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Education Science

Grammar Traces Language Roots 214

Posted by CowboyNeal from the ancestral-tongues dept.
mlewan writes "Researchers use grammar to trace relations between Papuan languages. What is interesting is not that much that they use grammar features to do this, but that they seem to have given up using vocabulary as a help."
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Grammar Traces Language Roots More

Grammar Traces Language Roots

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  • If they want a real challenge... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TrappedByMyself ( 861094 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @11:47AM (#13638309)
    Use the same techniques to decipher Slashot headlines

    Researchers use grammar to trace relations between Papuan languages. What is interesting is not that much that they use grammar features to do this, but that they seem to have given up using vocabulary as a help.
    • Great sentence structure! Seriously, too many Slashdotters think correct grammar is the end-all be-all requirement for decent writing. They never realize that style dictates the clarity of a message more than the grammar. Note the popularity of four-clause sentences in Wikipedia ("the encyclopedia that Slashdot built"), and you see what I mean.

  • Makes sense. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HugePedlar ( 900427 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @11:48AM (#13638314) Homepage
    Even in England, different regions use different words and pronunciations (which could count as different words). But we all use the same grammar. It's easy to change the sounds of a sentence, but to change the structure requires hefty evolution, and hence a separation of culture.

    • Re:Makes sense. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 )
      Makes perfect sense really. I mean look at the English language overall. The vocabulary varies within the three major countries that speak it (America, England and Australia), but the grammar has stayed steadfast to the language, so much in fact that we can understand most sentences that each other speak, even if we don't know what a certain word means. I've always thought that was one of the amazing things about language.
      • There are people what use slightly different grammar, however. They speech is understandable, but it's different.
        • Certainly. I'm just stating that vocabulary is usually not what determines the language, the grammar rules are much more important. I wouldn't be able to understand what you posted if I relied on vocabulary alone ( There are people what use slightly different grammar, doesn't make any sense once so ever), but as I understand the grammar, I know that "what" should be "that", and the sentence makes sense. It's the reason I don't bother to spellcheck my posts in Word (that, and the fact Slashdot doesn't have a

      • Re:Makes sense. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by HugePedlar ( 900427 )
        Furthermore, whilst vocabulary within a language can diversify yet remain part of the same language, vocabulary can easily bleed between diverse languages. Consider that the word "television" might exist in Chinese (I've no idea whether it does or not). That doesn't mean that Chinese was in any way derived from Latin (or Greek, I dunno). Words can migrate with ease. You certainly wouldn't expect Chinese grammar to suddenly mimic ours though.
        • "tele" is (roughly) distance in Greek, vision is from "visionem", a Latin word for seeing things. But yes, words are very often borrowed and blended from languages. Some people quote that 40% of English was ripped from French, which nearly 90% or more was ripped from Latin, which was devised from Greek, et cetera. Today our languages are so blended that even an English speaker can pick up many words a French or Spanish-speaking person says, even if the word doesn't translate perfectly. The main problem with

          • Re:Makes sense. (Score:2, Interesting)

            by cp.tar ( 871488 )

            Latin, which was devised from Greek

            Ouch.

            Ouch, ouch, ouch.

            Latin and Greek are not related any closer than Latin and Hittite or Latin and Sanskrit (which should really be spelled Sanskrt).
            While certain things in Latin culture have been borrowed from Greek, the languages themselves are not related, apart from belonging in the Indo-European family.

            Latin is a member of the Latin/Faliskic group, while Greek has no close relatives.

            Furthermore, Romance languages are not that heavy on flection as Slavic ones

      • Re:Makes sense. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Eightyford ( 893696 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:15PM (#13638426) Homepage
        The vocabulary varies within the three major countries that speak it (America, England and Australia)

        Eh?
      • Well, maybe not quite the same:

        UK: I haven't got a nose. US: I don't have a nose.

        UK: Microsoft are delaying Longhorn. US: Microsoft is delaying Longhorn.

        Also, grammar certainly does change quite a bit even in the course of a thousand years. E.g., "With this ring I thee wed" is a remnant of when English used Subject-Object-Verb ordering (like German) instead of Subject-Verb-Object, whereas most of the so-called "strong irregular verbs" in English can be traced back to proto Indo-European (~7000 BC).

