We always talk if we could go back in time and talk with our country men, but we never talk how crazy it would we to bring a "medieval english caveman" to our time and let him hear what we talk
The plural of the word for house in finnish is: "Taloja" (partitive plural) or "Talot" (nominative plural); the same goes for the word for worm: "Mato" [singular], "Matoja" [plural) or "Madot" To say taloi meaning many houses is kind of slangy or "improper" The "i" rule kind of works with some words, for example with the word for mole (AKA vole, the animal): Myyrä [singular], Myyriä [plural], but the plural form is actually: "Myyrät In summary, “myyriä” is used for an indefinite, non-specific number (partitive plural), while “myyrät” is used for a specific, countable number (nominative plural).
All prototypes are more complex than their representative developed products, since they need to be faster produced against less costs. Same for languages, they develop to be more efficient in use. Apparently it takes a while though.
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).
1:11 Kind of crude toilet humor? 0. 10:25 Typographically error leads to mistranslation. Caption should read "from our houses". 2. Giving thumbs down based on errors.
As a fluent speaker of both synthetic and analytic languages, I can firmly assure: I'm sorry, analytic bros, but synthetic languages are simply better at intricately conveying human thoughts. And I'm glad that there are languages that retain their beautiful synthetic nature and even expand it.
I think there’s something to be said for isolated peoples with little to gnome. Mutual intelligibility with surrounding groups. That also adds to the resistance of, for example, finish. Whereas Latin languages were all on a continuum with mutual intelligibility from Area to Area. Latin speaking peoples, probably found a difficult to clearly understand each other when they didn’t speak the same village-based derivative. This was probably even more so as you went from region to region or the pronunciation and usage differences became more pronounced. Simplicity was the bridge to understand each other. I think you see this English.. after the Viking. You had Anglo-Saxons trying to communicate with Norse. Getting rid of inflections and using prepositions help to clarify things.
I heard that languages don't "simplify", they simply change on a cycle. Analytic > agglutinative > fusional > analytic and so on. Like, Chinese relatively recently began to have a trend towards agglutination while Estonian is getting more fusional
I have always imagined that languages lose synthetic features when they borrow bits of vocabulary and grammar from other languages. For example Latin speakers in the ancient world were famously unable to handle foreign names; they always had to mangle someone's name into a form that would work with their inflections and declinations (for example Iesus rather than Yeshua, because you couldn't decline 'Yeshua' in the ways Latin required for names.) Words from other languages will run smack into your synthetic features by already bearing syllables your language has assigned significance as morphemes, or by not having your standard attachment points for your synthetic morphemes. So if you're going to admit words from other languages, you're going to lose those synthetic features and need to do things in other ways.
I wonder why you say that Hebrew and Arabic are getting more analytic, and if they are, is it that significant considerring the very many verb conjugations they have? Also, regarding languages gettingore analytic when many peopleare learning it as a foreign language, Hebrew was a language that most immigrants to Israel had to learn as a second language, and most of them have done so in the last very few generations.
In my language (Somali Maay) it’s becoming mor analytic. For example the word “feyleteenaa” meaning “Are you all good” This can broken down into: Feyl(é)+et(é)+een+aa Feyl(é) = good -et(é) = to be -een = this is what makes a verb plural ( this plural is only used in a question word) -aa = this is what makes a word that (is referring to two or more people) a question.
Just saw this biography of the language polyglot Daniel Kane: “When a language becomes dead or is going to die, it becomes simplified,” he said. “You see it in languages like Manchu. Let’s say, for example, that in classical Manchu there are a dozen or so words for ‘cup’, such as chalice, goblet, pannikin, et cetera. But, by the end of the Qing dynasty, people have forgotten the other terms; they just know the one word, ‘cup’.” He saw this happening in our society. “Kids these days may say: ‘Yeah, but you don’t know the way we speak.’ But in 10 years from now, all the words that I have in my head will be gone.”
