/lit/ - Literature

>>22493299
Proto-Indogermanic had more than 4 grammatical cases and many sounds we don't have today anymore. Pretty much all languages get streamlined with time, or can you tell me an example where a language got more complex organically?

>>22493299
>subjunctive mood
Was never a thing, just retards thinking english was latin.
> compound relatives
Only invented because they thought prepositions had to come before their noun… because of Latin. English can use postpositions
>thou
You can still use it to indicate archaic or religious speech. Not the same distinction but still a distinction
> where/whither/whence distinction --gone
Also made up because of latin.

No one ever talked like this.

>Early modern english
the French ruined ðe English language 1000 years ago

One way it can be tested. What would she do if I offed myself?

>>22493315
This is wrong and obviously stupid. Language is thousands and thousands of years old, it didn't start complex and it hasn't been on some fantastical journey of optimisation.

It is a general principle of linguistics that of a language is simplified in one respect, like OP's example, it will complicate in another, such as word order.

For pretty much the same reason nobody who actually studies languages will ever bother talking about a language being 'simpler' than any other

>>22493407
Yeah this is the “approved” take but it’s also obviously dumb. English is simpler than most languages. Chinese is the simplest of all and that’s why it has never got inflections in 5000 years and why inflected languages keep dropping and dropping their inflections.

>>22493318
No, English was made better by French influence, and there's nothing you redditors can say to convince me otherwise.

I can prey a pursuit of penning a cap in Angliziced Slav. In thing, I am producing it straightaway. Zeals me bare quantum a dialect may be towed to such a duration of score passing into a dialect of wich most would be astounded to unearth an imprecise acquaintance kin. Moust yar the pica (Latin) ingressions that produce curious likes, or that both dialects like in a sequestered and quiescent demeanor, and withal the so-peculiar proper personality of the English dialect peeled of it's rect slogan stopovers sojournly unspoliated in spite of the mostest disfigurations, whole ball of wax it is zealing to what dagger verge a dialect can be delivered. Howbeit, this only a tiny overplus of what whilom was an absurdly bloated exuberant language fond of thousands of different variations incomprehensible to each other. Everywhere in the world, modern language has become tight, stiff and sterile.

>>22493299
>Early modern english was much richer in these aspects.
These grammatical redundancies are definitely not the aspects that come to mind when I think of the richness of early modern English. I don't read Thomas Brown or Thomas Fuller for their observance of the shall/will distinction. So why fixate on these things?

>>22493299
>gotten

>>22493315
Chinese developed from a non-tonal Proto-Sino-Tibetan language family

>>22493299
>shall/will distinction
Was never a thing. Made up distinction in the 19th century that the few people who knew about it didn't even adhere to.

>>22493317
This guy gets it. A huge number of grammatical conventions common to older works in modern English are just Latin imports. Your ancestors (peasants) did not use those things.

>>22495711
Even putting aside other distinctions, the imperative use of shall distinguishing it from will is mostly gone outside of legalese.

>>22493317
“Whence” means the same as “where”?

Time for you to turn in your badge and don’t come back to this board until you read all of Shakespeare with annotation

>>22495752
I didn’t say that retard.
Where is ubi
Whence is unde
Whereto is quo
Etc
It’s made up because of Latin. That is all I said.

>>22493299
How much confusion in actual communication do those simplifications cause?

>>22493299
this retard used the phrase "Soft son" in his Taming of the Shrew to mean "wait a moment." explain to me in the english language why someone would go through the trouble of being obtuse as to say one thing to a rather confusing meaning.

>>22497040
The only one that really matters is the loss of the second person plural, which is currently being rectified by the growing popularity of "y'all". What's really funny to me is how many people will look at the history of any given language and look upon it all fondly, yet they see the spread of "y'all" and point to it as another sign of the corruption of English. Would it be preferable if it sounded nicer? Yes. But in truth, we should be crawling over each other to use it so that ANY form of the second person plural becomes normalized. That way, our grandchildren will be able to make up any variation they please, and if they're lucky, it'll trump "y'all" in their region. I personally hope we see a resurgence of "ye".

>>22493317
>>subjunctive mood
>Was never a thing, just retards thinking english was latin.
Yeah no this is fucking wrong, it comes from the Old English subjunctive.
>>where/whither/whence distinction --gone
>Also made up because of latin.
What the fuck. No it fucking wasn't. Do you think the same distinction in German was also made up because of Latin?
>No one ever talked like this.
No, you're just making shit up. The vast majority of these archaic grammar features were not taken from Latin. They really were used in the spoken language at some point.

>>22493299
They're literally not gone though. Only if I were an idiot like you would I think so

>>22493317
holy cope

>>22497817
Ebonics is the current English. They're gone for good.

>>22497849
ayo raciss azz muhfugga whu'chyuupee dishin out i ain fuggin eatin nigga gooba gobble biddly bop nigga no cap nigga Rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong nigga Shoo-bop sha wadda wadda yippity boom de boom Chang chang changitty chang sha-bop nigga Dip da-dip da-dip doo-wop da doo-bee doo
nigga Boogedy boogedy boogedy boogedy boo

>>22497849
Oh, I forgot. This board is full of people who only experience the world through news articles and memes.

>>22498034
>Go outside
>Encounter people who speak like their favourite hiphop artist
Bruh chu taking bout goin ousside nigga oughtta CAP yo ass nigga.