        • Re:Grammar changes too (Score:4, Informative)

          by ikkonoishi ( 674762 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:45PM (#13638551) Journal
          UK: I haven't got a nose.
          US: I don't have a nose.
          Alabama: I don't got no nose, boy. It done got bitt off by Bubba's houn' dawg.

          (I'm a resident. I can say this sort of thang, and get away with it y'all.)

          • Re:Grammar changes too (Score:2, Interesting)

            by cp.tar ( 871488 )
            Damn, I do wish I didn't spend that last mod point...

            On a sidenote, as a non-native English speaker, I have to ask: where would you put 'I ain't got no nose'?
            Geographically, I mean.

          • The verb tenses I learned in my school books in the Northeastern US didn't *always* match the way the kids on the street or the people on TV spoke, and most people didn't use the more complex Latin-like forms (subjunctives and optatives and the like) very much. But Southerners have all sorts of different verb forms, especially for future or potential future events. I'm not just talking about uneducated-white-boy Ebonics-equivalent or "ain't" or the assertion that a Southern accent is like losing 20 IQ
        • Any of those sentences is perfectly understandable by a speaker of either British and American English, and in fact I've heard all those forms on both sides of the Atlantic. One or the other may be more common in one location than the other, but it's by no means exclusive.
        • One day when I was bored a compiled a list of all of the differences between American English and UK English.

          http://s95353305.onlinehome.us/british [onlinehome.us]

          Some may be old or unused...
        • US: I don't have a nose.

          Hmmm . . . I could have sworn it was "I don't have a nose, you know what I'm saying?" . . .

    • Re: Makes sense. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 )
      > Even in England, different regions use different words and pronunciations (which could count as different words). But we all use the same grammar. It's easy to change the sounds of a sentence, but to change the structure requires hefty evolution, and hence a separation of culture.

      All the same, the various Indo-European languages vary greatly in grammar, and we might never have recognized the family's existence if grammar was all we looked at.

  • Huh? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What is interesting is not that much that they use grammar features to do this, but that they seem to have given up using vocabulary as a help.

    In other news, researchers find little evidence of English language roots in Slashdot postings.

    • Re:Huh? (Score:3, Funny)

      by HugePedlar ( 900427 )
      LOL ur so rite!

      • Re:Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        LOL - exclamatory particle (interjection)
        ur - 2nd person singular present tense copula (not marked for aspect like "ub")
        so - intensifier (adverb)
        rite - adjective modifying the subject of "ur"

        Vocabulary is nearly arbitrary, but the range of grammar that is comprehensible to the human mind is limited. Sure, you get polysynthetic and analytic languages, but they are, in the final analysis, reducible to a limited set of methods for operating on vocabulary. Phylolinguistics knows this, and that's what TFA is t

  • Ramsey Theory (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One can always, eventually, make out structure from random noise. At what point do you stop blindly searching for the sake of it?

    • Re:Ramsey Theory (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:00PM (#13638362)
      The problem here is, we know it's not just "fuzz". These people are communicating, but like Dolphins (for a good example of undecypherable language), it's very hard for outsiders to have any clue of how to translate.

      If we stop looking for how to translate it, we lose all that society has generated in terms of culture and myth, we lose another piece of humanity. Of course, people will argue that this doesn't matter, and I'm certain people will live without it, but it's still humanity, and we should be looking for ways to unite our people and not seperate ourselves.

      Lastly, the tools we use to break the code of earthly languages will be invaluable if we ever make contact with other civilizations and intellegences. We can't even decrypt dolphin banter here on earth, and yet when ET phones us we're expected to pick up the phone and talk to him in plain English? Perhaps we've been bombarded by alien signals for hundreds of years now in a multitude of frequencies and different alien languages and simply can't decypher any of them because our linguistics aren't that well developed. And if our linguistics aren't that developed what does that tell you about the rest of our societies? Food for thought.

