animal evolution new territories and colonisation tends to favour specific dominant organisms whereas isolation, segregation and lots of time created more diverse niches.
@@Fnidner the context matters. Why would an ancient language, closer to the point of inception and with a less complicated lifestyle to facilitate, be more complex than a modern one with thousands of years of additional data and a much wider range of education and professions? Why would a language back then be more complicated than one now? Remember that it would have to evolve and standardize to that point in the first place. What was the need that forced that?
@@OsirusHandle that doesn't really answer the question, though. What about developing civilization would cause a language to become less complex? Why would a hunter gatherer tribe NEED a super complex language, much less one more complicated than people who have mastered countless fields of science and sent men to the moon?
@@palariousit’s not about complexity. Remember that for the most part, nobody was even literate. There were no standard dictionaries nor any lingual sciences. The vast majority of all the ways we label a language “complex” are rules and structures that are meaningless to any speakers that learn innately. It was also exclusionary. Only those with access and wealth can learn to be literate in any language. These languages become complex when trying to be studied or standardized as they were never meant to be anything but oral. And even when it was written form, spellings and grammatical structure was yet to be standardized.
I don't agree with all ideas presented in this video, but I confirm that it was very useful for me to understand some processes of language change. In the end the author (or speaker? - I don't know...) doubts if it is really true that latin lost its inflection when it was learnt by many other people (with the growth of the Roman Empire). In fact, it is trou. We shoud notice the fact, that in the time of empire there was a strong pressure on proper use of the language of authority and administration, then the process of simplification of case system was quite slow (but it really took place on a small scale). The sudden change of the pace of this process started after the fall of the empire, when vulgar latin was being used by knew "learners", chiefly germanic people, who didn't have any respect for the language - as a result we have Portugese, Spanish, Catalon, French and Italian, which don't have the case system, but in a case of Romanian language, which was used by original inhabitants of the empire, who just managed to survive int the mountains, the case system was partly preserved.
I don't think the shift to -j- between vowels is limited to vowels the partitive case. Also, if the word body ends in i, then the non-nominative plural is -e-, unless of course the word body changes so that it no longer ends in i in that particular case - and yeah, the word body can change depending on which suffix you are affixing. Gradation is one famous kind of word body change but not the only one. All in all the suffixes do fuse quite a bit in Finnish, it's far from a purely agglutinative language. I don't speak Latin so I don't know how Finnish compares to that. If your threshold for an agglutinative language is that you can usually delineate where each morpheme starts and ends in a specific instance of a word, then I suppose Finnish is agglutinative.
Yeah, right. I tried to study Finnish once, it's definitely not as easy as it's shown in the video. Words with multiple roots depending on the case... it's madness.
Yeah I was a bit caught off guard with that one too. I mean it doesn't really matter since the point was just to show that you can take each part and name what that part means and adds to the word.
The agglutanive vs fusion is also importent for the difficulty of learning. For agglutanive you only have to know one suffix for each case, gender and number. While in fusion languages you have to know the word for every combination of it. That is one reason why german grammer is hard to learn, although there are other languages with way more cases.
Turkish (more correctly Istanbul dialect which is the standart) has an opposite situation, we have way more suffixes than our sibling languages and our old versions of the language. In Turkish, the more you use suffixes the more your speech feels proper and "civilized".
Do you think it is because new suffixes were invented in the Istanbul dialect or rather they were resistant to getting lost compared other dialects? Since because Istanbul dialect was written for hundreds of years while general Anatolian Turkish was ignored for the most part until 1930's maybe literate people were more aware of the intricacies of the suffix system and illeterate general populus were simplifing. Also can you give specific examples? Only thing that I can think of is the question marker. Azerbaijanis and Eastern Anatolians don't use the question marker and rely on the tone while asking a question. Thanks
@@efe_c.99 as you said especially in questions Azerbaijani tend to not use suffixes even if the language has question suffixes but other than that the first example come to my mind is Azerbaijani Turks saying "yaşım var (i have age)" while Turkiye Turks say "yaşındayım (at that age)". Though other than these factors and examples i need to make a better proper research to actually give a more comprehensive output. We actually have records of old Anatolian Turkish especially in forms of folk poems (there's also elitist/palace poems called as "divan poems", thats why we categorize them in two sections). Probably there are new suffixes that Istanbuli Turkish created too but I believe its more about using already existing suffixes in a wider spectrum of words.
4:23 In German, there is even a six-part book series with the title: “The dative is the death of the genitive”. (German: "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod"). The book series deals - in an entertaining way - with doubts about grammar, spelling and punctuation, as well as expressions in the German language that the author Bastian Sick considers to be unpleasant.
It's not a new thing in Low German. This phenomenon even aided the death of the genitive in Norwegian starting at least half a millennium ago through Hanseatic influence back in the 15th century. Expressions in the form "genitiven sin død" is still gaining popularity in Norwegian, but the genitive was dying anyway so "genitiven sin død" is now only competing with other alternative ways to express the genitive. The true genitive in Norwegian would be "genitivsens død", but nobody would say that. That would sound like mock poetry.
I've studied German since high school and I've been working as a German-Italian translator for 7 years, but I didn't know that the Genitiv was dying. It's the easiest of them all, I'd rather give away Dativ. Please change your mind! :D Anyway, I suppose it's mostly a spoken language issue, because I translate every day texts in German and they are full of genitive forms. That's why I've never noticed that.
von + dative has a different meaning than genitive in German. The functions of the cases are important or as it is called in German: Tiefenkasus (deep cases). genitive can show possessive, general state, objective or subjective meaning etc. The genitive case is one that is still used inflected in the English language, even more than in German, but similar to Scandinavian, but they only have one inflection and not several like in German. The genitive case is also used differently in the dialects, in many Middle German dialects there is a genitive case, while in many otger dialects they dont know a genitive case, they have two or three cases. Personally, I do use the genitive case and it is not the case which looks archaic or old fashioned.
10:26 I think you meant “our houses” not “out houses” :-) or maybe it pairs with the “fart” example from before? Either way, still a great video - very informative, well explained and an interesting topic. Thanks for sharing. Subscribed!
Hi, I have a few questions that someone hopefully can answer. Doesn't English have cases? the map at 3:51 says it doesn't. But I would think it at least has a genitive case since you can say "the cars window" (same as "the window of a car") wouldn't this be a case? This does (to my knowledge) perform the exact same function as the German genitive case, which is one of the four German has (German is my third language, and I'm far from fluent so correct me if I'm wrong). Also I would argue that English also has a subject and an object case for pronouns, like "I" and "me" and so on. This is different from German where the "subject and object" cases get split into three (nominative, accusative and dative) and they apply to all common nouns and pronouns (and som proper nouns), so I could see why you don't call this two cases, just remnants of previous cases. Also Norwegian (my native tongue ) has more or less the same case system as English, so I would also argue that Norwegian has 1 or 3 cases. Lastly, if genitive is a case and object/subject isn't, would English (and Norwegian) then be a two case language, with genitive and non-genitive or just have one and if genitive/subject/object all aren't cases wouldn't English (and Norwegian) still have one case, the "default case"?
I'd have to agree that the possessive means that English has 2 cases for nouns. For pronouns, you could argue that English has 4 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), although the dative case is identical to the accusative case. And here's a question for pendants: what's the difference between having 0 cases and having 1 case?
That's right. Those 0's are mostly wrong. Cases ------------ Language - Pronouns | Nouns --------------------------------------------------------- German - 4 4 (3) Danish - 3 2 English - 3 2 (1) Italian - 3 1 I don't know if it's true that German is starting to lose its genitive case for nouns. But changing the word order and adding a word meaning 'of' in-between instead of using a proper genitive declension is already one of two ways to mark 'belonging to' in English, and the only way in the Romance languages when it comes to nouns. This is not the case in Danish though. There's definitely two cases for Danish nouns. And they show no signs whatsoever of weakening or being replaced. When a noun has the genitive role in a sentence, then that noun gets an 's' on its tail. Always. No exception. If it tries to get away without, then the whole sentence loses all its meaning. So, there are not 1 or 0 cases in Danish when it comes to nouns, but 2. And as for pronouns. In English, in Italian, in Danish, and so on, there are 3 cases, not 0 (or 1).
It's possessive case, not genitive. Genitive can imply a few more things such as origin or substance. For example, one can say, Стакан воды in Russian, meaning "(a) Glass (of) water" where "воды", "water" is genitive. But you can't say in English, "A glass water's", or "Water's glass" to convey the same meaning.
@@J.RyanWhittlesey-uf3gc Italian preserved traces of the genitive in personal names as surnames (Paoli); Spanish and French preserves the genitive as shortening of stock names for the days of the week (miercoles or mercredi for dies Mercuris). English has a genitive for personal names (Jack's car, Fido's blanket McDonald's) and for some stock uses (three days' journey). But we speak of measurements (once a genitive use) as in "three cups of milk" in a prepositional phrase or use the genitive without inflection before the object (garage door, gas tank).
5:30 I'd like to mention that strictly speaking vocative is not a real case as it can not be used with all nouns, only with animated ones. Also Vas' not Vas))
Interesting topic! I know that “more analytic” and “simpler” are not necessarily the same thing, but since one of the questions you’re asking is if languages get simpler over time I figured I’d share a response inspired by a recent reading I had in a course on languages and literacies for my doctoral degree. Betsy Rymes (2014), in “A Repertoire Approach,” describes The Diversity Principle as “the more widely circulated a communicative element is, the more highly diverse the interactions with it will be” (p. 10). As any named language grows with more interlocutors, each person provides their own voice, their own idiolect, thus diversifying and to an extent furthering the complexity of said named language. I think focusing on the first question, do languages shift towards a more analytic or synthetic approach over time, seems a bit more interesting and useful (at least to me) instead of asking if they become simpler.
Disagree. I'm a native Russian speaker, and learning English (an analytical language) was so much easier than German (synthetic). I'm used to having 2-3 more cases and tons more forms than German, so it should be a breeze, right? Wrong! Just because cases and declinations are intuitive to me grammatically, it doesn’t suddenly make it easier to remember all the god-damn endings. It's one thing to understand the logic, it's a different, completely unrelated thing to remember which sounds/letters correspond to which case, gender and number. Calculating all that on the fly while speaking is even harder. Also, the logic is similar, but doesn't actually translate that well? As in, German often uses different cases than Russian for the same word or situation. E.g., "to call someone on the phone" is accusative in German, but dative in Russian (jemanden anrufen - звонить кому-то). The prepositions are all completely off, so you just learn them by heart (e.g., "with" is used with dative in German, but with the instrumental case in Russian). Long story short, I absolutely see how learning a synthetic fusional language as an adult is much, much harder, regardless of your native tongue. It's just how brains work - it's easier to remember one word form than a hundred. Even though I much prefer synthetic languages aesthetically.
Taking English as an example of a language that became more analytic over time, I once read that the reason the synthesis occurred was for ease of communication between the English and their frequent Old Norse-speaking trading partners/occasional conquerors and that since the roots of the words were so similar between the two languages but the declensions markedly different, it was easier to do away with the cases and just use the roots. Probably not the case with Latin, though-I think there the dissolution of the empire and the subsequent siloing off of city-states and regional hegemonies saw more assimilation with local populations that, while once subjects when the Romans were, um, Rominh, were likely elevated to peer status once the empire fractured (thus creating fertile grounds for sound and grammar assimilations. You can kind of see it with the high proportion of Arabic vocabulary in the Iberian Romance languages relative to the Italians that developed closer to the Latin heartland and the Germanic-influenced French in a region where former Latins and Goths eventually equilibriated somewhat.
Pēdam, pēdam, I hear it and I know, pēdam, pēdam, I know you wanna take me home. Pēdam, and take off all my clothes. Pēdam, pēdam, when your heart goes pēdam…
12:01 As for the simplification of English grammar, I've heard the hypothesis that the massive presence of Viking settlements in Britain at the end of the first millennium might have played a role. So you had Old English, a descendant of Proto-West-Germanic, and Old Norse, a derivative of the Proto-North-Germanic. The people from both groups largely somewhat understood each other but the synthetic grammar was too confusing, which the led to an analyticization of Old English.
I have studied two analytic/isolating languages, Thai beginning in 1971 and Khmer beginning in 1984, to the point of developing substantial ability to use these grammatically regular languages. I have developed what may be an unjustifiable bias regarding the ‘learnability’ of analytic/isolating languages. Trying to learn Hindi beginning in late middle-age became a matter of some frustration. Though I can enjoy a Bollywood movie or slowly read a somewhat simple text, participation in conversation in that synthetic language is something akin to trying to swap out a flat tire on a moving vehicle.
Because you asked about other languages: Japanese has gotten a lot less synthetic over time and verb and adjective forms are continuing to change to this day. One example of how verbs are currently changing is that in the standard language the passive form of one category of verbs ends in られる (rareru) which is the same as the potential form, so many speakers in the past century have started dropping the ら (ra) in the potential form of those verbs (eg. 食べられる > 食べれる). The phenomenon is called ら抜き (ra dropping). This would be an example of it becoming more synthetic I suppose. To speak briefly about the shift from Old Japanese, however. There you used to be more verb categories than exist now, several of them have collapsed together. And the entire verb system was different. Basically there were a very large number of auxiliary verbs that were attached to different verb forms, and then inflected themselves in order to indicate things like past tense, uncertainty, emphasis, negation etc. The verb system today has grammaticalised some of these auxiliary verbs and now they basically function as verb conjugations themselves. This process of grammaticalisation is continuing today for example adding the verb to be (いる iru) to the end of the て (te) form of a verb indicated that the action is completed or that it is in the process of happening. In speech the い (i) is dropped so the form now looks like (てる).
In spoken (not written) French, there are usually 3 different morphemes per verb in the present simple but one of them (the one used with "nous", meaning "we") is almost always replaced. That means we almost lost a morpheme. Also, the future simple is almost never used, we use the periphrasis "aller", meaning "go" to express the future in modern French. That means we lost almost 4 or 5 morphemes for each verb.
You could make the same argument for passé simple also. Altough these two tenses are still found in literature, it's pretty rare to use them in spoken french, and there are even weirder tenses, like passé antérieur or plus-que-parfait that I'm pretty sure many native speakers, including myself, don't really know how to use properly in writing, let alone in spoken french...
Also some subjunctive tenses aren't used in spoken French. Spanish and Portuguese have retained a much more inflectional and complex verb system, being pro-drop languages too.@@eldonad
This periphrastic "new future" which uses go as a marker for future (go is being grammaticalized as it does not mean "go" anymore) is happening in a particular West European Linguistic Area: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I don't know if it is going on in Celtic or Basque languages. "Going to" is spreading and replacing the older future forms. In the case of English, "going to" is replacing "will" (though will will probably hold on in some uses), which can be seen in text analysis as "going to" was barely present in 19th century texts, is frequent in texts of the 1930s, and is more frequent now. It is spreading. The same is happening in colloquial spoken Latin American Spanish. Voy a ir vs iré. Voy a ir is much much more common, with the future synthetic form almost being relegated to just written language.
@@erichamilton3373 Romanian also uses a go + infinitive structure for its future tense. Funnily enough, Catalan developed the same construction, but it evolved as a PAST tense (preterite). So Fr. "tu vas parler", Sp. "vas a hablar" = you're going to speak. But Cat. "vas parlar" = you spoke. The demise of the future simple in Spanish has been grossly exaggerated though, and this has been going on for decades now. Even in those Spanish dialects where it's used the least (like Argentinian Spanish) the synthetic form is still regularly used in oral colloquial speech, and it's still almost exclusively used in the written language. What's more, there seems to be a clear semantic difference between the two, with the future simple conveying a greater distance/detachment by the speaker as to the future event that is being uttered. It's true that, even if it were to disappear as a future tense, it will probably survive as a "conjectural" tense.
@@erichamilton3373 In Castilian Spanish the use of the periphrastic form “ir+infinitivo” is only limited for a subjective near future event (voy a estudiar, vamos a comprar un coche, vais a ir al cine, etc.). The synthetic future form is necessary in order to express distant future events (estudiaré medicina, tendremos un coche, habrá un lugar, diréis esto, etc.)
