This is progress.
They shook off the German autism
>drop the past tense next and just add a particle at the end of the sentence to imply that the event was in the pastBut you won't start doing that, will you?
The analytical tendency in language is clearly stupid and degenerate
>>18539201
>>18539477Yes, Indo-European languages have been simplifying ever since Proto-Indo-European, at least Western European languages, Eastern European languages haven't simplified nearly as much. But for a fair comparison I didn't post the complete paradigm.
>>18539494I really wonder what causes it. I used to think it was somehow an inbuilt trait of Indo-European, but Balto-Slavic and Albanian are relatively stable. With Germanic it makes some sense because the final syllables are clipped by the accent which eventually erodes grammatical information, and this also adequates explains French since there is a fundamentally Germanic accent underlying it, but it doesn't explain other Romance languages. Indo-Iranian is also pretty bad.
>>18539201>This is progress.Is it really?You show one example, so it looks like simplification, but in a language many words have to be modified in similar ways, meaning that there is a pattern to the modification of all words. That pattern is a simple rule.What I would say is that Swedish has been Anglified rather than simplified.
>>18539518No. I speak Swedish. It is only gräver and grävde. Clear simplification compared to Old Norse. I was being ironic when I said it's progress.
>>18539497I believe the fundamental reason is that complex morphology and phonology are more easily trained in a tightly knit homogeneous population. When a population is more heterogeneous and spread out, sophisticated morphology gives way to vocabulary that accomplishes the same task. The morphology must be taught at a young age within a small window of time, but individual words can be learned at any time.There are two major events that led to this state of affairs: the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European speakers and later the disintegration of Proto-Germanic speakers.
>>18540285I don't think that's a good hypothesis. All of Scandinavia including Iceland used to speak one and the same language, it was mutually intelligible. This was a population spread out over a vast area, considering that the technology was not as advanced as today, meaning you couldn't send an email from Denmark to Iceland. This doesn't just address the simplification of languages, but also the fact that languages have evolved from common roots, from fewer languages to a greater number, divergence rather than convergence, even though technology has progressed, which doesn't seem to make sense.>that accomplishes the same taskit doesn't>The morphology must be taught at a young age within a small window of time, but individual words can be learned at any time.no>There are two major events that led to this state of affairs: the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European speakers and later the disintegration of Proto-Germanic speakers.As I said, Old Norse was spread out over all of Scandinavia including Iceland.
>>18539518>Swedish has been AnglifiedHow the fuck would that happen when English has only been widely spoken in Sweden in the last 50 years
>>18540285meh Russian did just fine spreading across Eurasia and within the Empire/USSR despite its infamous case system
It's interesting that those that simplified their language were the ones that were more successful. People defending complicated linguistic things always say it leads to higher IQ and shit like that.
>>18540738The "complex grammar = smarter" meme is especially hysterical when you remember that many West African Bantu languages got considerably more convoluted grammar and wacky features in them than English or French could even conceive of
>>18540738Yes there is a correlation, but why there is a correlation we don't know. When Prussia lost a battle against Napoleon, Prussia instituted the Prussian education system shortly after as a direct response to the defeat, because they determined that the defeat was due to Prussian soldiers being too educated and overthinking, so they designed the education system to dumb down the masses, in order to make Prussia more effective in war. Same thing happened in the Sputnik crisis in the 1950s. The Soviet Union launched the world's first satellite. The USA then abolished Euclid from education in order to dumb down the people, so that the USA would compete against the Soviet Union more effectively.
>>18540775It's just noun classes, besides that Bantu is not that wacky
>>18540817>When Prussia lost a battle against Napoleon, Prussia instituted the Prussian education system shortly after as a direct response to the defeat, because they determined that the defeat was due to Prussian soldiers being too educated and overthinking,Where the hell did you read that that was the conclusion they drew? Most Prussian soldiers then were borderline illiterate peasants from the swamps of Brandenburg and after the Humboldtian reforms Prussia went on to become an intellectual powerhouse
>>18540817You should read about what the Prussian system actually was. They divided people into four categories: dumb and lazy, smart and lazy, smart and hardworking, dumb and hardworking. The dumb and lazy were made janitors, drivers, and cannon fodder. Calling them "dumb and lazy" was really an overstatement. These people were simply unexpectional. They constituted the overwhelmingly majority. The smart and lazy became strategists, diplomats, theorists. The smart and hardworking became officers and generals. The dumb and hardworking were identified as the most dangerous of all types and were prohibited from any sort of power or influence. Think of the kind of person who, when assigned to write an essay, would spend hours looking for an obscure author to get away with plagiarizing, instead of simply developing their own possibly inferior but authentic thoughts. In a normal organization that isn't actively rooting out these types, they can advance quite far.