      Language and Communication are two of the most important and employable sciences we humans can study and use. But yes, there's always a chance you can be over examining the issue. I just feel that this isn't one of those cases.
  • Aren't these the same guys who think English is grammatically closer to German than it is to Swedish?
    • I have no idea. Please, enlighten us...

    • Re:Yeah, right. (Score:3, Informative)

      by 0rionx ( 915503 )
      The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages (probably from early Scandinavian), whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin (a good deal of it comes via French, thanks to the Normans). Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.

      • Actually, although yes we do have a lot of vocabulary from Latin via Norman-French, it's far from the majority or 'core' - it's just an overlay. And English separated from other Germanic languages gradually after the invasions of Britain - in the early period what became the various Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, plus some minors depending on how you classify) were not really separated either. For instance, if you read Beowulf you'll find that the hero of the tale

      • Re:Yeah, right. (Score:3, Informative)

        by dajak ( 662256 )
        The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages (probably from early Scandinavian), whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin (a good deal of it comes via French, thanks to the Normans). Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.

        The core vocabulary, which is inseparable from the grammar, is clearly predominantly Germanic. There is no grammar left withou

        • [English] is the only Germanic language, as far as I know, that uses non-Germanic words and concepts for core legal vocabulary (law, violation, [...]

          Nope. The Nordic languages have lov(Norwegian/Danish) and lag (Swedish). I also believe this word is very old in Nordic languages. Violation reminds me a lot of vold (Norwegian) which means "violence", but also in a rather metaphoric sense: volde skade means inflict harm, and forvolde means cause (in a legal context).

          The other words, though, seems to matc

          • Nope. The Nordic languages have lov(Norwegian/Danish) and lag (Swedish). I also believe this word is very old in Nordic languages.

            I Stand Corrected.

            These Nordic, English and Romance words appear to be cognates. But related to what historical language?

  • Question (Score:5, Funny)

    by deutschemonte ( 764566 ) <lane,montgomery&gmail,com> on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:03PM (#13638374) Homepage
    Why is there a story about grammar on a site whose editors can't understand the difference between "its" and "it's"?
    • Why is there a story about grammar on a site whose editors can't understand the difference between "its" and "it's"?

      Perhaps they thought that the story was about actor Kelsey Grammer.

  • Makes sense (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    English has roots in ancient Saxon. Its vocabulary is largely from Latin via French. The grammar is still largely based on Saxon though. If you analyzed the vocabulary, you would conclude that English was a derivative of French. If you analyze the grammar, you conclude that it came from Saxon.

    It's also interesting to look at traditional rites, which don't change as rapidly as the rest of the language. For instance, there are lots of Christmas carols which have English usage that hasn't been used in eve

    • Re:Makes sense (Score:2, Informative)

      by Lillesvin ( 797939 )

      If you analyzed the vocabulary, you would conclude that English was a derivative of French.

      That's not entirely true. Yes, you'd see that English has a lot of words from French, but then you'd iterate further and find out where French has it from etc.

      Besides, when trying to determine language roots by using vocabularies, you'd use a core vocabulary, ie. words that are likely not to be borrowed from other languages. (Using words like prime minister, bulldozer etc. makes no sense, since they are very ne

    • > English has roots in ancient Saxon. Its vocabulary is largely from Latin via French. The grammar is still largely based on Saxon though.

      Au contraire, modern English sentence structure is far more like French than like its own ancestral forms.

      Also, our core vocablulary is still mostly Germanic (pronouns, articles, prepositions, names for relatives, etc.), and for other words we have so many lexical borrowings from French and Latin that we essentially have a dual vocabulary system.

      Sorry to say, but you h

  • Japanese and Korean (Score:3, Insightful)

    by line.at.infinity ( 707997 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:34PM (#13638499) Homepage Journal
    It has long been known that Japanese and Korean have had similarities in grammar, but both have been classified as language isolates as a result of not being able to find strong vocabulary links as nice as Indo-European languages. Some consider the two languages to be a part of the larger Altaic language group. Maybe this new method of investigation will turn up more useful results than the vocab link which is increasingly becoming a dead end.
    • The reason that Japanese and Korean are both considered "isolates" and not related to each other is more political than anything else. Koreans are still a bit sore about that whole subjugation thing, and (especially older) Koreans really do hate the Japanese. The older generation of Japanese aren't too fond of Koreans either, so they both refuse to admit that their languages(which is much more a part of cultural identity than in the west I think) are related purely on political grounds. Koreans especiall
      • ...the Japanese tried to destroy the Korean language(classes were all in Japanese, all published material was in Japanese etc)...

