Another related thing is that the grammar of languages appears to be getting simpler with time. Compare the grammar of Latin to that of modern French or Spanish. Or maybe not quite simpler but more structured/regular/principled, as something like the latter has been reproduced experimentally https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1262 (to the extent that this paper’s findings generalize to natural language evolution).
FWIW there is a theory that there is a cycle of language change, though it seems maybe there is not a lot of evidence for the isolating → agglutinating step. IIRC the idea is something like that if you have a “simple” (isolating) language that uses helper words instead of morphology eventually those words can lose their independent meaning and get smushed together with the word they are modifying.
The idea that grammar is just inflection is misleading: languages that are mostly isolating can have complex ordering rules,like the the notorious adjective ordering of English.
Redundancy makes sure the information passes through. In French, the word ‘aujourd’hui’ (‘today’) etymologically means ‘au jour de ce jour’ (‘on the day of this day’), but it is not uncommon to say ‘au jour d’aujourd’hui’ which would literally mean ‘on the day of on the day of this day’. It is also common to say ‘moi, je’ (‘me, I’) and increasingly people even say ‘moi, personnellement, je’ (‘me, personally, I’). This represents a kind of emphasis but also a kind of fashion, simular to what happens in the fashion industry, or a kind of drift, similar to what happens in the evolution of species.
Related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pweg9xpKknkNwN8Fx/have-attention-spans-been-declining
Another related thing is that the grammar of languages appears to be getting simpler with time. Compare the grammar of Latin to that of modern French or Spanish. Or maybe not quite simpler but more structured/regular/principled, as something like the latter has been reproduced experimentally https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1262 (to the extent that this paper’s findings generalize to natural language evolution).
FWIW there is a theory that there is a cycle of language change, though it seems maybe there is not a lot of evidence for the isolating → agglutinating step. IIRC the idea is something like that if you have a “simple” (isolating) language that uses helper words instead of morphology eventually those words can lose their independent meaning and get smushed together with the word they are modifying.
The idea that grammar is just inflection is misleading: languages that are mostly isolating can have complex ordering rules,like the the notorious adjective ordering of English.
As for french …Moi, je ne me défile pas.
1st person. Sing.
1st person. Sing, again.
Negative.
1st person. Sing, reflexive.
Verb!!!
Negative,again.
Fair enough. Modify my claim to “languages tend to move from fusional to analytic (or something like that) as their number of users expands”.
Redundancy makes sure the information passes through. In French, the word ‘aujourd’hui’ (‘today’) etymologically means ‘au jour de ce jour’ (‘on the day of this day’), but it is not uncommon to say ‘au jour d’aujourd’hui’ which would literally mean ‘on the day of on the day of this day’. It is also common to say ‘moi, je’ (‘me, I’) and increasingly people even say ‘moi, personnellement, je’ (‘me, personally, I’). This represents a kind of emphasis but also a kind of fashion, simular to what happens in the fashion industry, or a kind of drift, similar to what happens in the evolution of species.