>>18541542>Literally just making shit up awardWhere the fuck do you people come up with this rubbish? The German education system has tiers yes, but not these categories and never have I heard of them referenced in any of our literature. If you're destined for "higher" intellectual pursuits then traditionally you'd be placed in the Gymnasium for an Abitur graduation and University education; someone of good intellect but less focused on humanities, theorizing, etc. would go on to study "Real Sciences" like Engineering, Agricultural Science, etc... But more often than not, the distinction came down to economic class and who grew up in cities vs in the countryside
>>18541542>Think of the kind of person who, when assigned to write an essay, would spend hours looking for an obscure author to get away with plagiarizing.But enough about my Bachelor thesis.
>>18539201Made me think of high-context/low-context cultures.
That's the natural tendency of languages. They simplify over time. German has so many autistic rules with cases and gendered nouns, English shrugging most of that off somewhere in the transition between Old English and Middle English was probably the greatest boon for the language and part of how it became so easy to spread.
It's kind of sad that the future subjunctive tense died out in Spanish. It looks and sounds old and classy. Tense/conjugation simplification is a mistake.
>>18541903>That's the natural tendency of languages. They simplify over time. German has so many autistic rules with cases and gendered nounsYou're contradicting yourself right there. And no, it's not a natural tendency, see picrel, all these languages evolved from the same ancestor language.>autisticstfu retard, and learn languages before you discuss languages>greatest boon for the languageno, it became a grug language>part of how it became so easy to spreadno shit sherlock
>>18541922It died out? I think they still got that in Portuguese
>>18541936>Germany mapOkay wtf are you telling me Bavarian and Austrian dialects actually have straight up less cases than Standard German too? I knew Bavarians were incomprehensible but I figured it was only vocabulary and accent, not outright different grammar
>>18541542Have you ever tried to irganize anything? Because such a guy is totally fine, he knows his limits, and asks questions when anything is unclear. >develops his inferior thoughsTHAT guy is an absolute nightmare. He takes his own initiative doing something that nobody asked for, and nobody needs, and doesn't even notify anyone so that he could be told to stop. Then he claims that he "didn't know", and thinks it's a comoletely reasonable excuse for the mess he has done.
>>18542013So-called German dialects are separate languages. Plattdeutsch, aka Low German, has different grammar from High German, the former is simpler and is more like Dutch, Scandinavian languages and English in complexity of grammar.
>>18541936>new whiteness map just dropped
>>18539201I start spamming in Old English every time I see a working class American mischling trying to cargo cult cult erudition by complaining about someone's "improper English".
>>18540386a large population spread but a small amount of people overall. it matters less that tribes/villages were separated and could not easily interact, less people means less happens. less innovations, less necessity for change. maybe even more societal allowance for preserving stuff that would get waysided if there was more important/varying political stuff to worry about or prepare your kids for. also i really doubt the language was entirely homogenous like that.
>>18542055ok brainlet
>>18539497I believe it's actually easier to speak morphologically complex languages. Competent speakers learn to recognize entire morphological words as wholes (similar to how you recognize a sitting cat, a cat with its tummy up, a cat licking its anus as the same animal) which greatly reduces the number of symbols that need further processing, and the cognitive effor required for speaking. But iron made thinking more analytical, people lost the ability to recognize words in such a holistic manner, and it made morphology a burden.
>>18539201grófu-ck yourself.
>>18542036You may have autism
>>18541936>Had to grey out the Mongolian languages of Finngolia and Hungolia, otherwise they would mog the eastern "Europeans" with their 12 to 15 grammatical cases
>>18542162Their cases are less complicated though, it mostly just boils down to suffixes
>>18542071I'm not sure of this because Chinese has been analytical since the Bronze Age, while Uralic languages have actually acquired more morphological complexity over their ancestors at various points. The shift over time towards analytical grammar seems to only be a thing in Indo-European and Semitic.
>>18542162The map is of Indo-European languages. Agglutinative languages are very different, you can't compare them.
>>18542011It does but it will soon die out because of the influence of simplified (brazilian) Portuguese, they are incapable of conjugate a verb beyond the brain-dead gerúndio