Fantastic, well-researched video! There is a discussion missing that needs some serious consideration, and you are kinda getting at it with your last point about Latin simplifying by when it reached broader audiences: contact-induced change. The most well-studied creole languages tend to have an analytic grammar. In the case of Old English, we can observe a greater loss of morphological complexity when they came into contact with the Old Norse. Later during the Norman Conquest, we can observe a greater loss of inflectional robustness over a shorter period time. When the English came into contact with Norman French, the entire grammar of English greatly simplified. So honestly I would argue in some cases languages become more analytical as a result of contact induced change (including pidginization/creolization). I would also argue that in some cases the longer languages develop independently, the more grammatically complex they become. Basque and Navajo are extremely grammatically complex and spoken by very few people. There may be exceptions, but I think contact-induced change is one of the primary drivers for grammatical complexity and lack thereof
My native language is Vietnamese, a very analytic language with morpheme to word ratio close to 1:1. Now there's a tendency in Vietnamese to create and use lots of compound words, either by using Sino-origin rules and roots, by duplication or just by putting things together arbitrarily. This doesn't really make the language more complex as it doesn't develope cases, but certainly it doesn't get simpler too. I'm curious that if synthetic languages can get more analytic over time, could the opposite happens to analytic languages?
@@dhu1919 Tone doesn't preclude morphology. Sandawe is heavily tonal but has complex grammar. The Asian languages became analytical before tonality developed in the 1st millenium AD.
I think a large number of speakers, especially multilingual ones, makes inflections fade faster and easier, and a small isolated community grammarizes things faster and more often.
I haven't ever thought one day I would be so interested in linguistic, thanks :) about Russian 7th case - neo-vocative - it's so funny that we use it so often and don't even realize it. And from what I've read Russians happened to already lose one vocative case (It ceased to exist in 1918) (though it is still used in orthodox prayers), so now we are kind of trying to rebuild it, I guess xD
In Polish it's the opposite. The vocative is disappearing from informal language, I may use it in case of some friendly "nicknames", but wouldn't address my friends unsing it with their full name, that would sound too formal. I remeber one collegue sayig: "Vocative makes me feel uneasy, I feel as if a teacher is scolding me that I misbehaved." Though it's still in use in a bit more formal situations, when addressing some Pan/Pani, not just by their first name.
@@nerilka9527To make it clearer, in Russian the vocative has been lost, the one you're thinking about, and is only used in texts and some fixed expressions nowadays. The neo-vocative in the video has nothing to do with it, grammatically or semantically, and is actually used informally. It's widespread, but the Russians don't really think about it as a "case", more like an informal way of address.
I think this is a fascinating subject, thank you for furthering my knowledge on the subject. My personal opinion is that this must be a cyclical process, but for a long time the 'erosion' side was much more apparent than the 'orogenic' side so to speak and this is still something I am trying to work out. My knowledge of Russian, problems Russians have in English and a little Chinese have given me a few insights though. 1. Loss of cases isn't a simplification so much as a substitution for other complexities. Native speakers of more analytic languages are often not aware of them and grammars seem a little oblivious to them too. Besides word order, articles are often employed in idiomatic ways and stress and tonal contours on the sentence level can also be quite complex. The latter explains why speakers of synthetic languages often speak monotonously to our ears and also why people sometimes have to read complex sentences in English out loud to make sense of them. You are basically trying to find a stress or tonal contour that fits what is written. 2. Chinese is extremely analytic and composed solely of syllabic stems and also has a very limited number of possible syllables, even when tones are added. To remove ambiguity, most words need two of these stems. Often one of those two are starting to look an awful lot like suffixes. In addition Northern dialects often add 'r' to the end of words as a noun marker. A number of these stems have become particles marking things like possession or aspect. Although the writing system isn't very conducive to it, you can certainly see how it could develop in a more synthetic way.
If this is your very first video, I strongly encourage you to keep making more, as they turn out really well! In addition to the excellent video editing and pleasant audio work, I find that everything is explained quite good, specially the difference between analytic and synthetic (the easiest explanaiton I've ever seen, tbh). Cheers ^^
7:05 It does not appear clear to me how ‘dormirai’ is more easily reconducted to ‘dormire habeo’ rather than ‘dormibo’? I do understand that phonetically the path from late latin to french could seem more immediate, but it would be harder to then justify the dropping of the periphrastic structure. Especially considering that the infinite+ future of the verb to be is attested in a quite small amount of documents mostly redacted after the rising of the langue d’oïl. Can someone please explain this passage to me?
Can't speak to the French but the same process happened in Spanish, from "cantare habeo" to "cantar he" to "cantaré". We have sources from the XIII Century where we can still find them used analytically rather than synthetically: "Et aun el su destroymiento contar vos lo emos en so tiempo.", where "contar vos lo emos" evolved from "contare + vos + illo + habemus" and eventually gave way to "contaremos" (we will tell).
I'd go with Croatian. Czech lost synthetic past tense (except for the auxiliary "to be" in conditional phrases). In Croatian they still exist, but are considered archaic. I think Lithuanian also has a lot of synthetic verb forms in addition to the cases and many declension patterns.
Standard Swedish does not have 3 cases for nouns, only 2: nominative and genitive. The genitive is like the English genitive though, not like the Old Norse genitive. Many dialects in Norway and Sweden have he dative case, some in Dalarna in Sweden even have the accusative as well.
Indo european and semitic languages have become more analytic because they started fusional. Classical chinese started as analytic and its modern forms like mandarin have become more agglutinative. In modern mandarin, there are affixes to indicate plurality and tense which didn't exist in classical chinese. Fusional languages on average become analytic over time and analytic languages become agglutinative.
@@Kiyoliki i think proto indo european was agglutinative at an earlier stage. The multiple suffix morphemes fused together into a single suffix morpheme by the common period before the branches diverged.
@@Uulfinn I don't think so. Yes, maybe they share a common ancestor with the Finno-Ugric languages at some point, but the thing is, that postpositions or prepositions don't make the declension alone. For example, in Latin or German etc. such positions require other certain cases. As a Finnish linguist once explained to me is that most cases in Finnish are what in Indo-European languages are or were positions + declension on the noun, and those suffixes in Finnish probably consists of the old noun declension plus a postposition, which have merged, and that's why formed a new case. Or in other words, the postposition merged fully into the noun declension and looks like a distinct and separated case. English has almost none postpositions, which does make it unlikely to develope agglutination in that sense. But also Japanese almost does agglutination only on verbs, while nouns have just a limited set of postposition markers, which functions as more less declensions, which is why such postpositions are written on that noun in Korean, which actually has almost the same grammar as Japanese. In Chinese, those markers are in fact independent words, which can lose their actual meaning and just function as a grammatical particle/marker, like of ”yesterday“ would stop meaning yesterday but only indicating that an action happened the in the past.
@@SchmulKrieger i never said indo european and finno ugric were related. I said proto indo european was probably agglutinative at a much earlier time before the multiple affixes fused together into a single suffix. You're talking about something else.
The edges of Finland where it "has happened" are areas with Finnish Swedes, who speak Swedish as their mother tongue so it's less about Finnish becoming analytic but rather many citizens, specifically in those two places marked in the thumbnail, not knowing the grammar properly because they speak Swedish.
Thank you for an interesting video! Something that interests me is that languages with more cases tend to make less or no use of definite and indefinite articles, and how that has evolved. For example the present-day Slavic languages still have 6 or 7 cases and no articles at all, same as Latin. Ancient Greek had 4 main cases and a definite article but no indefinite article. What interests me is that as Latin evolved into the Romance languages, cases were dropped and it seems that people felt the need to invent definite and indefinite articles out of the words for 'this' and 'one'.
All Slavic languages with the exception of the South Slavic, Eastern branch, which lost all cases and adopted definitive article in the form of suffix.
I have often wondered about this topic. Because it seems to me a paradox that supposedly older and less sophisticated peoples had more complex languages, as defined by the ease of learning for outsiders. I think about Basque which is supposed to have survived from the Neolithic, and has incredible grammatical complexity. OTOH are the tonal languages of East Asia which I could call ultra analytic, and are just as old. About invasion, migration and assimilation, I think these phenomena have a role, although exactly how is not clear. Certainly what we would define today as a state has changed over history from the multi-ethnic empire with a dominant ruling group providing the lingua franca of administration, to the modern ethno state. This video is fascinating to me by showing that it is not all one way synthetic to analytic, that it can go the other way sometimes, but it seems less. Here in East Asia I think probably the most interesting case in my mind is the comparison between Cambodian and Vietnamese, both members of the Austroasiatic family. Under heavy Chinese influence, Vietnamese became more monosyllabic and tonal, and thereby more analytic, compared to Cambodian which was more influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, while not becoming synthetic as either of those, retained its original Austroasiatic synthetic features. The other two topics which really interest me in this area are the notion of a Sprachbund, and the phenomenon whereby one variant of a language family that is internally diverse gets to travel and thereby produce a sub family of daughter languages that are geographically widespread but considerably less heterogeneous.
There are any possible explanations of the simplification of languages over time. Personally, I favor 1) "Pigdinization" of dominant languages that spread to new populations, especially if the written and spoken standards of the dominant language are too remote keep the simplified dialects in line with the standard. 2) A general trend of IQ to fall over time since humans face fewer and fewer threats thus "Darwin awards" for the slow of mind become less and less common. Also smarter people tend to be less successful in reproducing than those of average intelligence. 3) The urbanization of the population and overspecialization of labor which leads to people losing contact with the natural world and its inherent complexities. A modern city dweller can describe the natural world far less vividly than a shepherd, even if the shepherd is totally illiterate.
I really liked this video! An interesting example of language getting more complicated (synthetic) is in Chinese where the word 这 (zhè, this) adds the suffix 儿 (er) to make 这儿 (zhèr, here), also with 孩 (hái, child-morpheme) being combind with 子 (zì) to make 孩子 (háizi, child). These examples did not exist in middle chinese and don't exist in other chinese dialects. The first example is actually so new that it is often only seen in the beijing dialect of mandarin.
My understanding is that English lost a lot of its synthetic feaures during the viking age and the age of the Danelaw. At that time many people learned Englis as adults and not in a leanguage school either, so it became simplier. Plus in many cases the roots of the english and norse words were similar but the case endings were different.
Sounds true...but the pattern is right across west Germanic as well as continental north Germanic ie excluding Iceland Faroe landsmal. Even Swedish with very different vocab from English is ridiculously uninflected.
ya know, there's a cycle. If a language has post positions (say, mandarin chinese), then it's very likely to grammaticalize those into inflections. If a language has agglutinated inflections, then it's very likely to erode those into fusional endings through sound change. If a language has fusional endings, its likely to level, and eventually lose them, through sound change, and then evolve analytical parts of speech due to the ambiguity.
This is currently happening with Hindi and Urdu, which does have postpositions. The first person accusative pronoun, for example, is "mujhe". In Urdu, you just use the postposition "ko" to use it in the dative case. In Hindi, though, the pronoun actually changes inflection to "mujhko".
this is a very profound comment. and in fact I'm wondering now where the future tenses in latin (its fusional endings i mean, or those of the subjunctive, as well) came from at first...
Apparently there is somewhat of a cycle where in large periods of time languages evolve this way: agglutinative > fusional > analytic > agglutinative ... Otherwise, after more than 50k years or more of human language existence, all the languages of the world would be analytical by now.
I'm no linguist but my guess is language entropy. Without force a language will "degenerate" if you will, into a simpler less inflected language. It takes more energy to keep a language more complex and inflected.
Entropy pulls languages in every direction. There are forces that pull languages towards being more analytic, and there are forces that pull them towards synthesis, and we see languages, over time, move in circles, not in a line that leads to some inevitable end. A change in a language that makes it more concise might make it harder to speak, a change that makes it easier to speak might make it harder to understand, a change that makes it easier to understand might make it wordier. None of these forces "win out" they will battle for as long as we have language, cycling our languages through infinite series of changes. We'll never cycle back and reach the language we had originally, but we also are not degenerating towards some maximally simple language. This isn't physics, energy does not decrease over time in this system.
If less inflection causes a higher level of phonetic complexity, how do you judge the overall complexity then? Chinese is highly analytic, but I don't think we can say it's a simple language. When languages become analytic and rely on single words to convey meaning, they need many more words to express the same thing. But the more words you need, the higher the chance of having homophones, therefore you need to expand your phonetics or make words longer. Chinese has 8 vowels, 23 consonants and 5 tones. The same happens in English, which has a wide variety of vowel and consonant sounds, 13 vowels, 27 consonants and 8 dipthongs. On the other hand, a strong synthetic language like Greenlandic has only 3 vowels and 15 consonants, making it easier to pronounce.
@8:37 definitely the need to learn the language by new comers has forced revived Hebrew to lose some of its inflection, e.g. the feminine plural of (pro)nouns. (They) hem, hen > hem (Doctors) rofe'im, rofe'ot > rofe'im Arabic has the same phenomenon, but since it's uncertain of Arabic dialects' origin, I won't say it for sure, though compared with Classical Arabic, the word order and most of the inflection was lost for good.
Got to admire someone who chooses "fart" as a demo verb, but brickbats to same someone for referring to "a millennia" (plural of millennium) 🤓 ETA: Liked and subscribed.
Oh God, I just clicked for curiosity as I like the lenguages and I thought that it would be just revision of the knowledge I already know, BUT it was more than I expected. You have my sub. Keep going it!
Very interesting video, I’m studying the English language right now in order to become a teacher but I’ve been considering doing a Master in linguistics in general for a few weeks as I’ve become a big fan of that subject. I see that your UA-cam channel is brand new, I hope this video is the first of a series of masterpieces like this one and that your channel will grow in consequence. You have my support and my subscription! Cheers
The history of English is fascinating because of all the major influences (Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Anglo-French), and its modern tendency to borrow words from everywhere. You might be interested in the History of English Podcast, Dr Geoff Lindsey, and David Crystal, who all have lectures on UA-cam. The last two are linguists, and the first one may be too.
what a great video! very informative. My native language is swiss german, a dialect of german, and it has interestingly become both more analytic and synthetic when compared to standard german. Swiss german doesn't use the genitive case at all and has lost a past tense (only past perfect is used), on the other hand, there is an conditional case that standard german doesn't have. there are also some pronouns that are substituted with suffixes with the verb (I have [...] him = Standard German: Ich habe ihm = Dialect: Ig hanem), so it's fascinating how a shift in both directions, synthetic and analytic, can present itself in a language
I go with the idea that contact with other languages leads to the language becoming more analytical, as at least one person commented below. It would be an interesting study to compare languages that are superstrate with those that are substrate to see which ones transform quicker.
I think there's a cycle between the two. Analytic is easier for newcomers to learn so languages spreading by influence shift that way. But longstanding phrases can get reduced producing new inflections and thus more synthetic as this gets adopted through analogy.I Obviously this can be sped up through sound changes or slowed down by easily distinct forms (eg agglutinative)
If Hungarian stopped being agglutinative you'd just have a completely different language. The only thing I can think of that got simplified massively is that there used to be a second past tense using the auxiliary "vala" that was used like a modern English Past Perfect to express passiveness or something that happened earlier than something else, and it is found in pre-19th century written works. There remains only one synthetic past, and the future is analytic, either using the present tense and the future is just implied by adverbs of time, or the "fog + infinitive" is used, much like the English "will + infinitive".
High quality, super interesting, and the comments of the viewers here equally high quality, and super interesting. I could not read all of them, today there are already 1171 comments, but I'll come back here.
Re. case stability, please consider also Basque which seems either intermediate between the "pure" cases of Finnish and Latin or rather tends to the fusional variant. Example (same as in the video but in Basque): 1. etxe (house, home), 2. etxea/etxeak (the house, depending on whether intransitive subject/direct object or transitive subject, ergative logic) 3. etxeak/etxeek (the houses, same ergative logic as above) 4. etxetik (from the house, notice how the -a/-ak nominative declension is no there anymore, replaced by -tik, which is singular) 5. etxeetatik (from the houses, the plural is made differently to the nominative, but similar to some other declensions like "to", which is "etxeetara", and also lots of toponimy ending in -eta with that plural meaning without any declension, e.g. "Arrieta" = the stones) 6. gure etxeetatik = from our houses/home (luckily "our" = "gure" doesn't need declensions in this type of syntagm) Basque also has lots of declensions (although they're treated as "suffixes" often they are actual declensions) and no preposition whatsoever. It's unclear how old they are but some can be tracked with lesser changes to ancient Iberian, so probably almost as conservative as Finnish ones, which I'd think it has to do with relative linguistic isolation rather than the fusion/agglutinative issue (non-expanding languages evolve much slower, especially if also isolated, just look at Icelandic vs other Norse dialects).
