Ron, (01)
The simplification of 'person' and 'number' endings for English verbs is just
one element of language evolution, but I have only heard bits of the
explanation. (02)
In 1600, an Englishman would surely have said:
I sit, Thou sittest, he sitteth, we sit (possibly we sitten), ye sitten, they
sit (or possibly they sitten).
which is obviously much closer to the older Germanic forms, and to modern
German, but not modern Scandinavian languages, for example. (03)
The 'th' to 's' migration is not uncommon. You can imagine how that comes
about, just by dropping the e that creates a second distinct syllable (loss of
time and energy) in 'sitteth'. He sit-th, and then he sit-s, which does not
lose time. I suspect that the loss of the -en, which was already happening in
Shakespeare's time, was also an economy. It may also be the case that the
(increasingly) written language encouraged economy more than the spoken
language did. You've doubtless also seen the 17th to 19th century writing
economies with tiny superscript letters and use of symbols and abbreviations
for certain words in common phrases. So 'sitten' may have become
'sit-superscript-n', before the n disappeared entirely. Quill pens slow down
the written conveyance of intent; so, make fewer strokes. . Language
maturation at work. (04)
By comparison, sometime in the 19th century, we lost the distinction between
thou/thee and ye/you. I have never heard how that came about. But there's a
whole genre of politeness and protocol issues in the pronouns of address in the
17th to 19th centuries in countries with nobles. Royalty referred to itself as
"we"; others often referred to their 'betters' in the 3rd person when
addressing them -- 'his Excellency may ...' rather than 'your Excellency may
...'. These practices carried over into modern German and French, but
differently. So the handling of the second person was clearly a place of
change in European languages that was coincident with the rise of the
bourgeoisie and the decline of the nobility, and probably somehow related.
(More of the language/culture/history intermix that every language teacher I
ever knew insisted on.) (05)
If there is some participant out there who is more knowledgeable in this area,
Ron and I would both like to be further educated... (06)
-Ed (07)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ron Wheeler [mailto:rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Monday, December 16, 2013 2:35 PM
> To: Barkmeyer, Edward J; [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] LInked Data meme revisited
>
> On 16/12/2013 1:52 PM, Barkmeyer, Edward J wrote:
> > Ron,
> >
> > 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.
> I sit, you sit, he sits, we sit, you sit, they sit.
> That is what I was referring to.
>
> My quote "This is countered a bit by the "anything goes" rule for making up
> the plural forms for common nouns and past tenses for verbs."
> relates to what you are discussing.
>
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > (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.)
> >
> > -Ed
> >
> >
> >> -----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
> >> skype: ronaldmwheeler
> >> phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
> >>
> >>
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>
> --
> Ron Wheeler
> President
> Artifact Software Inc
> email: rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> skype: ronaldmwheeler
> phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102 (08)
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