A friend points out that grammars seem to simplify over time--Attic Greek to Koine, for example, or classical Latin to modern Latin--but why would that happen? Shouldn't they become more elaborate instead? Or does the proliferation of vocabulary serve the elaborating function?
As a first guess, governments have a pretty significant interest in streamlining the use of language. Here's where I point to Seeing Like a State and Peasants Into Frenchmen.
As a second, there's simple efficiency. Different rhetorical modes will suit for different occasions (and involve different word choice and syntax), which should have a mild inflationary effect. If the purpose of language is communication, though, I would expect that all things being equal, grammar should simplify over time. Fewer rules should roughly equate to easier communication.
As a third, I'm not sure languages actually do become grammatically simpler over time. Certainly by the time of Grotius, long, distended Ciceronian Latin sentences are out of fashion. English, though, seems to me a case where grammar and syntax move cyclically through periods of simplicity and complexity. Or, at the very least, the much-heralded transition from the multiple-clause sentence to the comparatively simple one (say Chesterton versus Hemingway) has a number of exceptions (Joyce, Fitzgerald, David Foster Wallace).
Or, if one were so inclined, I might suggest that the view of Latin is wrong because while Latin itself simplified over time, it turned into a bunch of languages that have radically different grammatical rules: it might be easier to read Italian if you know some Spanish, but neither will help you with Romanian.
No comments:
Post a Comment