        That sounds very similar to what happened in Euzkadi (the basque land) during Franco's government, which attempted to assimilate the basque culture. Euskera (the basque language) was banned from schools, from church, from television and radio, from the printed page, etcetera. After much violence over the years, this situation has thankfully come to pass.

        Maybe the grammar databas

  • Unsound methodology (Score:5, Informative)

    by kurisuto ( 165784 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:50PM (#13638581) Homepage
    The article reports that "the researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French."

    Unfortunately, these aren't reliable characteristics for determining language relatedness. For example, English and German are both undisputably West Germanic languages and are very closely related, having branched less than 2000 years ago. Nevertheless, German nouns have grammatical gender, while English nouns don't. German verbs come at the end of the clause (except in the main clause), while in English the placement of the verb is much more flexible but rarely at the end of the clause. Other examples could readily be given.

    There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field: namely, by identifying a core of lexical and morphological items which show systematic correspondences in their sounds between languages (e.g. English father, fish, Latin pater, piscis), and which can't reasonably be attributed to borrowing or to chance.

    Of course it would be nice if we could show relatedness between languages which branched further back than 10,000 years or so. Because of the way in which languages change, it's very unlikely that we'll ever be able to do so, at least if we are observing accepted standards of scientific rigor. Approaches roughly similar to the one described here have been attempted repeatedly in recent years, and have been repeatedly answered in the literature. You don't earn brownie points for sexing up an unreliable methodology by involving computers.

    IAAPHCL (I am a professor of historical and comparative linguistics).
    • You made many good insights in your post, and the fact that you have at least some familiarity with linguistics shows, which would make sense if you're indeed a professor of linguistics. :) I admit no such claim for myself but do readily confess an interest in the field which I plan to pursue through a SIL course as soon as finances permit. I wonder though if perhaps a comparative grammar would have more weight in a comparative study of linguistic origins rather than just the lexical origins of a language

      • Re:Unsound methodology (Score:3, Informative)

        by Krach42 ( 227798 )
        The relation of father->pater, and fish->piscis are a nature of English having gone through the first sound shift of German languages. This is where the Germanic language as it existed at that time underwent a general change different from Latin, such that Latin ended up with "pater" with a P sound, while English ended up with "father" with an F sound at the beginning.

        A better example would be to show the other languages that are more closely related to English: German: Vater (pronounced fater), Dut

    • The article reports that "the researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French."

      Unfortunately, these aren't reliable characteristics for determining language relatedness.

      You don't mention whether you evaluated the research itself, or merely the report of the research. I get the sense from our post that you

    • Nice to see a fellow graduate from PENN. I did part of my studies on the sixth floor of the Williams, too. I'm not a linguist, but a Sanskritist.

      Anyhow, I always had the impression that historical linguistics had an easier time establishing methodologies depending on Indo-European languages. Those languages don't take a pro to notice similarities between its family members. Using one of your examples, stuff like father vs. pit.r (skt), mother vs. maat.r (skt) are easy enough to figure out they are relate

      • The comparative method as applied in Indo-European has been shown to work quite nicely for non-European languages. The state of work on the Algonquian languages (such as Massachusett, Cree, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Micmac, Western and Eastern Abenaki) is comparable to that of Indo-European, as is that of Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mordvin, etc.), to take just two examples.

    • Because of the way in which languages change, it's very unlikely that we'll ever be able to do so, at least if we are observing accepted standards of scientific rigor.

      Unfortunately, when studying the past you can't make experiments, reproducible or not. As a result, fields like evolution or linguistic history will always be less scientifically rigorous than other fields.