High quality video, good luck on your UA-cam journey! As a speaker of another agglutinative synthetic language, Turkish, what we do is very similar to Finnish but we put the suffix for "our" before the one for "from". I can't recall any loss in our synthetic features either, although I'm not an expert. There's even a well-known example of grammaticalization that produced our modern continuous present tense, it apparently comes from the word for "to walk" getting simplified and stuck at the end of verb stems.
@@smergthedargon8974 I'm not sure what exactly you mean. If you mean the optative -e suffix, I don't know why it would only be used for bad things. And I don't have any knowledge on the history of this suffix so I don't know about it being used as a sort of future tense, though it doesn't sound far-fetched.
I speak three Austronesian languages which seem to exhibit the range of simplicity you describe. Bahasa Indonesia is the simplest and most analytic, but it does retain some of the affixes that are found in reconstructed proto-Austronesian. Tagalog (as well as its more modern codification as Filipino) is considerably more complex, with a large number of affixes forming verbs and nouns. However it is mainly synthetic and specifically agglutinative with component morphemes often playing a single role and easily distinguished by role. The third language I speak is Cebuano (also known as Bisaya, especially when spoken in areas outside the island of Cebu), which is closely related to Tagalog. I have often wondered why it seems more complex. It may be somewhat more fusional. The phonological changes may have something to do with it. Old Tagalog and old Cebuano were written in scripts called baybayin (or badlit), ultimately derived from the Indic Devanagari writing systems via southeast Asian syllabaries. In the sixteenth century, these only transcribed three vowels: a, i/e and u/o. Today Tagalog / Filipino has five vowels. This makes loanwords from Spanish more easily distinguished, but some indigenous roots are also distinguished. Contemporary Cebuano has retained the system of three phonemic vowels, and just collapses vowel sounds together when developing loanwords from Spanish or other languages. (However, Bisaya, which has no standard orthography, will transcribe the phoneme /u/ as "o" in certain positions depending on the affixes used, and will write "e" in loanwords even if they are pronounced like /i/. Typically, there is a lot of dialectal variation). However, in some regions the language is losing the "l" consonant between open vowels. The word for house varies from balay across the language area to baay (with a single long a) in the area around Cebu City (which is the largest metropolitan area in the language area). Tagalog / Filipino has no long vowels. In Tagalog / Filipino, adjacent vowels are always kept distinct. For example, the "a"s in "maalaala" (to remember, to be able to remember) are all pronounced separately as five syllables. In Cebuano / Bisaya, which has a lot of dialectal variation, vowel sounds flow into each other more smoothly, and the seems to be more use of vowel digraphs. This may be partly due to the different affixes (-a and -i) and clitics in use, particularly the clitic marker -y which fuses with a final vowel in a preceding word. In rapid speech, various dialects of Bisaya will merge adjacent vowels into a digraph or long vowel. In Filipino, adjacent vowels are kept separate, usually inserting a glottal stop between them. This is noticeable in rap and pop songs, where rapid rapping in Filipino will be very choppy and precise (listen to Pablo's triple time rap in the recent SB19 hit song Gento). In Bisaya rapping, vowels will often just disappear and simplify the pronunciation, and the flow of vowels seems smoother and more flexible. The system of affixes in Cebuano is somewhat more complicated than Tagalog, although many affixes are archaic and seldom used in areas where Cebuano / Bisaya is spoken as a second language or lingua franca. The affixes will no longer be particularly productive but will still occur fossilized in particular words. I haven't looked at it systematically, but I feel that this results in a more fusional form of synthetic language.
I’ve never heard someone so calmly talking about farting to show tense😭
Had to scroll so far(t) to find this comment
The Latin took it from unhinged to hysterical 😂
Well, it's a swine herd who is talking.
@@lighting7508 Just because he refused to pronounce the long vowel ē. ☹️
I was thinking isn't it possible to have passive form of "fart"? Surely, there must have been someone that has been farted some time 😂
To counter the "getting simpler" argument, original Proto-Indo-European is theorised to have had two genders at an earlier stage, animate and inanimate. Then a three gender system developed in most branches and while much later Romance languages simplified it to two genders with articles, Slavic languages kept expanding the system with further distinctions being made between personal, animate and inanimate. These genders are highly fusional, but in for example modern Polish there exist five distinct grammatical "genders".
how ironic
I feel like Polish spelling is so illogical as for a slavic language. with all those sz/cz and rz. so confusing for no reason
@@olkredesign2410 What doest it have to do with the grammar?
@@olkredesign2410It might look difficult when you first see it as a foreigner, but it’s not really bad at all when you get into it. Sz/cz aren’t any less logical than English sh/ch when you think about it, and at least they always make the same sounds. I’m not Polish either but it’s got a good system
@@maxf9291 I studied Polish so I know what I am talking about. English spelling is not predictable/logical at all, so its pointless to compare with it. In Polish sz and Ś make the same sound. So there are two ways to write same sound. In Czech or Slovak it makes a little more sense and it's not just a bunch of wovels
12:01 Yeah, languages get "simpler" as they get bigger, basically. Languages don't typically grow because their speakers breed much faster than others. They grow because their speakers become politically/culturally dominant, and other communities abandon their own language in favour of theirs. But people who have to learn a new language will gravitate towards the easier systems and ignore or simplify the more complicated and unfamiliar ones. And so widespread languages with lots of speakers tend to be "simple", while small isolated languages tend to be "weird".
Modern Arabic is a good recent example. Most Arabic-speakers today are descended from people who spoke other languages, but switched to Arabic over the course of the Islamic expansion. And in the process they coloured Arabic with influences from their original native languages (so it very quickly split up into distinct dialects) and simplified the grammar of Classical Arabic. As a result, the modern spoken Arabics are significantly less "weird" than Classical Arabic.
As for Latin, it definitely did change and simplify during its expansion, a lot of that is just masked by the conservative literary language. The case system was initially preserved (though there was a lot of phonetically-induced syncretism even during antiquity, we have records of contemporary grammarians complaining about it!) because the languages it usurped in Europe were mostly other Indo-European languages. They had basically the same case system, so picking up the Latin one would have been pretty straightforward for speakers of other Italic languages or Celtic. Where the similarities were smaller, like in the verbal system, we see more drastic changes and losses of Latin forms.
but once the new analytic system is stablished, if it becomes cumbersome, and all speakers are fluent fro. birth, could the excess prepositions and auxiliaries start to be appended to the core information and do the inverse tragectory?
That’s not necessarily true. With Romanian, which has had constant contact with Turkish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hungarian and other neighbours (and rulers), we see still a case system and suffix articles. So your argument is invalid for Slavic languages, German (which still has a robust case system), Romanian, etc.
@@pedroavellarcosta9389that is curious too
@@masonharvath-gerrans832 But my argument isn't "languages lose all their inflection when in contact with other languages", it's "languages change to be easier to learn as they grow, because they grow by being learned, and learners tend to simplify or skip the hard parts."
Romanian hasn't really grown since it split off from Latin, and the historical situation in the Balkans is characterized by multilingualism and code-switching. Giving us the Balkan Sprachbund (where languages in close contact become more similar over time because speakers don't like to change things up too much when switching languages or borrowing expressions from another language). So that's a very different dynamic. That said, Romanian is still a lot "easier" than its ancestor Latin in terms of abstract morphological rules you need to learn.
İ am russian speaker, I have witnessed this time and time again with caucasians and central asians
A language prof proposed that creolization motivates languages to simplify, as it helps non-native speakers forced to use the language. Middle English is a good example. It emerged after the the French-speaking Normans conquered England; a common language was needed, and in the space of two or three generations Old English lost a great many of its inflections and became much more analytic. As the base of native speakers increases, there is a tendency to transform periphrasis into affixes and to expand periphrasis to add shades of meaning. For example, "can't" is widely used in Modern English, but didn't (another example) exist in Middle English. Another example is how the choice of auxiliary verb can show mood: could, would, should, will, might, etc all show different types of future tense, a plethora of choice that did not exist in Middle English.
Regarding why Latin did not start evolving until late, well, it DID start changing as the Empire spread out. The Vulgate spoken by the Legions and in colonial settlements outside of Rome was not the same as the official Latin preserved in monuments, literature, and official records and could vary widely in different parts of the Empire. It was not until the imperial infrastructure began to crumble, and the local vulgate became the language of local government, that we begin to see written records of proto-French, proto-Italian, proto-Romanian, and so on.
So, we need to make sure no one speaks our languages?
@@ukyoize I assume your question indicates a conservative attitude wherein language simplification (or maybe changes at all) are bad. I reject this idea - changes within a language, whether in the direction of more simple or more complex, are value neutral. They just happen, and we need not do anything to prevent nor encourage them. That aside, any argument that yields the conclusion "we should prevent people from learning x language" must necessarily have some absurdity within it to grant such an absurd conclusion.
Counterargument regarding your examples of auxiliary verbs of mood that supposedly didn't exist in Middle English.
How come these exact same auxiliaries of mood/possibilty also exist in German - which obviously didn't undergo any creolization:
could - könnten (inf.), would - würden (inf.), should - sollten (inf.), will - werden (inf.), might - möchten (inf.)
I’m not disagreeing with your comment. But it shows why it’s important to separate the idea of simplification without quotes from languages becoming less agglutinative. I don’t doubt that Middle English speakers were capable of communicating what Old and Modern English can about future moods etc. that’s more something I’d expect from a pidgin and not a common language. I guess what I’d be wanting to know is how languages go the other way- if those periphrases become agglutination over time otherwise how do agglutinative languages ever come about? But that’s on me that I’ve never looked into it. Swedish followed a similar timeline, and is about as simple as English and grammatically very similar (and verbs are simpler). English has a roundabout mannerism that came from the Norse and the Danes etc. that sounds more intelligent or polite or poetic to native English speakers. All the words are there in Swedish, but to draw words out just isn’t a thing and neither is colouring tenses. Eg. I don’t think progressive tenses are making up for shades of verbs lost in Middle English. Old English and Modern Swedish have them they just don’t care to use them much even though they’re not creoles.
@@ukyoize - I am not sure what you are asking. Languages change constantly, to the point where the Modern English of Shakespeare needs to be translated into the Modern English of today, and how today's spelling is weird but made perfect sense when spelling was fixed before the Great Vowel Shift.
The finnish spoken language that is the more used version is becoming more analytic, and for example “taloiltamme”, becomes “meidän taloilta
Yes, seeing all the inflections that Finnish has retained, and coming to the conclusion that it hasn't become more analytic is a bit of a mistake.
There are so many constructions that are becoming obsolete in favour of ones with more words and fewer inflections. For example, several of the 15 nominal cases are used only rarely. The abessive case (essentially "without") is generally avoided in favour of using the preposition "ilman".
Talotta - > ilman taloa
That's more in the style of southern/western speech. The eastern dialects are more conservative. However, I'm starting to hear more and more young people speak the southern dialect in the east too
Finnish is not a real language though.
"Kokoo koko kokko kokoon. Koko kokkoko kokoon? Koko kokko kokoon."
I mean... They are not even trying to make it look realistic!
@@spookyr "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"
So, seems like English is not a real language either.
Do you know when this happened?
Bulgarian, which is the Slavic language that lost almost its entire case system but has kept a very complex tense system, mode, moods, gained definiteness, lost its infinitive, is a very good example of analytical language not gaining simplicity, just changing.
Bulgarian is a rare case among slavic languages where "to be" verb is widely used in present tense.
@@Miraihi Is it tho? I think it's mainly East Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian) that don't use it in present in the sense of 'to be' but rather use the 3rd person one extensively to say 'to have'.
I'm currently learning Bulgarian, as a Englishman who has also learnt Russian to a decent standard, and it's interesting seeing the differences between the languages, it does feel like modern Bulgarian might be closer to older Slavic languages, than say Russian. I am enjoying the fact that you use the "to be" as an auxiliary verb though, I really 'missed' that about Russian!
@@pgf289 Bulgarian is certainly the closest we have to the old church Slavonic. Cyril and Methodius, the creators of the Cyrillic script and its predecessor, Glagolitic script, have been the missionaries at roughly the territory of modern Bulgaria.
You can say that Bulgarian for Slavs is a bit akin to Icelandic to Scandinavians.
@@pgf289 good luck with your studies of Bulgarian. I think that learning it for someone speaking English or French is easier than other Slavic languages, if the goal is to learn the basics but if you want to go deep into the language, it's not easy.
It really depends what you mean closer to old Slavic languages though. In what sense did you main it? It's a very interesting observation.
Thought this was a viral video from a big established linguistics channel. Turns out it's a new channel with only 1 video so far and less than 500 subs. The creator, if you're reading this, amazing job, keep going, this can grow to be a massively successful channel. Big thumbs up
It's only an "amazing job" do dimwitted dolts without a basic linguistic background.
Surprised this is your first video, very well done and great video on the topic.
I actually have another UA-cam channel called Serapeum Historia, so this isn't my first rodeo lol
That's what I was thinking too, until he chose "fart" as his example of an English verb. Smh.
@@Swine_Herdthought it was you! Too well spoken to be some other Brit hahaha.
He got the Latin wrong: “domibus nostris” not “nostra”, to say nothing of “out houses” instead of “our houses”. Rather carelessly done IMO. And choosing “fart” is just childish.
@@john.premosethat’s a great verb. It’s a weak verb and one of the oldest reliably traceable Indo Europeans verbs (I haven’t watched the video so I don’t know the relevance of it here).
I think the Hungarian language is another good example of how a language has been able to remain relatively synthetic until now. Although the use of the archaic past tense has worn out and as far as I know it never had grammatical genders, the agglutination still remained as in Finnish. On top of that, there are two types of verb conjugations, definite or indefinite, and vowel harmonization in suffixes also helps to ensure that this complexity remains an integral part of the language.
Turkic languages as well kept their synthetic structure to this day though they did have influences from many indo-european and semitic languages over the milennia
*domibus nostris (not domibus nostra) is the ablative plural of domus nostra, if I'm not mistaken.
It's also the dative plural btw. For most Latin declinations, the datives and ablatives (sg and pl) look the same. So besides -ibus implying the meaning of 'plural' and 'case', there is also ambiguity of which case this actually is 😅
Yep that's correct
@@nullings. yeah, in most romance languages, there are situations where the same words (and sentences) can mean different things depending on the context.
@@aureltoniniimperatorecomun4029 I can't find the form "domis" for the ablative anywhere. Not in my Rubenbauer Hofman grammar, not in wiktionary, nor on any other site that popped up when I googled it. Where did you find it?
@@AceliiousIt must be the case in all languages. Without it humour based on misunderstanding or double meaning would be impossible.
I have no idea why I was suggested this but I'm glad I saw it. Super informative and pitched at a good level! You just gained a subscriber. :)
As a native speaker of Turkish, which is an agglutinative language like Finnish, I think the agglutinative fusional explanation is the most reasonable one since all morphemes appear as suffixes, it is hard to think of that specific suffix for a case to disappear. I am not an expert either, just interested in linguistics and it is great to see such a channel.
I speak Armenian, and this is the rare occasion, when an armenian and a turk agree
@@Yoyërcompany ok, but you being Armenian has no connection to the topic he is talking.
@@AsylumDaemon But still funny joke about two nations xD.
This phenomenon has been long known and has deceived Europeans into thinking the trend is from Synthetic to analytic. This is not globally so. Modern Turkish is agglutinative and has 6 cases, and currently is developing slowly over many decades a seventh instrumental case as the particle "ile" ="with "is becoming an affix "-le" or "-la" obeying vowel harmony. This is an example of where becoming synthetic and "increasing complexity" actually simplifies the language.
In recent decades we see "diyorsun" morphing into "diyon" in certain dialects - these trends will continue - this one is removing syllables.
Some have even postulated that languages cycle through a circle of agglutinative -> separating - >isolating (Analaytic) -> agglutinative and that these cycles happen over many 1000s of years. The future of Europe may be a trend towards agglutination in the millenia to come. You can see it in English in "i am" -> "I'm" , "you all "->"yall"/"youse"/"you lot". "would not have" -> "would'na", "going to"->"gonna". This won't ever stop.
@@idjles Yeah, this idea of cycle is really interesting but I am not sure, as propably most people now hahae.
Wow! This was a _great_ video. I had no knowledge of synthetic vs. analytic languages, and this taught me a lot. Also, your voice is perfect for this sort of thing. Great pacing, clear pronunciation, wonderful. And your graphics matched up so perfect and clear with the points you were making (other than the outhouse error!). Well done.