In terms of german... yes and no. But it is not phased out. It is more a matter of Common speech VS book speech. You still ue genitives widely in official letters and TV and such. And tht is not going to change anytime soon. It also is not really old fashioned. It sounds more official. Plus you are not going to use teh dative everytime. In your example "DIe Hauptstadt von dem Land" would be used if you have talked about a certain country already so the dem basically implies knowing what country they talk about. "Die Haupstadt des Landes" is more an entry about a capital of a country that we d not yet know of. So for example Person 1: "Die Hauptstadt des Landes Frankreich ist Paris." (techncoallymore like "Die Hauptstadt von Frankreich ist Paris" Person 2: "Ach, Die Hauptstadt von dem Land ist Paris?" But "Die Haupstadt von dem Land Frankreich ist Paris" Soudns weird and i doubt anyone would really often use that. Yes, some do use the dative all the time, but those tend to be less educated to be honest. Also do not forget that many areas in germany also traditionally do not use the genitive like the lowgerman areas. They used for example "Den Mann sien Huus" The man's house" as the genetive.
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.
1:45 Next time you want to give a funny example about the morpheme ratio to your audience while proving your point that Latin is so cool, I suggest the use of the verb "peduco": in the active form, it means "force your way into something", "get into someting", "to punch through"; in its passive form, it means "to get fucked". A 140:1 morpheme ratio directly related to sex, how lovely! You are welcum.
My theory is that if newcommers in large numbers move into an existing language, they erode it into its mosts simplistic, fuctional forms ... aka analytic forms.
what about phrasal verbs? are particles an analytic or synthetic feature ? in some languages they are detached from verbs (english), prefixed to verbs(slavic languages) or both (german, depending on the tense)
By the way, as a Finnish speaker I can note that Finnish isn't quite perfectly agglutinative - it has developed some fusionality too. This has likely been in part caused by Indo-European influence. Estonian, the most closely related national language to Finnish (Karelian is closer related to Finnish but not a national language), is somewhat more fusional still. Additionally, spoken Finnish language often uses "shortcuts" and simplifications that make it more fusional (similarly to Estonian but somewhat less). Additionally, I would note that the modern Finnish case system is not quite 2000 years old as is. It has been created as an evolution of an older case system and was possibly influenced by the Slavic languages, as the locative case system of modern Finnish is highly analogous with the locative case and preposition system of Slavic languages. The older proto-Finnic/Uralic case system was probably simpler (less cases), possibly similar to the one in modern Turkish or Japanese.
with the fact that this video is analyzing languages to explain languages in a language to me proves that yes, languages do get more "analytical" over time dont they?
I'm shocked that you only have 3 videos, I just saw another video of yours, it was so excellently produced, it's a travesty that you don't have more videos! You are highly talented at what you do, this is not an exaggeration, I haven't seen better produced linguistic videos on RU-vid. Please make more!
What if the languages becoming more analytic is closely tied with the same processes as creation of pigin languages. Once the language is available to a wider population of different ethnic backgrounds it becomes more simple in morphology.
To me this is a nonstarter. They obviously shift and vary with no single tendency to being simpler or more complex. Its likely that complexity increases in times of intense intercultural exchange or rapid changes in society, and then decreases on times of relative stability
Thank you. It would be interesting to have a global perspective, this is predominantly European with some glances eastward. How about Japanese, Chinese, languages of Polynesia, North and South America?
I really appreciate your example of neo-vocative in Russian. Also there was locative, but then it mixed up a bit with prepositive, but it's still here. О лесе - в лесу (o l'es'e - v l'esu) (about the forest - in the forest). They really say in schools that it's the same case! Dirty liars.
Honestly the only difference between analytic and synthetic is whether or not you put a space between the words. How "words" are spelt greatly influnces this and it is worthwhile to explore languages that do not have an equivalent to a spacebar and see how they divide their words
languages like French and Italian relatively recently went through a phase of being imposed on a large section of their poorer populations who spoke local patois, this along with Italian being the language of opera for centuries and French being more recently a lingua franca meant that they imposed archaic forms onto people, there are similar stories with German and Russian as well. Whereas English evolved more naturally. German has had a number of ridged reforms that paralise the language each time. A language like Finnish was probably dug up and ordered or reordered when printing started and only a small number of people could even speak the language correctly I'll bet let alone write when people had to be made literate there it was probably a case of using what they had and calling it Finnish. But like I say English has been allowed to develop naturally over time with efforts made to include words and phrases from all over Anglophonia (Just the British Isles at first). Whereas in many other places in Europe old words and and phrases have been snubbed out in favour of the New Old Ways. So ancient tenses and cases survive. History of literacy has a lot to do with it all. PS I was only guessing with the case of Finnish, I don't really know the history of the Finnish language for certain. Although the histories of Italian, French, English, German and to some extent Russian, I'm more familiar.