      There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field:

  • Indonesian language (Score:2, Informative)

    by koinu ( 472851 )
    I find the article interesting, because it mentions Indonesian. I've learned Indonesian, because of my ex-girl-friend. It's very interesting and much easier than English. When you take a closer look at it, it seems as someone really thought about it and removed every trace of difficult grammar. The one thing you have to learn is the vocabulary.

    When I travelled to Jakarta (capital of Indonesia) the first time, I found out that that noone really speaks Indonesian there. The whole beautiful language does not

    • Re:Indonesian language (Score:5, Informative)

      by dajak ( 662256 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @02:07PM (#13639089)
      It's very interesting and much easier than English. When you take a closer look at it, it seems as someone really thought about it and removed every trace of difficult grammar. The one thing you have to learn is the vocabulary.

      When I travelled to Jakarta (capital of Indonesia) the first time, I found out that that noone really speaks Indonesian there.

      Bahasa Indonesia [wikipedia.org] is a derivative of what we used to call Dienstmaleis ('service malay') in the Netherlands. This is the standardized language taught in the Netherlands to civil servants who were sent to the Netherlands Indies, and it is based on similarities between Malay dialects of Islamic merchants who travelled between the islands. It became the national language of Indonesia because it was the only language, besides Dutch, that the native civil service class on the islands shared with eachother. This precursor language has never been a living language; It was designed at the universities of the colonial oppressor. Indonesia doesn't like to acknowledge this, because these mythological Indonesian-speaking merchants who existed before the Dutch are central to the claim of being a historical 'nation'.
    • From what I understand, javanese is an honorific language. That is, the words you choose depend on the relative class of yourself and the one you are addressing. So you may have six ways to say exactly the same thing -- which words you choose depend on whether you are honored more, less, or the same as your listener and to what degree.

  • The Nature Article is Badly Misleading (Score:5, Informative)

    by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposer@@@alum...mit...edu> on Saturday September 24, 2005 @01:24PM (#13638806) Homepage

    That Nature article is badly misleading in claiming that traditional historical linguistic methods are based on vocabulary and that it is an innovation to use grammar. It is true that amateurs' ideas about linguistic relationship are based almost entirely on vocabulary, but that isn't true of what professional historical linguists do.

    To begin with, there are two different problems to be addressed. The first is, given a bunch of languages, are they related at all, where by "related", we mean "descended from a common ancestor". The second problem is, given that a bunch of languages are related, HOW are they related, that is, what is the family tree, in what order did they separate?

    To determine whether languages are related, we look at "similarities". I put this in scare quotes because the relevant sorts of "similarities" are more accurately described as congruences, that is, systematic relationships between languages that may not necessarily be "similar" in the usual sense. For example, English and Armenian are distantly related members of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Indo-European *dw appears in English as /t/, as in "two", while in Armenian it appears as /erk/ as in /erku/ "two". Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk is a regular sound change in that it happens in all of the attested cases in which that sequence of sounds is found. It is almost certainly the result of a series of less peculiar changes of which the intermediate stages happen not to be attested. The point is that this kind of systematic relationship is evidence of historical relationship between languages but is not a similarity in the usual sense.

    Given some similarities or congruences between languages, the first question that arises is whether they might be due to chance. It is easy to find examples. For example, the Korean word for "language" is /mal/, as is the Icelandic word. There is no other reason to think that Korean and Icelandic are related, so this is written off as a coincidence. Amateurs tend not to realize how high the probability is of chance resemblences - there is a large crank literature in which people list words that they consider similar in sound and meaning in two languages and offer this as evidence of relationship.

    One reason that historical linguists look for regular sound changes like Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk, or less exotic, Proto-Indo-European *p -> English f (e.g. English "father", Latin "pater", Sanskrit "pitar") is that regular sound changes, which are reflected in regular sound correspondences among the daughter languages, greatly reduce the number of degrees of freedom and therefore provide evidence that the similarities observed are not merely coincidences.

    A first point, then, is that even to the extent that historical linguists rely on vocabulary for establishing relationships, what they rely on are the regular sound correspondances, not raw similarities in words.