The Bantu languages offer a nice non-Indo European example of agglutinating languages remaining stably agglutinating. The Bantu expansion began thousands of years ago (estimates vary on when exactly), and the daughter Bantu languages are reliably agglutinating. They also offer some interesting examples of grammaticalization. For example in Swahili several different verbs (in the infinitive form) can freely interchange with the phrase "more of" to form comparatives: "you are taller than she" could translate word-for-word as "you are tall more of she", but also "you are tall to conquer she" or "you are tall to pass she." ("Wewe ni mrefu [zaidi ya | kushinda | kupita] yeye.") It's also interesting to note that while the Bantu languages are reliably agglutinating, they have nevertheless grown apart in specific forms. For example Swahili indicates the simple past tense with an affix before the verb root, but nearby Lingala indicates the same simple past tense with a change to the end of the verb.
Xhosa and Zulu now use about 50% of English words. Sometimes with an "e" prefix.
Do English words mostly get used as nouns @@Deontjie, or are verbs imported this way too? Is the "e" a noun class prefix?
Mostly used as nouns for items that are new to their language.@@bumpty9830
Finnish is also stable agglutinative non Indo European language
The Aramaic word for God is "Alaha". It's the word Isa PBUH used. Sounds familiar?
Written without the confusing vowels it is written A-L-H ܐ ܠܗܐ (alap-lamed-he) as found in Targum or in Tanakh (Daniel, Ezra), Syriac Aramaic (Peshitta), reduced from the Arabic original (of which Aramaic is a dialect continuum as will be explained) it is written in the Arabic script 'A-L-L-H' (Aleph-Lam-Lam-Ha) add an A before the last H for vocalization.
The word God in another rendition in Hebrew ʾĕlōah is derived from a base ʾilāh, an Arabic word, written without confusing vowel it is A-L-H in the Arabic script, pronounced ilah not eloah. Hebrew dropped the glottal stop and mumbled it, aramic mumbled a little less and it became elaha. Infact both are written written A-L-H in Arabic, it is pronounced i in Arabic and not A because it is an Alef with hamza below (إ أ ) They are two different forms of Alef. And it mean "a god", it is the non definitive form of A-L-L-H, in which the Alef is without a glottal stop/hamza,(ا), but this kind of nuance is lost in the dialect continua.
infact "YHWH" itself is an Arabic word as discussed by Professor. Israel Knohl (Professor of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the paper" YHWH: The Original Arabic Meaning of the Name."
jesus as his name is often misspelled due to the lack of the ayin sound in Greek, which was rendered to Iesous, coupling the nearest sound to ayin, same letter found in 'Iraq', which sounds entirely different in Arabic form 'Iran' in Arabic, with the -ous Greek suffix that Greeks typically add to their names 'HerodotOS', 'PlotinUS', 'AchelOUS' and later mumbled into a J. The yeshua rendition of Isa (his name in the Qur'an) PBUH which is purported to be the name of Jesus is KNOWN to had been taken from greek. Western Syriac also use "Isho". Western Aramaic (separate from Syriac which is a dialect of Eastern Aramaic) use "Yeshu". Western Syriac has been separate from Western Aramaic for about 1000 years. And sounds don't even match up. Syriac is a Christian liturgical language yet the four letters of the name of Jesus «ܝܫܘܥ» [ = Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic: «ישוע» ] sounds totally different in West vs East Syriac, viz. vocalized akin to Christian Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic «ܝܶܫܽܘܥ» (Yēšūʿ) in West Syriac, but pronounced more akin to Muslim Arabic Quran character name Isa in East Syriac «ܝܑܼܫܘܿܥ» (ʾĪšōʿ). The reason for this confusion is their dropping of phonemes. Only someone that has no idea what the letters are or how they sound would have a name ending in a pharyngeal fricative like the ayin, if it were to be used in a name it would have had to be in the beginning, thus the Arabic rendition is the correct one. An example in English is how the appended -d is a common error amongst the English pronouncing Gaelic names. The name Donald arose from a common English mispronunciation of the Gaelic name Donal. Just how it is with donal becoming donald and the two becoming distinct and the original being regarded as something seperate so too did Isa PBUH turn to Iesous turn to jesus and when they tried going back to the original they confused it for yeshua ( ysu is how it is actually written) for Isa PBUH ( 3'eysah )
Schlözer in his preparation for the Arabia expedition in 1781 coined the term Semitic language:
"From the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, from Mesopotamia to Arabia ruled one language, as is well known. Thus Syrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Arabs were one people (ein Volk). Phoenicians (Hamites) also spoke this language, which I would like to call the Semitic (die Semitische)." -Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German By Han F. Vermeulen.
He was only half right though, Arabic is the only corollary to "proto-semitic", infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical as will be shown.
"protosemetic" Alphabet (28), Arabic Alphabet (28), Latin transliteration, hebrew (22)
𐩠 𐩡 𐩢 𐩣 𐩤 𐩥 𐩦 𐩧 𐩨 𐩩 𐩪 𐩫 𐩬 𐩭 𐩮 𐩰 𐩱 𐩲 𐩳 𐩴 𐩵 𐩶 𐩷 𐩸 𐩹 𐩺 𐩻 𐩼
ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي
A b t ṯ j h kh d ḏ r z s sh ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ʿ ġ f q k l m n h w y
א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת
Merged phonemes in hebrew and aramaic:
ح, خ (h, kh) merged into only kh consonant remain
س, ش (s, sh) merged into only Shin consonant remaining
ط, ظ (ṭ/teth, ẓ) merged into only ṭ/teth consonant remaining
ص, ض (ṣ, ḍ/Tsad ) merged into only ḍ/Tsad consonant remaining
ع, غ (3'ayn, Ghayn) merged into a reducted ayin consonant remaining
ت, ث (t/taw, th) merged into only t/taw consonant remaining
The reason why the protoS alphabet here is 28 and not 29, is because the supposed extra letter is simply a س written in a different position, but it was shoehorned to obfuscated. In Arabic letter shapes are different depending on whether they are in the beginning , middle or end of a word.
As a matter of fact, all of the knowledge needed for deciphering ancient texts and their complexity was derived from the Qur'an. It was by analyzing the syntactic structure of the Qur'an that the Arabic root system was developed. This system was first attested to in Kitab Al-Ayin, the first intralanguage dictionary of its kind, which preceded the Oxford English dictionary by 800 years. It was through this development that the concept of Arabic roots was established and later co-opted into the term 'semitic root,' allowing the decipherment of ancient scripts. In essence, they quite literally copied and pasted the entirety of the Arabic root. Hebrew had been dead, as well as all the other dialects of Arabic, until being 'revived' in a Frankensteinian fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The entire region spoke basically the same language, with mumbled dialect continuums spread about, and Arabic is the oldest form from which all these dialects branched off. As time passed, the language gradually became more degenerate,
Language; When one looks at the actual linguistics, one will find that many were puzzled by the opposite, that is, how the other "semetic" languages were more "evolved" than Arabic, while Arabic had archaic features, not only archaic compared to bibilical Hebrew, Ethiopic, "Aramaic" contemporary "semetic" languages, but even archaic compared to languages from ancient antiquity; Ugaritic, Akkadain. What is meant here by Archaic is not what most readers think, it is Archaic not in the sense that it is simple, but rather that it is complex (think Latin to pig Latin or Italian or Old English, which had genders and case endings to modern English), not only grammatically, but also phonetically; All the so called semitic languages are supposed to have evolved from protosemetic, the Alphabet for protosemitic is that of the so called Ancient South Arabian (which interestingly corresponds with the traditional Arabic origins account) and has 28 Phonemes. Arabic has 28 phonemes. Hebrew has 22, same as Aramaic, and other "semitic" languages. Now pause for a second and think about it, how come Arabic, a language that is supposed to have come so late has the same number of letters as a language that supposedly predates it by over a millennium (Musnad script ~1300 BCE). Not only is the glossary of phonemes more diverse than any other semitic language, but the grammar is more complex, containing more cases and retains what's linguists noted for its antiquity, broken plurals. Indeed, a linguist has once noted that if one were to take everything we know about languages and how they develop, Arabic is older than Akkadian (~2500 BCE).
And then the Qur'an appeared with the oldest possible form of the language thousands of years later. This is why the Arabs of that time were challenged to produce 10 similar verses, and they couldn't. People think it's a miracle because they couldn't do it, but I think the miracle is the language itself. They had never spoken Arabic, nor has any other language before or since had this mathematical precision. And when I say mathematical, I quite literally mean mathematical.
Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of years later in an alphabet that had never been recorded before, and in the highest form the language had ever taken?
The creator is neither bound by time nor space, therefore the names are uttered as they truly were, in a language that is lexically, syntactically, phonemically, and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing. In fact, that writing appears to have been a simplified version of it. Not only that, but it would be the equivalent of the greatest works of any particular language all appearing in one book, in a perfect script and in the highest form the language could ever take. It is so high in fact, that it had yet to be surpassed despite the fact that over the last millennium the collection of Arabic manuscripts when compared on word-per-word basis in Western Museums alone, when they are compared with the collected Greek and Latin manuscripts combined, the latter does not constitute 1 percent of the former as per German professor Frank Griffel, in addition all in a script that had never been recorded before. Thus, the enlightenment of mankind from barbarism and savagery began, and the age of reason and rationality was born from its study.
God did bring down the Qur’an, Mohamed is his Messenger.
The existence of substantial Balto-Slavic vocabulary and originality in Slavic inflection suggest that proto-Slavs had a creolized language (unlike Baltic ancestors, they were very exposed to Scytian, Sarmatic and Gothic neighbors) that got grammaticalized. The ability of moving parts of a sentence around has subtle advantages in expressing intentions and attitudes. For example, in a saying "kruk krukowi oka nie wykole" (raven raven eye not pierce out with inflections) can be permuted except "nie wykole" has to be together, but the proverb stresses "two of the same kind", e.g. internal conflicts stay within limits but placing both ravens at the beginning, and the fact that more usual order is "kruk nie wykole oka krukowi" points attention to "kruk krukowi". BTW, if you want to cite it, in Polish, like in German, "w" is like English "v".
I will admit that, despite finding this video a bit late, I immediately gravitated towards your content now. This video is a really good introduction into a topic that many people think has an answer, but really doesn't, plus your audio quality and voice really mix well with the background soundtrack. ¡Keep it up man!
Dative forms also become less frequent in German. E.g., nowadays we say "dem Volk" instead of "dem Volke", unless it's in an idiom such as "All state authority emanates from the people." Some would also say "dem Mensch" instead of "dem Menschen", etc. The dative is still present in the article "dem", but the inflection is gone.
The genitive is not yet dying. Sometimes people even use the genitive with prepositions that require the dative, because they try to speak in an elevated manner.
I was just about to say this. My impression is that the genitive has been declared dead way too early, it seems to be going quite strong, mainly not in casual speech, but in any and all situations where people try to sound scholarly or to be authoritative, so much that it is used in some contexts where it originally wasn't. Also, in many cases the dative replacement for genitive possession ("von dem/der") still seems very childish or outright wrong. While saying "das Haus von meinem Vater" instead of "das Haus meines Vaters" ('my father's house') might be pretty much normal nowadays, saying "die Hauptstadt von dem Land" like in the video is fine colloquially, but wouldn't be used in any formal setting, and giving LotR the title "Der Herr von den Ringen" would sound like a complete parody, because it lacks any kind of poetic sound to it. So I can't imagine these latter kinds of uses of the genitive possessive being replaced anytime soon.
Regarding the replacement of dative -e, this is a process that has been going on for more than 100 years, and leaving it out has been pretty much standard since at least the 60s/70s, I would say. It won't take long, I think, until this will no longer be regarded as correct outside of the idioms you mentioned ("wie es im Buche steht" or "im Sinne" are other ones). Not so sure about "dem Menschen" though
@@MrNathanael94Ja, das glaube ich auch. Übrigens hat sich gerade der Genitiv im Englischen am längsten gehalten.
Schlözer in his preparation for the Arabia expedition in 1781 coined the term Semitic language:
"From the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, from Mesopotamia to Arabia ruled one language, as is well known. Thus Syrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Arabs were one people (ein Volk). Phoenicians (Hamites) also spoke this language, which I would like to call the Semitic (die Semitische)."
-Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German By Han F. Vermeulen
He was only half right though, Arabic is the only corollary to "proto-semitic", infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning mass between their ears. hebrew, aramaic, rest of madeup dialect continua only have 22 letters of the 29 protosemitic letters Arabic has all 29. The difference betweeen Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as that between Latin and pig latin or italian.
|Classical Arabic | 28 consonants, 29 with Hamza and 6 vowels; some consonants are emphatic or pharyngealized; some vowels are marked with diacritics | Complex system of word formation based on roots and patterns; roots are sequences of consonants that carry the basic meaning of a word; patterns are sequences of vowels and affixes that modify the meaning and function of a word | Flexible word order, but VSO is most common; SVO is also possible; subject and object are marked by case endings (-u for nominative, -a for accusative, -i for genitive); verb agrees with subject in person, number, and gender; verb has different forms for different moods and aspects |
| Akkadian | 22 consonants and 3 vowels; some consonants are glottalized or palatalized; vowels are not marked | Similar system, but with different roots and patterns; some roots have more than three consonants; some patterns have infixes or reduplication | Fixed word order of SVO; subject and object are not marked by case endings, but by prepositions or word order; verb agrees with subject in person, number, and gender; verb has different forms for different tenses and aspects |
| Aramaic | 22 consonants and 3 vowels (later variants have more); no emphatic or pharyngealized consonants (except in some dialects); vowels are not marked (except in later variants such as Syriac) | Simple system of word formation based on prefixes and suffixes; some roots or patterns exist, but are less productive than in Arabic or Akkadian |
"Semitic" is just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed and simplified grammar. That's Aramaic, Hebrew, etc. For example, combine T and D into just T; there's no need to have 2 letters. The same goes for i, e, y - they should all be just y from now on, etc., etc. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-Semitic. In fact, the whole classification of Semitic languages is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning brain. Hebrew, Aramaic, and the rest of these made-up dialect continua only have 22 letters out of the 29 proto-Semitic letters. Arabic has all 29. The difference between Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as the difference between Latin and pig Latin or Italian. "Phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, and not only that, it is pidgin. It is simplified to the point of stupidity. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this clearly. What happened was that Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of Scottish Twitter spelling, with added mumbling due to phonemic mergers (22 letters, not 29), and mistakenly thought they were seeing a different language."
Let's start with a simple sentence:
## The house is big
Arabic:
البيتُ كبيرٌ
al-bayt-u kabīr-un
Proto-Semitic:
*ʔal-bayt-u kabīr-u
Hebrew:
הבית גדול
ha-bayit gadol
Akkadian:
bītum rabûm
Amharic:
ቤቱ ገደሉ
betu gedelu
As can be seen, Arabic and Proto-Semitic have the same word order (noun-adjective), the same definite article (al-), and the same case endings (-u for nominative). Hebrew and Akkadian have lost the case endings and changed the definite article (ha- and -um respectively). Amharic has changed the word order (adjective-noun) and the definite article (u-).
But Arabic is not only similar to Proto-Semitic, it is also pre-Semitic, meaning that it is the original form of Semitic before it split into different branches. This is because Arabic preserves many features that are not found in any other Semitic language, but are found in other Afro-Asiatic languages, such as Egyptian and Berber. These features include:
- The definite article al-, which is derived from the demonstrative pronoun *ʔal- 'that'. This article is unique to Arabic among Semitic languages, but it is similar to the article n- in Berber and the article p-, t-, n- in Egyptian.
- The dual number for nouns and verbs, which is marked by the suffix -ān or -ayn. This number is rare in other Semitic languages, but it is common in other Afro-Asiatic languages, such as Egyptian and Berber.
- The imperfective prefix t- for verbs, which indicates the second person singular feminine or third person plural feminine. This prefix is unique to Arabic among Semitic languages, but it is similar to the prefix t- in Berber and Egyptian.
- The passive voice for verbs, which is marked by the infix t between the first and second root consonants. This voice is unique to Arabic among Semitic languages, but it is similar to the passive voice in Egyptian and Berber.
Finally, a more complex sentence: The letter was written with a pen.
Arabic:
كُتِبَتِ الرِّسَالَةُ بِالقَلَمِ
kutiba-t al-risāla-t-u bi-l-qalam-i
Proto-Semitic:
*kutiba-t ʔal-risāla-t-u bi-l-qalam-i
Hebrew:
המכתב נכתב בעט
ha-michtav niktav ba-et
Akkadian:
šipram šapāru bēlum
Egyptian:
sḏm.n.f p-ẖry m rnp.t
Berber:
tturra-t tibratin s uccen
Here, Arabic and Proto-Semitic have the same word order (verb-subject-object), the same passive voice marker (-t-), the same definite article (al-), and the same preposition (bi-). Hebrew has changed the word order (subject-verb-object), lost the passive voice marker, changed the definite article (ha-) and the preposition (ba-). Akkadian has changed the word order (object-subject-verb), lost the passive voice marker, changed the definite article (-um) and the preposition (bēlum).
Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of years in a language that is lexically, syntactically, phonemically, and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing?
Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of years later in an alphabet that had never been recorded before, and in the highest form the language had ever taken?
The creator is neither bound by time nor space, therefore the names are uttered as they truly were, in a language that is lexically, syntactically, phonemically, and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing. In fact, that writing appears to have been a simplified version of it. Not only that, but it would be the equivalent of the greatest works of any particular language all appearing in one book, in a perfect script and in the highest form the language could ever take. It is so high in fact, that it had yet to be surpassed despite the fact that over the last millennium the collection of Arabic manuscripts when compared on word-per-word basis in Western Museums alone, when they are compared with the collected Greek and Latin manuscripts combined, the latter does not constitute 1 percent of the former as per German professor Frank Griffel, in addition all in a script that had never been recorded before. Thus, the enlightenment of mankind from barbarism and savagery began, and the age of reason and rationality was born from its study.
God did bring down the Qur’an, Mohamed is his Messenger.
@@MrNathanael94I'd say if you look at modern Dutch it showcases a state when this change is complete. Dutch lost the case system, and it is only found in fixed expressions, and the replacement for cases are much like this change that is now affecting German. The preposition 'van' for marking the possessor, 'aan' as a replacement for dative, and accusative doesn't really have or need a replacement, even in modern German only masculine looks different from the nominative versions.
You just admitted that genitive is being lost in spoken German and is increasingly being restricted to formal or literary contexts. This is especially true for masculine/neutral nouns, so it's more common to hear "das Haus von meinem Vater" but "das Haus meiner Mutter" rather than "von meiner Mutter".
I also agree that the few remaining nouns that are inflected in dative and acusative are being lost, and people increasingly say "ich habe Herr Müller gesehen", "das Fell von dem Bär", etc.
The process of losing -e at the end of nouns in dative started in the Middle Ages btw. @@MrNathanael94
Turkish is great example of a language becoming more synthetic over time. I think the word order is factor in that development. Turkish only makes use of post positions and they may turn into a suffix over time. Personal endings during the conjugations of the verbs come from personal pronouns. For example
I come = gelir men (lit. comes I) became gelir-im
You come = gelir sen > gelir-sin
We come = gelir miz > gelir-iz
You come = gelir siz > gelir-siniz
They come = gelir onlar > gelir-ler
I am good = edgü erir men > iyi-yim (er = the verb be over time it was dropped and the pronoun became a suffix: erir men > erir-im > -ir-im > -im)
You are good = edgü erir sen > iyi-sin (erir sen erir-sin > ir-sin > -sin)
As you can see "am" can only be turned into a contraction like I'm. If the word order in English were in Turkish, it prpobably would have become a suffix as in Turkish.
Instead of "I am good", "I good am" would probably be turned into "I good-am".
By becoming more synthetic so you mean moving from agglutinative to fusion?
Excellent work. Would be lovely to discuss how tonality in Chinese and other East Asian languages relate to these concepts sometime
I have studied Chinese in school - in the Sino-Tibetan language family (Chinese, Cantonese etc) the tones do not convey grammatical meaning and therefore are not related to whether the language is analytic or synthetic. Instead the tones are used to differentiate words with the same pronunciation to give them different meaning. For example saying a certain word going low to high means something different than saying it from high to low.
Now on the question of whether they are analytic or synthetic, the Chinese languages are analytic. They do not have lots of endings added to the same word but instead use lots of adverbs to convey grammatical meaning like English (they use even more in fact). Japanese and Korean on the other hand are their own respective language families and are unrelated to the Chinese languages, and they are synthetic.
Very occasionally, there are relics of exoactive derivations with the reconstructed Old Chinese suffix *-s, which is purportedly responsible for the difference in tone between 買 (OC *mˤrajʔ "to buy") and 賣 (OC *mˤrajʔ-s "to sell"), and other exoactive-endoactive pairs. Otherwise, it's much rarer to find morphology coded into tone in East Asia and MSEA. Typologically, the northern branches of Chinese are less analytic than the southern varieties.
However, I think you might still be interested in the fossilised remnants of proto-Vietic infixes in modern Vietnamese. These typically did not result in tonal alternations but did give rise to pairs of related words with different initials. A pair like chết "to die" (from PV *k-ceːt), without lenition, and giết "to kill" (from PV *k-pr-ceːt), with post-sesquisyllabic lenition *c > *ʝ > z/j, is most commonly cited.
Though it is less obvious than Indo-European language, modern Japanese becomes simplifier over time. Compared to Classical Japanese, It has less variety of conjugation patterns (9→5) and no distinctive forms between terminal form and attributive form. However, the biggest difference is a phonetic aspect. Classical Japanese had 8 vowels (now 5) .
Considering Classical Chinese had much complex phonetic system (it had double consonants and ending consonants), Simplification of East Asian languages is more obvious in the phonetic aspect.
@@ether6107 Korean and Vietnamese shall be similar to Chinese. They only dropped the Chinese characters but not the language itself. They only changed the Chinese writing to a different form.
@@CN_SFY_General that's compete nonsense and 100% of linguists will say the exact same thing
They evolved from completely different sources and are from different families entirely. This means their vocabulary is completely different and the differences cannot be due to gradual pronunciation changes.
For example the English word "father" comes from the old German word "fæder", and that comes from "pater" in Proto Indo-European. Meanwhile father in Korean is "abeoji", in Mandarin it's "fuqin", and in Vietnamese it's "bo". There is no way to connect these words at all, so they obviously came from different sources while the Germanic languages did not.
Also, just because they are neighbors does not mean they are from the same family. Cantonese is more similar to Mandarin than Korean even though they are from farther apart geographically because they are from the same family.
The writing system has nothing to do with the family of the language as well. For example, Turkish used to use the Arabic script but now uses the Latin script - that doesn't make Turkish a Semetic language.
Besides the analytic vs. the synthetic ( grammatical) aspect, there is the phonetic and spelling ones. For example, English is less inflected than Spanish , but when it comes to pronunciation Spanish is easier than English, French or Russian. There are only 5 vowel sounds in Spanish vs 14 in English and 19 in French. The correlation between spelling and pronunciation is extremely straightforward in Spanish. Every single letter is pronounced the same way . There is no silent letter with the exception of the "h" , but the h is ALWAYS silent. Besides, the B and V are pronounced the same way nowadays and something silmilar is happening with the s and z in now, so there is oversimplification of consonant sounds, too. You can master the correlation between spelling and pronunciation of Spanish in a couple of lessons, but that is not the case in some European languages. . To top it off, Spanish-speaking countries have Academias de la Lengua Española and they have international meetings to agree on changes and when a change in spelling is accepted , it is for all the countries, so there is no change in spelling regardless the country. No wonder la gente piensan que aprender español es fácil😊
As a linguistics' student, this is a very coincice and very well done video! I'll be waiting the next ones!
Chinese and Tibetan evolved to be highly analytic languages from fusional proto-languages.
@Deywos-zs2sq why do you say that?
My wild guess is that languages becomes simpler and more analytical when they become bigger, more standardized and more culturally imposed. And, vice versa, new cases, like our Russian "neo-vocative" (I am a native Russian speaker), arise in extremely informal contexts, in small communities, when people feel free to experiment with the language.
I would compare Russian and Bulgarian, which has lost all its cases, but developed (THE only one of the Slavic languages) a definite article. It's obvious how much bigger Russian is, but it's retained almost all the pra-Slavic cases, whereas Bulgarian - the source of most of our literary vocabulary - has lost cases. I think there is no single answer here, and each case must be studied separately.
I say bring back the vocative case. Vocative makes the meaning different and less cold when calling someone!!!
Should Neo-vocative even count as a new case? It only happens in short diminutive forms (that are always full of new, exiting ways to address someone), in very casual setting, and cutting happens only in names ending in "а", where with "я" it changes into "ь"... and with that we come full circle and just using Plural Accusative case for a single person.
Partitive case on the other hand.... in most cases (huh) just repeats Genitive Case. So we also don't bother.
I just don't get it. Why Neo-vocative is a new candidate when it used in a very specific circumstances. Unlike when we use partitive with "tea" e.g. Regardless of where we are, who we are and with whom we drink it ;)
@@somestuff7876 It does not matter in how narrow circumstances a new case is used - it is still a new case, a distinction of forms which did not exist previously. Of course, the cultural norm pressure restraints its acceptance as a new norm. But there is always a chance that at some point in the future people stop bothering and start counting it as one of the normal cases.
@@somestuff7876 Neo vocative does not cut ending only names ending with -a. It's because -a requires the "hard" consonant before it, and -я requires a "soft" one, so when the vowel is removed from -я, soft sign is put there because the consonant still remains "soft".
In other words, neo vocative is actually consistent with the way it changes words prononciation
The way I currently see it is “Solutions in language act as knots” always tugging through communication.
For many years, I've been interested in grammatical development of languages over time. Apparently, a frequent claim is that languages move in a circle- from analytic to agglutinative to fusional and back to analytic. I'm honestly fascinated by thoughts of a future "Japanese" which has complex noun grammar, or maybe even verb conjugation like Romance or Slavic languages. Korean is quite agglutinative like Japanese, and even has cases, but no verb conjugation.
Korean DOES have verb conjugation, it just conjugates for different features than Indo-European languages. For example "seung-chuhn-hae" and "seung-chuhn-hae-yoh" are two conjugated forms of the same verb. I thought Japanese did something similar.
Whether the semantics could drift toward Indo-European version, I don't see why not. In my little time studying Korean I noticed that one of the more humble verb forms tended to be used for the first person, which makes sense. It's not hard to imagine that system realigning to a first person vs non-first-person, and maybe a second person vs. third person split happening later.
The Aramaic word for God is "Alaha". It's the word Isa PBUH used. Sounds familiar?
Written without the confusing vowels it is written A-L-H ܐ ܠܗܐ (alap-lamed-he) as found in Targum or in Tanakh (Daniel, Ezra), Syriac Aramaic (Peshitta), reduced from the Arabic original (of which Aramaic is a dialect continuum as will be explained) it is written in the Arabic script 'A-L-L-H' (Aleph-Lam-Lam-Ha) add an A before the last H for vocalization.
The word God in another rendition in Hebrew ʾĕlōah is derived from a base ʾilāh, an Arabic word, written without confusing vowel it is A-L-H in the Arabic script, pronounced ilah not eloah. Hebrew dropped the glottal stop and mumbled it, aramic mumbled a little less and it became elaha. Infact both are written written A-L-H in Arabic, it is pronounced i in Arabic and not A because it is an Alef with hamza below (إ أ ) They are two different forms of Alef. And it mean "a god", it is the non definitive form of A-L-L-H, in which the Alef is without a glottal stop/hamza,(ا), but this kind of nuance is lost in the dialect continua.
infact "YHWH" itself is an Arabic word as discussed by Professor. Israel Knohl (Professor of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the paper" YHWH: The Original Arabic Meaning of the Name."
jesus as his name is often misspelled due to the lack of the ayin sound in Greek, which was rendered to Iesous, coupling the nearest sound to ayin, same letter found in 'Iraq', which sounds entirely different in Arabic form 'Iran' in Arabic, with the -ous Greek suffix that Greeks typically add to their names 'HerodotOS', 'PlotinUS', 'AchelOUS' and later mumbled into a J. The yeshua rendition of Isa (his name in the Qur'an) PBUH which is purported to be the name of Jesus is KNOWN to had been taken from greek. Western Syriac also use "Isho". Western Aramaic (separate from Syriac which is a dialect of Eastern Aramaic) use "Yeshu". Western Syriac has been separate from Western Aramaic for about 1000 years. And sounds don't even match up. Syriac is a Christian liturgical language yet the four letters of the name of Jesus «ܝܫܘܥ» [ = Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic: «ישוע» ] sounds totally different in West vs East Syriac, viz. vocalized akin to Christian Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic «ܝܶܫܽܘܥ» (Yēšūʿ) in West Syriac, but pronounced more akin to Muslim Arabic Quran character name Isa in East Syriac «ܝܑܼܫܘܿܥ» (ʾĪšōʿ). The reason for this confusion is their dropping of phonemes. Only someone that has no idea what the letters are or how they sound would have a name ending in a pharyngeal fricative like the ayin, if it were to be used in a name it would have had to be in the beginning, thus the Arabic rendition is the correct one. An example in English is how the appended -d is a common error amongst the English pronouncing Gaelic names. The name Donald arose from a common English mispronunciation of the Gaelic name Donal. Just how it is with donal becoming donald and the two becoming distinct and the original being regarded as something seperate so too did Isa PBUH turn to Iesous turn to jesus and when they tried going back to the original they confused it for yeshua ( ysu is how it is actually written) for Isa PBUH ( 3'eysah )
Schlözer in his preparation for the Arabia expedition in 1781 coined the term Semitic language:
"From the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, from Mesopotamia to Arabia ruled one language, as is well known. Thus Syrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Arabs were one people (ein Volk). Phoenicians (Hamites) also spoke this language, which I would like to call the Semitic (die Semitische)." -Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German By Han F. Vermeulen.
He was only half right though, Arabic is the only corollary to "proto-semitic", infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical as will be shown.
"protosemetic" Alphabet (28), Arabic Alphabet (28), Latin transliteration, hebrew (22)
𐩠 𐩡 𐩢 𐩣 𐩤 𐩥 𐩦 𐩧 𐩨 𐩩 𐩪 𐩫 𐩬 𐩭 𐩮 𐩰 𐩱 𐩲 𐩳 𐩴 𐩵 𐩶 𐩷 𐩸 𐩹 𐩺 𐩻 𐩼
ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي
A b t ṯ j h kh d ḏ r z s sh ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ʿ ġ f q k l m n h w y
א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת
Merged phonemes in hebrew and aramaic:
ح, خ (h, kh) merged into only kh consonant remain
س, ش (s, sh) merged into only Shin consonant remaining
ط, ظ (ṭ/teth, ẓ) merged into only ṭ/teth consonant remaining
ص, ض (ṣ, ḍ/Tsad ) merged into only ḍ/Tsad consonant remaining
ع, غ (3'ayn, Ghayn) merged into a reducted ayin consonant remaining
ت, ث (t/taw, th) merged into only t/taw consonant remaining
The reason why the protoS alphabet here is 28 and not 29, is because the supposed extra letter is simply a س written in a different position, but it was shoehorned to obfuscated. In Arabic letter shapes are different depending on whether they are in the beginning , middle or end of a word.
As a matter of fact, all of the knowledge needed for deciphering ancient texts and their complexity was derived from the Qur'an. It was by analyzing the syntactic structure of the Qur'an that the Arabic root system was developed. This system was first attested to in Kitab Al-Ayin, the first intralanguage dictionary of its kind, which preceded the Oxford English dictionary by 800 years. It was through this development that the concept of Arabic roots was established and later co-opted into the term 'semitic root,' allowing the decipherment of ancient scripts. In essence, they quite literally copied and pasted the entirety of the Arabic root. Hebrew had been dead, as well as all the other dialects of Arabic, until being 'revived' in a Frankensteinian fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The entire region spoke basically the same language, with mumbled dialect continuums spread about, and Arabic is the oldest form from which all these dialects branched off. As time passed, the language gradually became more degenerate,
Language; When one looks at the actual linguistics, one will find that many were puzzled by the opposite, that is, how the other "semetic" languages were more "evolved" than Arabic, while Arabic had archaic features, not only archaic compared to bibilical Hebrew, Ethiopic, "Aramaic" contemporary "semetic" languages, but even archaic compared to languages from ancient antiquity; Ugaritic, Akkadain. What is meant here by Archaic is not what most readers think, it is Archaic not in the sense that it is simple, but rather that it is complex (think Latin to pig Latin or Italian or Old English, which had genders and case endings to modern English), not only grammatically, but also phonetically; All the so called semitic languages are supposed to have evolved from protosemetic, the Alphabet for protosemitic is that of the so called Ancient South Arabian (which interestingly corresponds with the traditional Arabic origins account) and has 28 Phonemes. Arabic has 28 phonemes. Hebrew has 22, same as Aramaic, and other "semitic" languages. Now pause for a second and think about it, how come Arabic, a language that is supposed to have come so late has the same number of letters as a language that supposedly predates it by over a millennium (Musnad script ~1300 BCE). Not only is the glossary of phonemes more diverse than any other semitic language, but the grammar is more complex, containing more cases and retains what's linguists noted for its antiquity, broken plurals. Indeed, a linguist has once noted that if one were to take everything we know about languages and how they develop, Arabic is older than Akkadian (~2500 BCE).
