Ron, (01)
What makes you think that all the verbs except 'to be' and 'to have' "got
simplified"?
Many of the older verbs in all languages still retain "irregular forms". In
English, consider: Go, went, gone, or lie, lay, lain. (Go is a favorite,
along with carry, do, have, sit, stand, lie, give, and verbs of placing.) As I
recall, the Stanford Parts of Speech dictionary includes about 100 irregular
verbs. (02)
I think linguists generally agree that "irregular forms" are commonly
associated with verbs (and, to a lesser extent, nouns) that early speakers
(e.g., peasants and traders) actually used. So, they carry elements of mergers
with other words of similar sense and former morphological rules for formation
of intent. The 'simplified rules' were also based on morphological rules of
approximately the same time, but only for some verbs. Because they were
simple, those rules were adopted for newly coined verbs when they were ADDED to
the language. (03)
In Germanic languages, the past simple of some verbs was formed by adding -d or
-t or -te, but in other verbs, it was formed by altering the principal vowel
(most of them were on syllable anyway). In a similar way, in Anglo Saxon, the
past participle was usually formed by adding -en, but at some point English
speakers stopped distinguishing the past form from the past participle form --
a simplified language practice -- in most cases. "gone" and "lain" and "done"
and "given" are holdovers, because everyone used those words. (04)
Languages change over time. In general, they become more regular and more
economical, because there is a larger set of concepts that need to be conveyed,
and a larger populace whose utterances need to be comprehensible to each other.
Older languages are simpler than younger languages, and older forms of current
languages are more complicated than the current ones. (05)
(Being careful, I ascribe the above to a brief education in linguistics 50
years ago, and one or two books I have read since. Current theory may be
different.) (06)
-Ed (07)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ron Wheeler
> Sent: Saturday, December 14, 2013 8:24 AM
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] LInked Data meme revisited
>
> A bit off topic but I have always wondered about a couple of odd English
> language characteristics
>
> 1) When and how did it lose genders for nouns?
>
> 2) When and how did all the verbs except "to be" and "to have" get
> simplified?
> The requirement for an "s" at the end of the verb in the third person singular
> is another oddity.
>
> These are major departures from the root languages.
>
> They make the language a lot easier to learn.
> This is countered a bit by the "anything goes" rule for making up the plural
> forms for common nouns and past tenses for verbs.
>
> Ron
>
> On 13/12/2013 11:32 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
> > Ed,
> >
> > All languages evolve. But they have different structures, which may
> > make certain kinds of expressions shorter and simpler than others.
> >
> >> What you think is significant about English right now was true of
> >> French 300 years ago and may be true of Chinese in 2050.
> >> It is all about language evolution, which is the central theme.
> > The fact that English happens to be the dominant language now and
> > French was dominant a few centuries ago is definitely *not* what I was
> > trying to explain.
> >
> > For parallels, look at Japanese and Chinese. Japanese scribes learned
> > Chinese characters with their pronunciation in a dialect of Chinese.
> > When they used them to write Japanese, they pronounced them in
> > Japanese -- except in compounds. The character for 'new' is
> > pronounced in Japanese as /atarashi/ when used as an adjective by
> > itself. But in compounds, it's pronounced in Chinese as /shin/.
> > The area of Tokyo named Shinjuku has three Chinese words and
> > characters for 'new hotel district'. Nobody pronounces those three
> > characters with the native Japanese pronunciation.
> >
> > This is an example of the way a clash of languages changed Japanese.
> > It caused Japanese to adopt the Chinese paradigm for coining new
> > words, and weakened the native Japanese paradigms. However, Japanese
> > does have various grammatical morphemes. So they developed the
> > syllabic hiragana and katakana to express those forms.
> >
> > When the Japanese opened up to the wider world, they started to borrow
> > many new words from western languages, which they spelled in katakana.
> > The character for ju (a kind of hotel) in Shinjuku is pronounced
> > /yadoya/ in native Japanese. When they began to build western-style
> > hotels, they borrowed the western word, which is pronounced /hoteru/.
> >
> > For the word 'taxi', the Japanese use syllabic katakana to spell
> > /takushi/. For 'bus', they say /basu/. For taxi, the Chinese
> > themselves say chu-zu-qi-che (for-hire-energy-vehicle). For bus, they
> > say gong-gong-qi-che (public-use-energy-vehicle). But in context,
> > they rarely use those compounds. Instead, they'll say "Call me a che"
> > -- i.e., taxi. Or they'll say "I'm waiting for the che" -- i.e., bus.
> >
> > This is the point I was trying to make: the changes to Japanese
> > caused by its clash with Chinese weakened its native methods for
> > coining new words. That also made it more receptive to borrowing
> > words from other languages. But Chinese uses its own resources to
> > coin new compounds.
> >
> > EJB
> >> An-ge-stell-t-er is literally 'in-stall-d-er' -- a person who is 'put
> >> in a place' in an organization. The French origin of em-ploy-ee
> >> could be translated in-use-d, or in-place-d, a participial adjective
> >> taken as a noun.
> > I agree. But note three points: (1) the clash with Danish caused the
> > Anglo-Saxon paradigms to be weakened; (2) the clash with French
> > introduced a completely different paradigm; and (3) the university
> > system, which taught Latin (and some Greek) to anyone who did any
> > significant amount of writing.
> >
> > As a result of these clashes, Anglo-Saxon compounds such as the
> > equivalent of 'heaven-candle' were lost. Anyone who wrote anything
> > more than sales receipts used their university training to write
> > 'celestial spheres'.
> >
> >> And we have coined similar terms, like 'installer' and 'mortgagee'.
> >>
> >> As we can see, rather than losing this technique for vocabulary
> >> extension to the French influence, English simply gained the
> >> mechanisms of the second language as well.
> > No. When there are multiple paradigms for word formation, they tend
> > to become moribund or drastically simplified. English retained a few,
> > but most of them are not as productive as they were in their original
> > languages. The Germanic -er is still fairly productive in English,
> > but -ee is rarely used except for words borrowed from French.
> >
> > The issues that cause one language or another to become dominant are
> > very different from those that make it easy for a language to borrow
> > new terms.
> >
> > John
> >
> >
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>
> --
> Ron Wheeler
> President
> Artifact Software Inc
> email: rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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