    Now, given that we have reason to believe that there are similarities between two languages that are unlikely to be due to chance, we still have to determine their origin.One possibility is that they are due to common descent,in which case we have evidence of a genetic relationship. The alternative is that the similarities are due to diffusion. Diffusion can consist of outright borrowing, e.g. English acquiring karate from Japanese, or it can be less direct, e.g. Amharic and Tigrinya shifting away from the old Semitic verb-initial word order to verb-final word order under the influence of the neighboring languages in Ethiopia and Eriterea. The problem is, how can we tell whether a given similarity is due to genetic relationship or to diffusion?

    The answer is, sometimes we can, but often it is hard, maybe even impossible. If you have multiple sets of regular sound correspondances, at most one of them can be genetic. The others must reflect borrowing. If the vocabulary that show

  • Probably a mixture of both (Score:4, Insightful)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @02:52PM (#13639353) Journal
    I speak German, Swiss-German, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, English and some Spanish and Turkish. One thing that really amazed me about Turkish is that, despite being seperated for over 1000 years, a Turk can still make himself understood throughout central asia from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. The languages have changed very little from proto-Turkic. Whats more, once you learn the grammatical system on which Turkish is based, you immediatley notice the exact same or at least very similar features throughout the Ural-Altaic language group, from Finnish, Hungarian, through to Turkish and Mongolian: The way that these languages almost uniformally have no concept of grammatical gender (no word for he or she), the way that these languages universally use the concept of adding prepositions as suffixes onto the end of words instead of being seperate as is generally the case in Indo-European languages, the very large case system also added as suffixes to the ends of words, and the concept of vowel harmony, where, in the beginning of a word which has back vowel such as a,o and u, or front vowels such as ä, ü or ö, will force the rest of the word to also change their vowels to fit in with the pattern.

    It is amazing that this structure of these languages has remained so solid such that Hungarian and Finnish, which have no common words, have a very similar grammatical structure after having being seperated for almost 3500 years.

    This is absolutely not the case with Indo-European languages where a modern English person can usually not understand their own language from 1200 years ago, much less German or Dutch which were both very closely related to Old English at the time. Granted Old English changed very much with the viking invasions when it mixed with Old Norse and then once again when it mixed with old French after the Norman invasion, such that the structure of a modern English sentence resembles Scandinavian more than it does German, but its vocabulary resembles German/Dutch and French.

    In summary, I think that language is a reflection of both society and environment. People will make up new words to fit changing circumstances, and language structure will change when different languages meet. Simply trying to match grammatical patterns will work well on some language groups such as Ural altaic, but not so well on others, such as Indo European where vocabulary patterns are better matched (try matching English's almost complete lack of grammatical cases with Czech's 7 cases). Pattern matching on languages should try to take not only historical environmental situations into account, but also language group mixing, language evolution patterns if possible, and integrate those with vocab and grammatical patterns.

    For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.
    • I speak German
      This is absolutely not the case with Indo-European languages where a modern English person can usually not understand their own language from 1200 years ago, much less German or Dutch

      I think you missed another great point to make. The variety of German dialects in Germany. [side note, how the heck did English get Germany as the name for Deutschland?] Especially since (as I understand it) it is very hard for two people in Germany speaking there native dialects (as opposed to High Germa
    • For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.

      This isn't actually all that accurate. For instance, many would say that Latin is more complex than Spanish. But then you get into all the features of Spanish that aren't in Latin, and make Spanish more difficult than Latin.

      While English has lost it's case system, it's gender system and numerous other Germanic f
    • For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.

      You seem to have a unique, inter-related perspective on languages, given the number of them that you know. I speak a measly two languages, Spanish and English, which makes me feel quite poor, as if there's a banquet of humanity and all I have is a loaf of bread and a glass of water.

      Yes, it's a good question, but
    • Just a couple of points: Languages today aren't grammatically simpler than they used to be. Many languages have whittled down old case systems with more cases to ones with less (or, as in English, none), and similar things have happened to verbs. Meanwhile, though, those same languages have done horrible things to their word order, prepositional and modal/auxilliary verb systems. What's the difference between 'shall', 'will', 'going to' and 'gonna' when expressing something in the future? And that's only fo

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