And then the Qur'an appeared with the oldest possible form of the language thousands of years later. This is why the Arabs of that time were challenged to produce 10 similar verses, and they couldn't. People think it's a miracle because they couldn't do it, but I think the miracle is the language itself. They had never spoken Arabic, nor has any other language before or since had this mathematical precision. And when I say mathematical, I quite literally mean mathematical.
Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of years later in an alphabet that had never been recorded before, and in the highest form the language had ever taken?
The creator is neither bound by time nor space, therefore the names are uttered as they truly were, in a language that is lexically, syntactically, phonemically, and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing. In fact, that writing appears to have been a simplified version of it. Not only that, but it would be the equivalent of the greatest works of any particular language all appearing in one book, in a perfect script and in the highest form the language could ever take. It is so high in fact, that it had yet to be surpassed despite the fact that over the last millennium the collection of Arabic manuscripts when compared on word-per-word basis in Western Museums alone, when they are compared with the collected Greek and Latin manuscripts combined, the latter does not constitute 1 percent of the former as per German professor Frank Griffel, in addition all in a script that had never been recorded before. Thus, the enlightenment of mankind from barbarism and savagery began, and the age of reason and rationality was born from its study.
God did bring down the Qur’an, Mohamed is his Messenger.
I feel like Japanese has quite a low chance to develop verb conjugation for person because of the plethora of pronouns
@@mznxbcv12345babes we were talking abour korean and japanese why did u copy paste an essay
@@CrisCheese_ what a complete buffoon
It's usually a cycle. Small language has unique grammar but vocabulary split off from previously dominant language. Population expands and more non natives learn the language. Language simplifies so everyone can communicate easily. Smaller and isolated group changes their dialect so much that it becomes a new language, and repeat.
Obviously there are many local languages that never really expand much outside of their own demographics and those languages often stay much more complex over time since they rarely ever speak to a nonnative speaker. A language like Navajo is a perfect example, that language is extremely specific and probably the most complex language still spoken today. Then there's a language like Japanese that is still complex, but slowly losing that complexity now that they are receiving more attention on a global scale.
English is an interesting case as we are seeing that cycle on the opposite side where smaller communities are creating their own English based languages and adding complexity and new vocabulary into the language that only they understand.
Hi, thank you for the video! I can provide some infomation about Manchu - a kind of Altaic-Tungusic language. Basically, the Tungusic languages are all agglutinative which use mainly suffixes. Manchu started the writting system from the 17th century. Scince that, the Manchu literature didn't show any remarkable change on suffixes. In spoken language, for example, Sibe, as the robustest dialect for now, a few verbal suffixes did lose vitality. Through in Sibe there ARE some new constructions have been developed, but most of them are expressed with converbs or auxilaries instead of suffix.
On the other hand, when comaparing with other Tungusic Languages like Nanai and Oroqen, which are both considered to be descended from the same ancestor of Manchu - the Jurchen, we found Manchu is tremendously 'simplified'. Almost all personal references, and nearly 2/3 converbal suffixes are dropped.
So, I think for Manchu, it is getting more analytic.
Good video. One piece of advice I have would be that any and all sources or resources you use should be listed in the description. It helps give you additional legitimacy and can be helpful for people looking to get into linguistics.
Great video! Praise the algorithm for showing me your channel, you earned a subscriber!
6:48 Regarding the reinventing of a synthetic future tense in Romance languages, it’s worth point out that the languages that do it share the shifting of the stress/accent on the last syllable:
English: I will sing
French: chanterai
Spanish/Catalan: cantaré
Italian: canterò
Could “y’all” be an regional English example of creating new synthetic forms? It distinguishes the second person plural from the second person singular (both are “you” in standard English)
how about something like shouldn't've (?). or just shouldn't
What about jev (did you have)?
This is the best video I've seen on UA-cam that both explains this phenomenon, and that does a good job of debunking why it's not true. Most others seem to simply say, "No, languages do not *necessarily* get more analytic over time," but then the evidence they bring up isn't very good at showing why many languages get more analytic, but others don't. From my perspective as someone who just enjoys linguistics as a hobby, so many I.E. languages *_do_* seem to have gotten simpler. Old English --> Modern English; Latin --> every modern Romance language; Classical Greek --> Modern Greek; Old Norse --> modern Scandinavian languages (except Icelandic); Old Persian --> Farsi; It's nice to see an explainer that tries to explain why a language may get grammatically simpler and isn't just "Nuh-uh, just because some languages have gotten simpler doesn't mean they have to by necessity."
An example from Italian.
The language has undergone analytical simplification from Latin, but has at the same time developed some curious agglutinations.
Take the phrase "pass it to me":
One could translate it with "passa quello a me" pass=verb root , a=suffix for imperative 2nd person singular, quello= it/that (bent for mascuilne singular), a=to, me=me
But no one would ever say that.
The common expression is "passamelo": pass=verb root , a=suffix, me= to me, lo= it (masculine singular).
Since when is the a in "passamelo" a suffix?
They meant that the a is the imperative conjugation.
@danijeljovic4971 they meant that the -a of "pass(a)melo" is the suffix they referred to in the previous example and it stands for the 2nd person imperative singular. Morphologically, in the original verb, "-a" is the suffix, and it remains the same in the new agglutinative form.
Same in Spanish
Same in French - albeit with a slight difference in the sequence of the (in effect) pronouns at the end.
We would typically (in the imperative) say "passe le moi" (it is still written as separate words in French, rather than stuck together) - though in some dialects (such as here in Canada), it's not uncommon to hear "passe moi le" (ear-grinding as that is to me...) On the other hand, we DO say "passe-moi ça" and "passe-moi [l'objet]" so there are idiosyncratic agglutinations at work here...
The sequencing, placement before/after the verb (and often the form of the pronoun used) also depends on the verb mode and tense: in the infinitive, it would be "me le passer" and in the indicative it would be "tu me le passes" (or "vous me le passez" for the equivalent plural or formal forms).
My castillian is getting rusty (and my Italian is very basic) but my impression is that something similar is true (with slight differences) in the other Latin-derived languages.
What you’re saying about English being a very analytic language is very interesting, because English has quite a lot of compound words like ‘i’ll’ ‘you’ve’ and ‘he’s’ where the oxilery verb is turned into a suffix, these and there ilk though are relatively un-interesting as the whole purpose of oxilery verbs is to move around in order to signify if a statement is a question, what is more enticing is the suffix ‘nt’ which is deriven from the word not (but now it’s a suffix) and it can be applied to the oxilery verb of a sentence to make it un-true, and the suffix ‘d’ derived from the word ‘would’ is basically the Spanish ‘ia’ suffix, but it goes on pronouns,
Now i’m thinking of a hypothetical Anglic language which is just as synthetic as the Rommance languages, except that unlike other Endo-European languages, the conjegation goes on the pronouns not the verbs
Also the words ‘wanna’ ‘needa’ and ‘gonna’ Exist
It's funny because the Spanish "ía" suffix actually stems itself from an analytical root, much like the synthtization of future suffixes he mentioned in the video.
Where "cantaré" (I will sing) stems from Latin "cantare habeo" --> Old Spanish "cantar he", "cantaría" stems from another form of "habere", the old pluperfect indicative: Latin "cantare habia" --> Old Spanish "cantar hía" --> modern Spanish "cantaría".
4:26 All Indo-European languages have at least one case - the Nominative. If you chose not to count it, then for all the languages that have other cases, the number need to be lower by one.
Together with that Bulgarian has got the vocative case apart from the nominative, meaning depending on how you count it, it has one or two cases (not zero as shown on the map).
if you don't distinguish cases, that means there are no cases; Nominative only exists if there is something to compare it to, like Accusative. You cannot say that in "the house of Matthew", "Matthew" is nominative cause really it would be dative, it just isn't distinguished on account of the ending falling out. however a kind of distinction between nominative and other cases is retained in all ie languages at the very least through pronouns (and in english i guess there is a kind of genitive case, the so-called Saxon genitive)
In Japanese, positional relations are expressed by adding auxiliaries.
For example:
米田さんの家から。
米田さん[Mr Yoneda]の[possessive('s)]家[house]から[from]
There is no similar expression in Chinese, which explains the preceding action by adding a sentence
For example:
是人出其家，故至此。
是人[That man]出[go out]其[possessive('s)]家[house]，故[ergo]至[get]此[here]
The real question is why old languages were so complex.
possibly just longevity in locale. someone else here suggests its expansion which simplifies. in animal evolution new territories and colonisation tends to favour specific dominant organisms whereas isolation, segregation and lots of time created more diverse niches.
likely because you're comparing them to modern languages. Back then they were just "languages".
@@Fnidner the context matters. Why would an ancient language, closer to the point of inception and with a less complicated lifestyle to facilitate, be more complex than a modern one with thousands of years of additional data and a much wider range of education and professions?
Why would a language back then be more complicated than one now? Remember that it would have to evolve and standardize to that point in the first place. What was the need that forced that?
@@OsirusHandle that doesn't really answer the question, though.
What about developing civilization would cause a language to become less complex?
Why would a hunter gatherer tribe NEED a super complex language, much less one more complicated than people who have mastered countless fields of science and sent men to the moon?
@@palariousit’s not about complexity. Remember that for the most part, nobody was even literate.
There were no standard dictionaries nor any lingual sciences.
The vast majority of all the ways we label a language “complex” are rules and structures that are meaningless to any speakers that learn innately.
It was also exclusionary. Only those with access and wealth can learn to be literate in any language.
These languages become complex when trying to be studied or standardized as they were never meant to be anything but oral. And even when it was written form, spellings and grammatical structure was yet to be standardized.
I don't agree with all ideas presented in this video, but I confirm that it was very useful for me to understand some processes of language change.
In the end the author (or speaker? - I don't know...) doubts if it is really true that latin lost its inflection when it was learnt by many other people (with the growth of the Roman Empire). In fact, it is trou. We shoud notice the fact, that in the time of empire there was a strong pressure on proper use of the language of authority and administration, then the process of simplification of case system was quite slow (but it really took place on a small scale). The sudden change of the pace of this process started after the fall of the empire, when vulgar latin was being used by knew "learners", chiefly germanic people, who didn't have any respect for the language - as a result we have Portugese, Spanish, Catalon, French and Italian, which don't have the case system, but in a case of Romanian language, which was used by original inhabitants of the empire, who just managed to survive int the mountains, the case system was partly preserved.
Plural for Finnish is talot not taloi. The plural t switches to i because -lta ending
The nominative plural.
It's plural stem for any non-nominative case. Though, in partitive that i turns to j. just because we'd otherwise have three vowels in a row.
I don't think the shift to -j- between vowels is limited to vowels the partitive case. Also, if the word body ends in i, then the non-nominative plural is -e-, unless of course the word body changes so that it no longer ends in i in that particular case - and yeah, the word body can change depending on which suffix you are affixing. Gradation is one famous kind of word body change but not the only one.
All in all the suffixes do fuse quite a bit in Finnish, it's far from a purely agglutinative language. I don't speak Latin so I don't know how Finnish compares to that. If your threshold for an agglutinative language is that you can usually delineate where each morpheme starts and ends in a specific instance of a word, then I suppose Finnish is agglutinative.
Yeah, right. I tried to study Finnish once, it's definitely not as easy as it's shown in the video. Words with multiple roots depending on the case... it's madness.
Yeah I was a bit caught off guard with that one too. I mean it doesn't really matter since the point was just to show that you can take each part and name what that part means and adds to the word.
The agglutanive vs fusion is also importent for the difficulty of learning. For agglutanive you only have to know one suffix for each case, gender and number. While in fusion languages you have to know the word for every combination of it.
That is one reason why german grammer is hard to learn, although there are other languages with way more cases.
Turkish (more correctly Istanbul dialect which is the standart) has an opposite situation, we have way more suffixes than our sibling languages and our old versions of the language. In Turkish, the more you use suffixes the more your speech feels proper and "civilized".
Do you think it is because new suffixes were invented in the Istanbul dialect or rather they were resistant to getting lost compared other dialects? Since because Istanbul dialect was written for hundreds of years while general Anatolian Turkish was ignored for the most part until 1930's maybe literate people were more aware of the intricacies of the suffix system and illeterate general populus were simplifing. Also can you give specific examples? Only thing that I can think of is the question marker. Azerbaijanis and Eastern Anatolians don't use the question marker and rely on the tone while asking a question. Thanks
@@efe_c.99 as you said especially in questions Azerbaijani tend to not use suffixes even if the language has question suffixes but other than that the first example come to my mind is Azerbaijani Turks saying "yaşım var (i have age)" while Turkiye Turks say "yaşındayım (at that age)". Though other than these factors and examples i need to make a better proper research to actually give a more comprehensive output. We actually have records of old Anatolian Turkish especially in forms of folk poems (there's also elitist/palace poems called as "divan poems", thats why we categorize them in two sections).
Probably there are new suffixes that Istanbuli Turkish created too but I believe its more about using already existing suffixes in a wider spectrum of words.
@@recep2939 I see, thanks :)
@@efe_c.99 well i also thank you for thinkering. Have a nice day!
In German using more suffixes is also considered more proper and civilized. Interesting question why then it develops in the opposite direction.
4:23 In German, there is even a six-part book series with the title: “The dative is the death of the genitive”. (German: "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod").
The book series deals - in an entertaining way - with doubts about grammar, spelling and punctuation, as well as expressions in the German language that the author Bastian Sick considers to be unpleasant.
The funny thing about the title is that it uses the dative case instead of the genitive :D
It's not a new thing in Low German. This phenomenon even aided the death of the genitive in Norwegian starting at least half a millennium ago through Hanseatic influence back in the 15th century. Expressions in the form "genitiven sin død" is still gaining popularity in Norwegian, but the genitive was dying anyway so "genitiven sin død" is now only competing with other alternative ways to express the genitive. The true genitive in Norwegian would be "genitivsens død", but nobody would say that. That would sound like mock poetry.
@@midtskogenthis is so interesting. And, as a German, also scary for the genetive.
I've studied German since high school and I've been working as a German-Italian translator for 7 years, but I didn't know that the Genitiv was dying. It's the easiest of them all, I'd rather give away Dativ. Please change your mind! :D Anyway, I suppose it's mostly a spoken language issue, because I translate every day texts in German and they are full of genitive forms. That's why I've never noticed that.
von + dative has a different meaning than genitive in German.
The functions of the cases are important or as it is called in German: Tiefenkasus (deep cases). genitive can show possessive, general state, objective or subjective meaning etc.
The genitive case is one that is still used inflected in the English language, even more than in German, but similar to Scandinavian, but they only have one inflection and not several like in German.
The genitive case is also used differently in the dialects, in many Middle German dialects there is a genitive case, while in many otger dialects they dont know a genitive case, they have two or three cases.
Personally, I do use the genitive case and it is not the case which looks archaic or old fashioned.
It is fair to say that the major Germanic languages have grown more analytic over time
10:26 I think you meant “our houses” not “out houses” :-) or maybe it pairs with the “fart” example from before?
Either way, still a great video - very informative, well explained and an interesting topic. Thanks for sharing.
Subscribed!
also it should be "domibus nostris"
I was thinking "This guy sounds exactly like Serapeum Historia" and he is him indeed!
Hi, I have a few questions that someone hopefully can answer.
Doesn't English have cases? the map at 3:51 says it doesn't. But I would think it at least has a genitive case since you can say "the cars window" (same as "the window of a car") wouldn't this be a case? This does (to my knowledge) perform the exact same function as the German genitive case, which is one of the four German has (German is my third language, and I'm far from fluent so correct me if I'm wrong). Also I would argue that English also has a subject and an object case for pronouns, like "I" and "me" and so on. This is different from German where the "subject and object" cases get split into three (nominative, accusative and dative) and they apply to all common nouns and pronouns (and som proper nouns), so I could see why you don't call this two cases, just remnants of previous cases. Also Norwegian (my native tongue ) has more or less the same case system as English, so I would also argue that Norwegian has 1 or 3 cases. Lastly, if genitive is a case and object/subject isn't, would English (and Norwegian) then be a two case language, with genitive and non-genitive or just have one and if genitive/subject/object all aren't cases wouldn't English (and Norwegian) still have one case, the "default case"?
