Comment by bradrn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradrn | Hacker News Reader

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Oh, this sort of thing goes way back… here’s Swift from 1712, for instance:

> I do here … complain to your Lordship … that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities … Gentlemen … introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, … as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds … They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid … Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.

— A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue [taken from https://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/proposal.html]

Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels! Not that nasty word ‘dess-turbd’ which is impossible to pronounce! What a horrible degradation of the language!”

(For more of this, Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language contains a highly amusing list of examples dating all the way back to Cicero in 46 BC, who complains that the speech of his day was sadly degraded from the great orators of the past. I’m certain I’ve even seen an Ancient Egyptian complaint along these lines, though sadly I can’t seem to find it now.)

It is interesting how much more complex ancient languages were. Just look at Greek and Latin. So many tenses, aspects, time, etc. It doesn't seem odd that things become simpler over time. People are inherently lazy and if they can get by with nicknames, abbreviations, fewer syllables, simpler syntax and grammar, they will. Though this does beg the question, why in the world were language so much more complex the farther back you go? You would think languages would have been simple from the start.

Disclaimer: not a linguist.

Languages don't really become systematically simpler over time, or they would've had to start out incredibly complicated. They have some tendency to cycle between lots of grammatical forms (like Latin) and few grammatical forms with lots of helper words (like English).

("Simple" and "complex" is debatable; English's snarl of helper words is infamously hard to learn.)

It's obvious how you go in the "less inflection" direction, but how do you go in the "more inflection" one? The answer is that you start with helper words, which evolve into enclitics (fragments of words attached to other words, like the n't in 'can't' and 'shouldn't'), and eventually those become suffixes and prefixes, and then merge into the words they're attached to, creating grammatical inflections!

This process is where all(?) of the grammatical forms in Greek/Latin/etc are thought to have come from, afaik. Proto-Indo-European, one of the earliest languages we can reconstruct, seems to have been pretty close to the apex of this process, having just consolidated a bunch of enclitics into grammar.

So the goofy internet 'verbn't' trend is actually a possible glimpse of how English could acquire a negative verb form like Japanese has!

From what I gather, languages don't necessarily get simpler over time, but they do tend to get simpler as the number of speakers increases, particularly if the speakers learn it as a second language.

Russians tend to drop articles in English, Indonesians don't really distinguish between "he" and "she", many learners forget the -s in third person singular verbs ("he make"), irregular forms get regularised ("teacher teached me").

Some of the most complicated languages are spoken by small groups in Africa or Papua Guinea, with features such as an evidential aspect (different verb endings depending on whether you saw something with your own eyes, heard about it, concluded it, etc.) [1], or Mother-in-law-speech, where the language you use changes when you speak to your in-laws [2].

Pidgins tend to be very simple and regular, by contrast.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech

That's because the Russian language doesn't have articles, but other complexities of the language that don't exist in English convey the distinction between, say, "a boy" and "the boy".

> Though this does beg the question....

You are raising the question, not begging it.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-questi...

I have all but given up on this one. It's now notable when I hear someone use the phrase in the "correct" way. Usually the person ends up being someone who majored in philosophy.

This progression is likely due to the fact that people raise questions much more often than they beg questions. Once the phrase started being used in the former sense, it was bound to overtake the latter.

"Begging the question" is a mistranslation of a mistranslation. Saying that it means something other than what people use it to mean is the worst form of pedantry.

From the first sentence of that article:

> Begging the question means "to elicit a specific question as a reaction or response," and can often be replaced with "a question that begs to be answered."

This isn’t really true — in fact, it’s exactly the same fallacy as in Swift’s article. Certainly at a glance Greek and Latin look a lot more complicated than English does, and certainly this is true with respect to their morphology (how words are created from smaller parts), but morphology is far from the only part of language. For instance: word order is pretty much entirely unconstrained in Latin, but English has much more rigid rules about word order, which are nonetheless often fairly subtle and complex to delineate. Or: we can distinguish no less than 11 different tense/aspect combinations in English, but this is non-obvious because they rely on combinations of verb form and auxiliary verb(s), and the auxiliaries themselves nearly all have several different interpretations depending on where and how they are used (see Dixon’s A Semantic Approach to English Grammar for more).