>>22498044
Why do you live in an area where people speak like that? I don't know about you, but I go outside and people speak like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGllxaAlG7Y

>>22498058
Faulkner died in 1962. No one speaks like this now.

>>22497249
just say yous guise like a normal person

>>22493315

languages get more complex all the time, depending on how you define “complex”, and if you actually consider it’s entire history, english is one of those languages.

>>22498533
its*

>thou/you distinction -- gone
That one left several hundred years ago because people started copying les batards francais. The rest of these have only faded out fairly recently.

The telegraph's inception in the 1830s revolutionized communication. Before instant communication, one expected mail to take several days (if not months) to reach its recipients. The sheer cost of this process promoted senders to ensure they wrote well; a simple mistake could not be rectified quickly. Tabloid trash could not exist in this environment, and so news was reserved for important, local ideas (and since it was local, people were willing to invest time into understanding the issue).

The telegraph (cum photography) made the newspaper of the late 19th century an incoherent jumble of ideas. Writers would forego complex ideas in favour of many ideas - after all the telegraph now made the latter possible. Television content of the latter 20th century was even more fragmented; a new camera angle every 2 seconds, an incessant stream of pointless information, and each idea given no more than five minutes of airtime before cutting to commercials (five minutes being the time allocated to only the most serious topics [like nuclear holocaust]; lesser topics could be [and were] transmitted in less time - two to three minutes). This new mode of "communication" thus set the precedent.The length of a conversation dropped because it's what Americans were becoming used to (because of American TV, Americans [of all native English speakers] tend to have the worst English), and with a drop in length came a further drop in complexity (how can one be expected to develop anything thoughtful with just three minutes?).
In the best case scenario then, three minutes of the news could be dedicated to informing the public of healthy eating, but this was always balanced with hours of commercials informing us of how tasty high-sugar "breakfast cereals" are. Knowledge of sugar's effect on the body abdicated before the mighty slogan "I'm lovin' it". And thus the English language became a vessel to communicate a simple message: "buy our product because it gives you the good feely weelies". The whole of our modern experience seems to be predicated on this.

If the point of language is to communicate ideas, and most people prefer to communicate with their coevals (who are inundated with catchy jingles and fragmented streams of irrelevant information), then it makes sense why there is such little motivation to learn or use words like 'whither' or 'henceforth'.

I've spoken much on tv and little on the internet. The latter has produced two opposing effects. On the one hand, the free-flow of information has allowed elite individuals to sharpen their faculties of language and reason to extents hitherto unseen. On the contrary, visual pills have dulled the masses to levels paralleling genuine mental retardation. The unequal distribution of intelligence will have disastrous consequences for us all.

>>22493299
It's your black population dumbing it down, it's pretty obvious. Especially the "could have been" morphing to "could of been", it's just the start. Negros did all of that. Soon USA will be black and I won't enjoy going there anymore. Even white youth listen to retarded black music.

>>22493317
>if you say the dumbest most made up shit with enough certainty it becomes true
holy...I want more

>>22495685
While true, those tones developed from simplifying previously existing consonant clusters so it's still a simplification.

>>22493315
Finnish has more cases than Proto-Uralic. Modern Chinese has classifiers and a bunch of verbal constructions and affixes or quasi-affixes that Old Chinese didn't have. In order to simplify, a language has to get complex in the first place. (Look up 'grammaticalization'.)

>>22493317
No, a lot of these things are still alive in English's sister German, and German generally borrows less from Latin than English does (though still quite a bit).

>>22493419
>and that’s why it has never got inflections in 5000 years
It's arguably starting to evolve them, with particles like -le and -zhe functioning a lot like conjugations. Cantonese is also moving vaguely in the direction of turning classifiers into something like a Bantu-style noun class system. But more to the point, how do you quantify overall complexity?

>>22494789
Anglish is by and large kind of a silly project, but one respect in which I like it is that native coinages are often more transparent. "Samebloodedness" and "birdlore" are much more self-evident in their construction than "consanguinity" or "ornithology". You effectively have to know Latin just to understand advanced English. Compare this to Chinese, in which technical terms are often much more transparent- the two terms I mentioned are xuèqīn 'blood kindred' and niǎolèixué 'bird study' respectively.

>>22495488
What's wrong with having distinct plain past and past participle forms?

>>22500029
English was gang raped in an alley. When she fought back they beat her head against a wall for 400 years. There's a reason she talks dumb and simple. Now she takes any lexicon she can shove down her throat for cheap meaning.

>>22497849
Ebonics has more tense/aspect combinations than your dialect LMAO

>>22500047
Can you explain how to quantify the overall complexity or simplicity of a language?

>>22493318
French isn't a real language, just well shit Latin.

>>22500058
If the language resembles English, it is simple. If it doesn't resemble English it is ornate, and probably a rapist. Invade that country and steal its words.

>>22494976
The only good post in the thread. I like this.

>>22493299
bump

English is the dark souls of languages.

Only real humans can speak it well enough to communicate sophisticated ideas.

>>22502047
ayo what this nigga be tryna say? soun like sum racis sheit mufucka betta ctrl+z he fuckn lines b4 i undo he hole life fr fr numsayn?

>>22494976
I can't understand this

>>22500365
Ha, ha.

>>22500335
And Latin isn't a real language, just shit Proto-Italic. And Proto-Italic isn't a real language, just shit Proto-Indo-European. And Proto-Indo-European isn't a real language, just shit Proto-Nostratic...