I'd have to agree that the possessive means that English has 2 cases for nouns. For pronouns, you could argue that English has 4 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), although the dative case is identical to the accusative case. And here's a question for pendants: what's the difference between having 0 cases and having 1 case?
That's right. Those 0's are mostly wrong.
Cases
------------
Language - Pronouns | Nouns
---------------------------------------------------------
German - 4 4 (3)
Danish - 3 2
English - 3 2 (1)
Italian - 3 1
I don't know if it's true that German is starting to lose its genitive case for nouns. But changing the word order and adding a word meaning 'of' in-between instead of using a proper genitive declension is already one of two ways to mark 'belonging to' in English, and the only way in the Romance languages when it comes to nouns. This is not the case in Danish though. There's definitely two cases for Danish nouns. And they show no signs whatsoever of weakening or being replaced. When a noun has the genitive role in a sentence, then that noun gets an 's' on its tail. Always. No exception. If it tries to get away without, then the whole sentence loses all its meaning.
So, there are not 1 or 0 cases in Danish when it comes to nouns, but 2.
And as for pronouns. In English, in Italian, in Danish, and so on, there are 3 cases, not 0 (or 1).
May I pedantically point out that I may be a pedant, but not a pendant? (I'll just let that one hang for a while.)@@mrab4222
It's possessive case, not genitive. Genitive can imply a few more things such as origin or substance. For example, one can say, Стакан воды in Russian, meaning "(a) Glass (of) water" where "воды", "water" is genitive. But you can't say in English, "A glass water's", or "Water's glass" to convey the same meaning.
@@J.RyanWhittlesey-uf3gc Italian preserved traces of the genitive in personal names as surnames (Paoli); Spanish and French preserves the genitive as shortening of stock names for the days of the week (miercoles or mercredi for dies Mercuris). English has a genitive for personal names (Jack's car, Fido's blanket McDonald's) and for some stock uses (three days' journey). But we speak of measurements (once a genitive use) as in "three cups of milk" in a prepositional phrase or use the genitive without inflection before the object (garage door, gas tank).
For anyone familar with Latin "domibus nostra" in 11.14 is a somewhat shoking mistake - the correct ablative form would be "domibus nostris".
Very shoking mistake
There's some irony that a video about language would have a typo on screen for a good two minutes.
5:30 I'd like to mention that strictly speaking vocative is not a real case as it can not be used with all nouns, only with animated ones. Also Vas' not Vas))
Interesting topic! I know that “more analytic” and “simpler” are not necessarily the same thing, but since one of the questions you’re asking is if languages get simpler over time I figured I’d share a response inspired by a recent reading I had in a course on languages and literacies for my doctoral degree.
Betsy Rymes (2014), in “A Repertoire Approach,” describes The Diversity Principle as “the more widely circulated a communicative element is, the more highly diverse the interactions with it will be” (p. 10). As any named language grows with more interlocutors, each person provides their own voice, their own idiolect, thus diversifying and to an extent furthering the complexity of said named language.
I think focusing on the first question, do languages shift towards a more analytic or synthetic approach over time, seems a bit more interesting and useful (at least to me) instead of asking if they become simpler.
"simpler" from the perspective of non natives whose first language is analytical 😂.
Disagree. I'm a native Russian speaker, and learning English (an analytical language) was so much easier than German (synthetic). I'm used to having 2-3 more cases and tons more forms than German, so it should be a breeze, right?
Wrong! Just because cases and declinations are intuitive to me grammatically, it doesn’t suddenly make it easier to remember all the god-damn endings. It's one thing to understand the logic, it's a different, completely unrelated thing to remember which sounds/letters correspond to which case, gender and number. Calculating all that on the fly while speaking is even harder.
Also, the logic is similar, but doesn't actually translate that well? As in, German often uses different cases than Russian for the same word or situation. E.g., "to call someone on the phone" is accusative in German, but dative in Russian (jemanden anrufen - звонить кому-то). The prepositions are all completely off, so you just learn them by heart (e.g., "with" is used with dative in German, but with the instrumental case in Russian).
Long story short, I absolutely see how learning a synthetic fusional language as an adult is much, much harder, regardless of your native tongue. It's just how brains work - it's easier to remember one word form than a hundred. Even though I much prefer synthetic languages aesthetically.
I was watching this video with total seriousness until the word FART was mentioned 😂 then I just lost my composure 🤣
Yeah from the thousands of words to choose from. lol
Taking English as an example of a language that became more analytic over time, I once read that the reason the synthesis occurred was for ease of communication between the English and their frequent Old Norse-speaking trading partners/occasional conquerors and that since the roots of the words were so similar between the two languages but the declensions markedly different, it was easier to do away with the cases and just use the roots. Probably not the case with Latin, though-I think there the dissolution of the empire and the subsequent siloing off of city-states and regional hegemonies saw more assimilation with local populations that, while once subjects when the Romans were, um, Rominh, were likely elevated to peer status once the empire fractured (thus creating fertile grounds for sound and grammar assimilations. You can kind of see it with the high proportion of Arabic vocabulary in the Iberian Romance languages relative to the Italians that developed closer to the Latin heartland and the Germanic-influenced French in a region where former Latins and Goths eventually equilibriated somewhat.
Pēdam, pēdam, I hear it and I know,
pēdam, pēdam, I know you wanna take me home.
Pēdam, and take off all my clothes.
Pēdam, pēdam, when your heart goes pēdam…
THANK YOU
12:01 As for the simplification of English grammar, I've heard the hypothesis that the massive presence of Viking settlements in Britain at the end of the first millennium might have played a role. So you had Old English, a descendant of Proto-West-Germanic, and Old Norse, a derivative of the Proto-North-Germanic. The people from both groups largely somewhat understood each other but the synthetic grammar was too confusing, which the led to an analyticization of Old English.
I have studied two analytic/isolating languages, Thai beginning in 1971 and Khmer beginning in 1984, to the point of developing substantial ability to use these grammatically regular languages. I have developed what may be an unjustifiable bias regarding the ‘learnability’ of analytic/isolating languages.
Trying to learn Hindi beginning in late middle-age became a matter of some frustration. Though I can enjoy a Bollywood movie or slowly read a somewhat simple text, participation in conversation in that synthetic language is something akin to trying to swap out a flat tire on a moving vehicle.
Because you asked about other languages: Japanese has gotten a lot less synthetic over time and verb and adjective forms are continuing to change to this day. One example of how verbs are currently changing is that in the standard language the passive form of one category of verbs ends in られる (rareru) which is the same as the potential form, so many speakers in the past century have started dropping the ら (ra) in the potential form of those verbs (eg. 食べられる > 食べれる). The phenomenon is called ら抜き (ra dropping). This would be an example of it becoming more synthetic I suppose.
To speak briefly about the shift from Old Japanese, however. There you used to be more verb categories than exist now, several of them have collapsed together. And the entire verb system was different. Basically there were a very large number of auxiliary verbs that were attached to different verb forms, and then inflected themselves in order to indicate things like past tense, uncertainty, emphasis, negation etc. The verb system today has grammaticalised some of these auxiliary verbs and now they basically function as verb conjugations themselves. This process of grammaticalisation is continuing today for example adding the verb to be (いる iru) to the end of the て (te) form of a verb indicated that the action is completed or that it is in the process of happening. In speech the い (i) is dropped so the form now looks like (てる).
In spoken (not written) French, there are usually 3 different morphemes per verb in the present simple but one of them (the one used with "nous", meaning "we") is almost always replaced. That means we almost lost a morpheme. Also, the future simple is almost never used, we use the periphrasis "aller", meaning "go" to express the future in modern French. That means we lost almost 4 or 5 morphemes for each verb.
You could make the same argument for passé simple also. Altough these two tenses are still found in literature, it's pretty rare to use them in spoken french, and there are even weirder tenses, like passé antérieur or plus-que-parfait that I'm pretty sure many native speakers, including myself, don't really know how to use properly in writing, let alone in spoken french...
Also some subjunctive tenses aren't used in spoken French.
Spanish and Portuguese have retained a much more inflectional and complex verb system, being pro-drop languages too.@@eldonad
This periphrastic "new future" which uses go as a marker for future (go is being grammaticalized as it does not mean "go" anymore) is happening in a particular West European Linguistic Area: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I don't know if it is going on in Celtic or Basque languages. "Going to" is spreading and replacing the older future forms. In the case of English, "going to" is replacing "will" (though will will probably hold on in some uses), which can be seen in text analysis as "going to" was barely present in 19th century texts, is frequent in texts of the 1930s, and is more frequent now. It is spreading. The same is happening in colloquial spoken Latin American Spanish. Voy a ir vs iré. Voy a ir is much much more common, with the future synthetic form almost being relegated to just written language.
@@erichamilton3373 Romanian also uses a go + infinitive structure for its future tense.
Funnily enough, Catalan developed the same construction, but it evolved as a PAST tense (preterite). So Fr. "tu vas parler", Sp. "vas a hablar" = you're going to speak. But Cat. "vas parlar" = you spoke.
The demise of the future simple in Spanish has been grossly exaggerated though, and this has been going on for decades now. Even in those Spanish dialects where it's used the least (like Argentinian Spanish) the synthetic form is still regularly used in oral colloquial speech, and it's still almost exclusively used in the written language. What's more, there seems to be a clear semantic difference between the two, with the future simple conveying a greater distance/detachment by the speaker as to the future event that is being uttered.
It's true that, even if it were to disappear as a future tense, it will probably survive as a "conjectural" tense.
@@erichamilton3373 In Castilian Spanish the use of the periphrastic form “ir+infinitivo” is only limited for a subjective near future event (voy a estudiar, vamos a comprar un coche, vais a ir al cine, etc.). The synthetic future form is necessary in order to express distant future events (estudiaré medicina, tendremos un coche, habrá un lugar, diréis esto, etc.)
Fantastic, well-researched video! There is a discussion missing that needs some serious consideration, and you are kinda getting at it with your last point about Latin simplifying by when it reached broader audiences: contact-induced change. The most well-studied creole languages tend to have an analytic grammar.
In the case of Old English, we can observe a greater loss of morphological complexity when they came into contact with the Old Norse. Later during the Norman Conquest, we can observe a greater loss of inflectional robustness over a shorter period time. When the English came into contact with Norman French, the entire grammar of English greatly simplified.
So honestly I would argue in some cases languages become more analytical as a result of contact induced change (including pidginization/creolization). I would also argue that in some cases the longer languages develop independently, the more grammatically complex they become. Basque and Navajo are extremely grammatically complex and spoken by very few people.
There may be exceptions, but I think contact-induced change is one of the primary drivers for grammatical complexity and lack thereof
Should be noted that even without the Normans it would have simplified Greatly.
Loss of cases and so on
My native language is Vietnamese, a very analytic language with morpheme to word ratio close to 1:1. Now there's a tendency in Vietnamese to create and use lots of compound words, either by using Sino-origin rules and roots, by duplication or just by putting things together arbitrarily. This doesn't really make the language more complex as it doesn't develope cases, but certainly it doesn't get simpler too. I'm curious that if synthetic languages can get more analytic over time, could the opposite happens to analytic languages?
I've also noticed your language and Chinese languages' use of tones to convey meaning. Maybe that's a way to simplify things and keep it analytic?
@@dhu1919 Tone doesn't preclude morphology. Sandawe is heavily tonal but has complex grammar. The Asian languages became analytical before tonality developed in the 1st millenium AD.
I think a large number of speakers, especially multilingual ones, makes inflections fade faster and easier, and a small isolated community grammarizes things faster and more often.
I haven't ever thought one day I would be so interested in linguistic, thanks :)
about Russian 7th case - neo-vocative - it's so funny that we use it so often and don't even realize it.
And from what I've read Russians happened to already lose one vocative case (It ceased to exist in 1918) (though it is still used in orthodox prayers), so now we are kind of trying to rebuild it, I guess xD
In Polish it's the opposite. The vocative is disappearing from informal language, I may use it in case of some friendly "nicknames", but wouldn't address my friends unsing it with their full name, that would sound too formal. I remeber one collegue sayig: "Vocative makes me feel uneasy, I feel as if a teacher is scolding me that I misbehaved." Though it's still in use in a bit more formal situations, when addressing some Pan/Pani, not just by their first name.
@@nerilka9527To make it clearer, in Russian the vocative has been lost, the one you're thinking about, and is only used in texts and some fixed expressions nowadays. The neo-vocative in the video has nothing to do with it, grammatically or semantically, and is actually used informally. It's widespread, but the Russians don't really think about it as a "case", more like an informal way of address.
I think this is a fascinating subject, thank you for furthering my knowledge on the subject. My personal opinion is that this must be a cyclical process, but for a long time the 'erosion' side was much more apparent than the 'orogenic' side so to speak and this is still something I am trying to work out. My knowledge of Russian, problems Russians have in English and a little Chinese have given me a few insights though.
1. Loss of cases isn't a simplification so much as a substitution for other complexities. Native speakers of more analytic languages are often not aware of them and grammars seem a little oblivious to them too. Besides word order, articles are often employed in idiomatic ways and stress and tonal contours on the sentence level can also be quite complex. The latter explains why speakers of synthetic languages often speak monotonously to our ears and also why people sometimes have to read complex sentences in English out loud to make sense of them. You are basically trying to find a stress or tonal contour that fits what is written.
2. Chinese is extremely analytic and composed solely of syllabic stems and also has a very limited number of possible syllables, even when tones are added. To remove ambiguity, most words need two of these stems. Often one of those two are starting to look an awful lot like suffixes. In addition Northern dialects often add 'r' to the end of words as a noun marker. A number of these stems have become particles marking things like possession or aspect. Although the writing system isn't very conducive to it, you can certainly see how it could develop in a more synthetic way.
If this is your very first video, I strongly encourage you to keep making more, as they turn out really well! In addition to the excellent video editing and pleasant audio work, I find that everything is explained quite good, specially the difference between analytic and synthetic (the easiest explanaiton I've ever seen, tbh).
Cheers ^^
7:05 It does not appear clear to me how ‘dormirai’ is more easily reconducted to ‘dormire habeo’ rather than ‘dormibo’? I do understand that phonetically the path from late latin to french could seem more immediate, but it would be harder to then justify the dropping of the periphrastic structure. Especially considering that the infinite+ future of the verb to be is attested in a quite small amount of documents mostly redacted after the rising of the langue d’oïl. Can someone please explain this passage to me?
Can't speak to the French but the same process happened in Spanish, from "cantare habeo" to "cantar he" to "cantaré". We have sources from the XIII Century where we can still find them used analytically rather than synthetically: "Et aun el su destroymiento contar vos lo emos en so tiempo.", where "contar vos lo emos" evolved from "contare + vos + illo + habemus" and eventually gave way to "contaremos" (we will tell).
Damn in that case, Czech is basically the model Synthetic language. We have suffixes for everything and seven declensions.
I'd go with Croatian. Czech lost synthetic past tense (except for the auxiliary "to be" in conditional phrases). In Croatian they still exist, but are considered archaic. I think Lithuanian also has a lot of synthetic verb forms in addition to the cases and many declension patterns.
Standard Swedish does not have 3 cases for nouns, only 2: nominative and genitive. The genitive is like the English genitive though, not like the Old Norse genitive. Many dialects in Norway and Sweden have he dative case, some in Dalarna in Sweden even have the accusative as well.
Indo european and semitic languages have become more analytic because they started fusional. Classical chinese started as analytic and its modern forms like mandarin have become more agglutinative. In modern mandarin, there are affixes to indicate plurality and tense which didn't exist in classical chinese. Fusional languages on average become analytic over time and analytic languages become agglutinative.
And languages that start agglutinative either maintain their agglutinativity or evolve into a polysynthetic language
@@Kiyoliki i think proto indo european was agglutinative at an earlier stage. The multiple suffix morphemes fused together into a single suffix morpheme by the common period before the branches diverged.
@@Kiyoliki polysynthetic are agglutinative languages, but also fusional languages can be.
@@Uulfinn I don't think so. Yes, maybe they share a common ancestor with the Finno-Ugric languages at some point, but the thing is, that postpositions or prepositions don't make the declension alone. For example, in Latin or German etc. such positions require other certain cases. As a Finnish linguist once explained to me is that most cases in Finnish are what in Indo-European languages are or were positions + declension on the noun, and those suffixes in Finnish probably consists of the old noun declension plus a postposition, which have merged, and that's why formed a new case. Or in other words, the postposition merged fully into the noun declension and looks like a distinct and separated case.