Besides, even when you just look at morphology alone, ancient languages are no more complex on the whole than modern ones. Thus consider Russian, which has more cases than Latin (IIRC). Or Hindustani, which uses an entirely different case system depending on the aspect of the verb. Or Swahili, where the verb inflects for both direct subject and object (but not always!), which have no less than 18 irregular genders, as well as for 28 tense/aspect/mood forms (if Wikipedia is to be trusted) — amongst other categories.

What happens, it turns out, is that languages can grow more complex over time as well as simpler. People do tend naturally to simplify, delete and abbreviate syllables in words — but they also tend to merge words together and elaborate simple constructions to more complex ones, in order to retain the expressive capabilities of their language. I’ve already mentioned Deutscher’s bool The Unfolding of Language; I will recommend it again here, since it has a great summary of exactly how these processes work and interact with each other in order to generate complexity in language.

My idea about that is that people had far fewer fields of endeavour to express themselves in, and yet they had the same cranial volume and brain complexity as we do today, and societies were also relatively similar in patterning (but I guess smaller in size and complexity than today), basically we had similarly complex mental and emotional lives back then as now, but Language was one of the few ways people could actually express all of that "stuff" that now comes out in so so so so many creative ways: the trillion fields of formal and informal endeavour we now have (actuarial science, chemistry, TikTok creators, professional YouTubers, e-sports, parkour, commenting on HN, creating RFCs, creating web standards, programming, East Asian studies, film, music composition, sports medicine, comparative mythology, life hacking, race studies, and so on and so on and so on....)

As a result Language was heavily over-engineered back in the day when it was one of the few ways people could get all that "out".

The main process by which languages become simpler (when they do. It is not a universal rule) is when large numbers of adults have to learn the language. This usually happens during mass migrations involving intermarriage. The newcomers don’t learn all the complex rules and nuances. They tend to leave out some of the more complex parts. If there are enough of these newcomers, then their children start speaking a version of the language that has been simplified by their parent.

English went through this when the Norse invaded England and controlled up to 3/4 of it for several hundred years. As they did not have a large social separation from the English, they tended to intermarry with the English, and because their own language was similar but not the same, it was easier to speak a simpler kind of “pidgin” based on Anglo-Saxon but dropping things like gender and declensions that didn’t match the Norse versions.

When the Normans invaded, they stayed socially separated from the English for much longer and didn’t try to learn English, so there was no repeat of the simplification process. In contrast, the Norman French vocabulary migrated into English and seriously complicated the spellings in English.

Probably latin wasn't the start ;-). We are not 2,000 years old hehe.

> Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels!

Some of these pronunciations still survive, such as "I learned* the words to the song" vs "the learned gentleman".

* as a kid I was taught to write "learnt" but I never see that in the US.

“learnt” is mostly British English.

> Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels! Not that nasty word ‘dess-turbd’ which is impossible to pronounce!

I had a Professor who pronounced the -ed that was at the end of a word as its own syllable. She loved doing that, and it actually wasn't noticable after a short while.

> What a horrible degradation of the language!”

It's not that different from people today saying "wanna" for "want to" or even "me wan go home" for "I want to go home".

Idioms and dialects abound!

I love this, thanks! "Kids these days" of language. Oh well, I'm gonna stop correcting of's used instead of have's - don't want to end up in The Unfolding of Language II. But I will definitely check out the first one, thanks for the tip!

Is this a serious article from Swift? It has "A Proposal" in the name, and we all know about his more famous "Modest Proposal". I can't tell if this is a masterful 18th Century troll job or if he was actually in earnest.

Even if it's satire, it's got to be satirizing an attitude that actually exists - otherwise it's just nonsense.

Given how prevalent the eyeroll-inducing grammar nazis have been in my lifetime (I am happily recovered from that affliction, myself), I have no trouble believing they existed in the 1700s, too.

Sadly, the art of Speaking in Capital Letters has been lost to the Ages.

Many 18th century writers of English capitalized nouns the way it's done in German. For example, the US Constitution does this. But it was already going away by then.

It still exists, but it is rarely taught. When it is time for you to learn it, you will learn The Way of the Capital Letter, and anyone paying even the smallest amount of Attention to your words will Hear them in your speech.

Ah but now we have the informal-internet-speak version of using capital letters to emphasize things that are Very Important.

That’s old school. My favourite source where you can clearly see it in use is Winnie the Pooh; Milne rather liked the style.

I LOVE this. Thank you! :)

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