English has almost none postpositions, which does make it unlikely to develope agglutination in that sense. But also Japanese almost does agglutination only on verbs, while nouns have just a limited set of postposition markers, which functions as more less declensions, which is why such postpositions are written on that noun in Korean, which actually has almost the same grammar as Japanese. In Chinese, those markers are in fact independent words, which can lose their actual meaning and just function as a grammatical particle/marker, like of ”yesterday“ would stop meaning yesterday but only indicating that an action happened the in the past.
@@SchmulKrieger i never said indo european and finno ugric were related. I said proto indo european was probably agglutinative at a much earlier time before the multiple affixes fused together into a single suffix. You're talking about something else.
The edges of Finland where it "has happened" are areas with Finnish Swedes, who speak Swedish as their mother tongue so it's less about Finnish becoming analytic but rather many citizens, specifically in those two places marked in the thumbnail, not knowing the grammar properly because they speak Swedish.
Latin for "from our houses" = domibus nostris (macron on the "i" or even; "domibus nostrabus" (macron on the "a")
There is no such form as 'nostrābus' - the -ābus ending only exists for a few words.
-īs is the correct ending, but -ābus isn't
@@landy4497 I misunderstood, I thought he meant that the /i/ in domibus was long.
@@Glossologia 👍
Thank you for an interesting video! Something that interests me is that languages with more cases tend to make less or no use of definite and indefinite articles, and how that has evolved.
For example the present-day Slavic languages still have 6 or 7 cases and no articles at all, same as Latin. Ancient Greek had 4 main cases and a definite article but no indefinite article.
What interests me is that as Latin evolved into the Romance languages, cases were dropped and it seems that people felt the need to invent definite and indefinite articles out of the words for 'this' and 'one'.
All Slavic languages with the exception of the South Slavic, Eastern branch, which lost all cases and adopted definitive article in the form of suffix.
@@petrilio Yes that one is particularly interesting.
Good new lingustics channel, also good topic. Keep making more!
I have often wondered about this topic. Because it seems to me a paradox that supposedly older and less sophisticated peoples had more complex languages, as defined by the ease of learning for outsiders. I think about Basque which is supposed to have survived from the Neolithic, and has incredible grammatical complexity. OTOH are the tonal languages of East Asia which I could call ultra analytic, and are just as old.
About invasion, migration and assimilation, I think these phenomena have a role, although exactly how is not clear. Certainly what we would define today as a state has changed over history from the multi-ethnic empire with a dominant ruling group providing the lingua franca of administration, to the modern ethno state. This video is fascinating to me by showing that it is not all one way synthetic to analytic, that it can go the other way sometimes, but it seems less. Here in East Asia I think probably the most interesting case in my mind is the comparison between Cambodian and Vietnamese, both members of the Austroasiatic family. Under heavy Chinese influence, Vietnamese became more monosyllabic and tonal, and thereby more analytic, compared to Cambodian which was more influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, while not becoming synthetic as either of those, retained its original Austroasiatic synthetic features.
The other two topics which really interest me in this area are the notion of a Sprachbund, and the phenomenon whereby one variant of a language family that is internally diverse gets to travel and thereby produce a sub family of daughter languages that are geographically widespread but considerably less heterogeneous.
There are any possible explanations of the simplification of languages over time.
Personally, I favor
1) "Pigdinization" of dominant languages that spread to new populations, especially if the written and spoken standards of the dominant language are too remote keep the simplified dialects in line with the standard.
2) A general trend of IQ to fall over time since humans face fewer and fewer threats thus "Darwin awards" for the slow of mind become less and less common. Also smarter people tend to be less successful in reproducing than those of average intelligence.
3) The urbanization of the population and overspecialization of labor which leads to people losing contact with the natural world and its inherent complexities. A modern city dweller can describe the natural world far less vividly than a shepherd, even if the shepherd is totally illiterate.
Serapeum! Pleasantly surprised the algorithm brought me to you twice! Good luck on your new venture! A man of many talents it would seem.
Ah, thank you 😀 - I will post new things on my other channel too, I promise !
@@Swine_Herd OK why did you use the word fart, and why are you called a swine herd? Is there something going on with you?
I really liked this video! An interesting example of language getting more complicated (synthetic) is in Chinese where the word 这 (zhè, this) adds the suffix 儿 (er) to make 这儿 (zhèr, here), also with 孩 (hái, child-morpheme) being combind with 子 (zì) to make 孩子 (háizi, child). These examples did not exist in middle chinese and don't exist in other chinese dialects. The first example is actually so new that it is often only seen in the beijing dialect of mandarin.
An odd choice of an exemplary morpheme
It served its purpose 😁 I liked it.
My understanding is that English lost a lot of its synthetic feaures during the viking age and the age of the Danelaw. At that time many people learned Englis as adults and not in a leanguage school either, so it became simplier. Plus in many cases the roots of the english and norse words were similar but the case endings were different.
Very interesting informtion
Sounds true...but the pattern is right across west Germanic as well as continental north Germanic ie excluding Iceland Faroe landsmal.
Even Swedish with very different vocab from English is ridiculously uninflected.
ya know, there's a cycle. If a language has post positions (say, mandarin chinese), then it's very likely to grammaticalize those into inflections. If a language has agglutinated inflections, then it's very likely to erode those into fusional endings through sound change. If a language has fusional endings, its likely to level, and eventually lose them, through sound change, and then evolve analytical parts of speech due to the ambiguity.
Yes, just like Spanish will combine words which are really separate, like "contigo", "hacerlo".
This is currently happening with Hindi and Urdu, which does have postpositions. The first person accusative pronoun, for example, is "mujhe". In Urdu, you just use the postposition "ko" to use it in the dative case. In Hindi, though, the pronoun actually changes inflection to "mujhko".
this is a very profound comment. and in fact I'm wondering now where the future tenses in latin (its fusional endings i mean, or those of the subjunctive, as well) came from at first...
Apparently there is somewhat of a cycle where in large periods of time languages evolve this way: agglutinative > fusional > analytic > agglutinative ... Otherwise, after more than 50k years or more of human language existence, all the languages of the world would be analytical by now.
1:14 how many more fumes have you got?
I find the phrasal verbs as an amazing development of fusional properties in English.
I'm looking forward to the #2! I hope there's more to come about linguistics
Next video will probably be a short one explaining tense, aspect and mood
@@Swine_Herd Could you please tell me why you chose this name?
I want a phonetic version of this video. As an East Asian, language simplification seems more obvious in phonetics than in grammar.
I'm no linguist but my guess is language entropy. Without force a language will "degenerate" if you will, into a simpler less inflected language. It takes more energy to keep a language more complex and inflected.
Less inflection does not mean less complexity. Periphrastic constructions can be complex.
Entropy pulls languages in every direction. There are forces that pull languages towards being more analytic, and there are forces that pull them towards synthesis, and we see languages, over time, move in circles, not in a line that leads to some inevitable end.
A change in a language that makes it more concise might make it harder to speak, a change that makes it easier to speak might make it harder to understand, a change that makes it easier to understand might make it wordier. None of these forces "win out" they will battle for as long as we have language, cycling our languages through infinite series of changes. We'll never cycle back and reach the language we had originally, but we also are not degenerating towards some maximally simple language. This isn't physics, energy does not decrease over time in this system.
If less inflection causes a higher level of phonetic complexity, how do you judge the overall complexity then? Chinese is highly analytic, but I don't think we can say it's a simple language. When languages become analytic and rely on single words to convey meaning, they need many more words to express the same thing. But the more words you need, the higher the chance of having homophones, therefore you need to expand your phonetics or make words longer. Chinese has 8 vowels, 23 consonants and 5 tones. The same happens in English, which has a wide variety of vowel and consonant sounds, 13 vowels, 27 consonants and 8 dipthongs. On the other hand, a strong synthetic language like Greenlandic has only 3 vowels and 15 consonants, making it easier to pronounce.
@8:37 definitely the need to learn the language by new comers has forced revived Hebrew to lose some of its inflection, e.g. the feminine plural of (pro)nouns.
(They) hem, hen > hem
(Doctors) rofe'im, rofe'ot > rofe'im
Arabic has the same phenomenon, but since it's uncertain of Arabic dialects' origin, I won't say it for sure, though compared with Classical Arabic, the word order and most of the inflection was lost for good.
Got to admire someone who chooses "fart" as a demo verb, but brickbats to same someone for referring to "a millennia" (plural of millennium) 🤓 ETA: Liked and subscribed.
But he cannot pronounce Latin. "pedəu", haha
This is what I get for recording my videos at one in the morning lol
@@PaulVinonaama Can't play this video out loud. Talks about "farts" and "pedos." lmao
Have faith in Jesus to be saved, turn from your old ways and live life for God who created you, God bless!
Oh God, I just clicked for curiosity as I like the lenguages and I thought that it would be just revision of the knowledge I already know, BUT it was more than I expected. You have my sub. Keep going it!
Excellent video. Very interesting. I subscribed. Keep up the good work!
Very interesting video, I’m studying the English language right now in order to become a teacher but I’ve been considering doing a Master in linguistics in general for a few weeks as I’ve become a big fan of that subject.
I see that your UA-cam channel is brand new, I hope this video is the first of a series of masterpieces like this one and that your channel will grow in consequence. You have my support and my subscription!
Cheers
The history of English is fascinating because of all the major influences (Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Anglo-French), and its modern tendency to borrow words from everywhere. You might be interested in the History of English Podcast, Dr Geoff Lindsey, and David Crystal, who all have lectures on UA-cam. The last two are linguists, and the first one may be too.
Thank you, I'll check that out! @@sluggo206
what a great video! very informative.
My native language is swiss german, a dialect of german, and it has interestingly become both more analytic and synthetic when compared to standard german. Swiss german doesn't use the genitive case at all and has lost a past tense (only past perfect is used), on the other hand, there is an conditional case that standard german doesn't have.
there are also some pronouns that are substituted with suffixes with the verb (I have [...] him = Standard German: Ich habe ihm = Dialect: Ig hanem), so it's fascinating how a shift in both directions, synthetic and analytic, can present itself in a language
In this Swiss German is very German. Standard German does the same. Ich habe ihm... = ich hab'im...
What is the conditional case? The noun is marked for conditional sentences?
I go with the idea that contact with other languages leads to the language becoming more analytical, as at least one person commented below. It would be an interesting study to compare languages that are superstrate with those that are substrate to see which ones transform quicker.
I think there's a cycle between the two.
Analytic is easier for newcomers to learn so languages spreading by influence shift that way.
But longstanding phrases can get reduced producing new inflections and thus more synthetic as this gets adopted through analogy.I
Obviously this can be sped up through sound changes or slowed down by easily distinct forms (eg agglutinative)
If Hungarian stopped being agglutinative you'd just have a completely different language. The only thing I can think of that got simplified massively is that there used to be a second past tense using the auxiliary "vala" that was used like a modern English Past Perfect to express passiveness or something that happened earlier than something else, and it is found in pre-19th century written works. There remains only one synthetic past, and the future is analytic, either using the present tense and the future is just implied by adverbs of time, or the "fog + infinitive" is used, much like the English "will + infinitive".
The (possessive) adjective is declined according to the noun to which it is attached, so it should have been: "domibus nostrīs"
Ah, my mistake; thanks for pointing that out
Da, Domine, pacem in diebus nostris
Already loving this. As an English speaker learning Ancient Greek this explains a lot.
I've literally just been looking around at the use of cases in modern Indo-European languages, so this video is great.
High quality, super interesting, and the comments of the viewers here equally high quality, and super interesting. I could not read all of them, today there are already 1171 comments, but I'll come back here.
Re. case stability, please consider also Basque which seems either intermediate between the "pure" cases of Finnish and Latin or rather tends to the fusional variant. Example (same as in the video but in Basque):
1. etxe (house, home),
2. etxea/etxeak (the house, depending on whether intransitive subject/direct object or transitive subject, ergative logic)
3. etxeak/etxeek (the houses, same ergative logic as above)
4. etxetik (from the house, notice how the -a/-ak nominative declension is no there anymore, replaced by -tik, which is singular)
5. etxeetatik (from the houses, the plural is made differently to the nominative, but similar to some other declensions like "to", which is "etxeetara", and also lots of toponimy ending in -eta with that plural meaning without any declension, e.g. "Arrieta" = the stones)
6. gure etxeetatik = from our houses/home (luckily "our" = "gure" doesn't need declensions in this type of syntagm)
Basque also has lots of declensions (although they're treated as "suffixes" often they are actual declensions) and no preposition whatsoever. It's unclear how old they are but some can be tracked with lesser changes to ancient Iberian, so probably almost as conservative as Finnish ones, which I'd think it has to do with relative linguistic isolation rather than the fusion/agglutinative issue (non-expanding languages evolve much slower, especially if also isolated, just look at Icelandic vs other Norse dialects).
The quality of this video immediately drips off of every word, sound, and graphic. Very nice.
High quality video, good luck on your UA-cam journey!
As a speaker of another agglutinative synthetic language, Turkish, what we do is very similar to Finnish but we put the suffix for "our" before the one for "from".
I can't recall any loss in our synthetic features either, although I'm not an expert. There's even a well-known example of grammaticalization that produced our modern continuous present tense, it apparently comes from the word for "to walk" getting simplified and stuck at the end of verb stems.
Didn't Turkish "lose" one of its future tenses, turning it into a sort of "optative but for bad things" moo?
@@smergthedargon8974 I'm not sure what exactly you mean. If you mean the optative -e suffix, I don't know why it would only be used for bad things. And I don't have any knowledge on the history of this suffix so I don't know about it being used as a sort of future tense, though it doesn't sound far-fetched.
Great infomative video on languages. Please release more. Was disappointed to find only one video from you. I look forward to more!
I speak three Austronesian languages which seem to exhibit the range of simplicity you describe. Bahasa Indonesia is the simplest and most analytic, but it does retain some of the affixes that are found in reconstructed proto-Austronesian. Tagalog (as well as its more modern codification as Filipino) is considerably more complex, with a large number of affixes forming verbs and nouns. However it is mainly synthetic and specifically agglutinative with component morphemes often playing a single role and easily distinguished by role. The third language I speak is Cebuano (also known as Bisaya, especially when spoken in areas outside the island of Cebu), which is closely related to Tagalog. I have often wondered why it seems more complex. It may be somewhat more fusional.
The phonological changes may have something to do with it. Old Tagalog and old Cebuano were written in scripts called baybayin (or badlit), ultimately derived from the Indic Devanagari writing systems via southeast Asian syllabaries. In the sixteenth century, these only transcribed three vowels: a, i/e and u/o. Today Tagalog / Filipino has five vowels. This makes loanwords from Spanish more easily distinguished, but some indigenous roots are also distinguished. Contemporary Cebuano has retained the system of three phonemic vowels, and just collapses vowel sounds together when developing loanwords from Spanish or other languages. (However, Bisaya, which has no standard orthography, will transcribe the phoneme /u/ as "o" in certain positions depending on the affixes used, and will write "e" in loanwords even if they are pronounced like /i/. Typically, there is a lot of dialectal variation). However, in some regions the language is losing the "l" consonant between open vowels. The word for house varies from balay across the language area to baay (with a single long a) in the area around Cebu City (which is the largest metropolitan area in the language area). Tagalog / Filipino has no long vowels.
In Tagalog / Filipino, adjacent vowels are always kept distinct. For example, the "a"s in "maalaala" (to remember, to be able to remember) are all pronounced separately as five syllables. In Cebuano / Bisaya, which has a lot of dialectal variation, vowel sounds flow into each other more smoothly, and the seems to be more use of vowel digraphs. This may be partly due to the different affixes (-a and -i) and clitics in use, particularly the clitic marker -y which fuses with a final vowel in a preceding word. In rapid speech, various dialects of Bisaya will merge adjacent vowels into a digraph or long vowel. In Filipino, adjacent vowels are kept separate, usually inserting a glottal stop between them. This is noticeable in rap and pop songs, where rapid rapping in Filipino will be very choppy and precise (listen to Pablo's triple time rap in the recent SB19 hit song Gento). In Bisaya rapping, vowels will often just disappear and simplify the pronunciation, and the flow of vowels seems smoother and more flexible.
The system of affixes in Cebuano is somewhat more complicated than Tagalog, although many affixes are archaic and seldom used in areas where Cebuano / Bisaya is spoken as a second language or lingua franca. The affixes will no longer be particularly productive but will still occur fossilized in particular words. I haven't looked at it systematically, but I feel that this results in a more fusional form of synthetic language.