How Languages Change

A discussion of Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language

Since I don’t read many book reviews, I’ve never written one on this blog. I also don’t think I can provide a novel angle on most of the books that I read. Instead of reviewing a book, then, I’d like to try something new by discussing a book written about a topic that interests me. You won’t find any evaluation of The Unfolding of Language here, but, rather, a summary and re-organization of its contents.

Through the written word, linguists can study how languages change. Our earliest English records appear in about the sixth century, though records remain sparse until hundreds of years later. We can access a longer window for Romance languages, as Latin writing predates the birth of Christ. Semitic languages provide us with the greatest history, with writing dating back to the dawn of civilization. In the English records alone, we see substantial changes. If you’re familiar with German, you’ve experienced frustration with its three seemingly random grammatical genders. You might have also wondered how the language gained four (or sometimes three) cases, where nouns change their change articles and endings based on their role in the sentence. Many remain unaware, however, of the fact that English used to contain a similar system, with the same three grammatical genders and up to five cases. Remnants of the case system remain in our pronouns (he did X to him), but they remain absent from our amateur ones. The gender system also disappeared as Middle English speakers turned all nouns masculine. Similarly, Latin’s case system and neuter gender didn’t survive the journey into Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. These examples only illustrate the most obvious changes to their respective. When reading older texts, like Shakespeare plays, we can notice phrases and sentence constructions that feel alien in a way that’s difficult to explain.

Guy Deutschers’ The Unfolding of Language argues that language changes through three mechanisms: economy, expressiveness, and metaphor. Economy refers to the tendency to shorten or simplify sounds and words. English examples include the the future tense signifier “gonna,” which we know derived from “going to” and the silent “e”s that spoke their name in Middle English. Expressiveness includes the tendency to strengthen words and phrases by combining or reusing them in novel ways. We see this in phrases in like “most unique,” which remains logically impossible according to the original meaning of “unique.” We see the same mechanism in positive usages of words like “bad” or “wicked.” Finally, metaphor refers to the creation of new terms via abstract deployments of existing ones. Words like “understand” began as metaphors until the abstract meaning trounced the literal one. Yes, the term originally referred to a person physically standing under an abject. Metaphors also create systems and patterns where none previously existed. You might have cringed at my my “amateur noun” joke from earlier, but you’ll soon learn that you accept sillier analogies in your everyday speech.

Economy

It’s not hard to see examples of economy in our own lives. Though spoken English keeps evolving, our writing hasn’t changed much since the sixteenth century. As a result, written language creates a window into archaic pronunciations. No one pronounces all the vowels in “radically,” and I probably don’t need to explain the origin of “don’t.” We can also recognize economy from the speech across the pond. Americans may wonder why we spell “caught” and “cot” differently, but Brits can hear the difference in their own speech. On the other hand, Americans may wonder what those islanders have done all with all the “r”s.

Irregular plurals like “mice” stem from a double laziness. English plurals previously ended in “iz.” Some vowel sounds like roll together more easily, causing speakers to change them when making a noun plural. In other words, it’s easier to say something like “mice-iz” or “feet-iz” than “mouse-iz” or “foot-iz.” Later, the speakers forgot the “iz” entirely, leaving us with the vowel change but without the reason for the vowel change. Later still, English speakers began to forget some of these irregular plurals, and our “hend” and “beek” became “hands” and “books.”

We can also see the impact of economy by comparing Germanic and Latin works. English speaker have fathers, while our Spanish counterparts have padres. These terms share the origin, but linguists have found a universal tendency for “p” sounds to degenerate to “f” sounds over time. Words originating from Latin, like paternal, maintain the original constant. We see the same change in many of our prepositions: “for” in English versus “por” in Spanish. The same process occurred with “g” and “k.” While our Germanic ancestors gave us the word “corn” (which has a “k” sound, though it’s spelled with a “c”), the Latin version of the word, “grain,” keeps the original “g.”

These differences exemplify a general consonant trend known as Grimm’s law. When they weren’t writing about princesses amputating their feet, the Brothers Grimm noticed changes like b→p→f, g→k→ch (the German one)→h→silence , and d→t→th¹ throughout multiple languages. Old English speakers, for example, said something like “auk” for the word “I.” The “k” sound remains in Dutch alongside a softer “ch” in German. Us English speakers have, the other hand, removed the consonant.

Economy also leads to grammatical changes. “Gonna” now acts a future tense signifier, as its usage no longer aligns with “going to.” One might say “I’m gonna walk to the store,” but no one would say that they’re “gonna the store.” Similarly, French gained its future tense when speakers appended their word for “have” to the end of verbs. These same French speakers once used “ille” as the word for “he,” but now the front-half has become a pronoun, while the back-half transitioned to an article. Plurals often arrive when a word for “all” starts combining itself to nouns and articles, while we see languages evolve case systems when prepositions do the same. Articles themselves descent from shortened version of normal words. The words “the” and “a,” for instance, descend from words for “that” and “one,” respectively. We see the same origin for articles in languages across the globe. While the origins of English’s genitive (as, in the ‘s) case predate writing, it’s not hard to imagine an archaic word for “of” attaching itself it the end of nouns. Future English speakers may find themselves indicating possession with an ‘f, even after they’ve have abandoned the word “of.”

Expressiveness

Unlike economy, expressiveness often adds syllables to words. We know that “right now” indicates more urgency than “now” while “not a chance” hits harder than “no.” Due to the aforementioned force of economy, future English speakers may pronounce these phrases as singular words. Expressiveness ultimately leads to a hedonic treadmill, however, where yesterday’s emphasis becomes today’s banality. “Awesome” used to refer to real awe, though consistent use weakened it into its modern place. At some point, a mere “on” sufficed to explain an object’s height. This didn’t cut it, granting us “upon.” English speakers then emphasized the concept with “by up on of”, which shorted to “above.” You can hear modern speakers say “high up above” and rest assured that future speakers will find this inadequate. French saw a similar process with their word for “today” which originated with two separate instances of users placing the phrase “the day of” in front of it.

Expressiveness can also change words in bizarre way. In his memoirs, Newton often notes how much he “resents” his mentor. This sounds harsh, but the word “resent “ meant “appreciate” at the time. The desire for expressiveness lead people to deploy it in ironically until everyone forgot the original meaning. Around the same time, the word “like” switched direction. When a character in Shakespear’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona mentions asks if the “music likes him,” he’s not asking about the music’s internal feelings. Rather, he’s asking if she’s enjoying the music. At the time, “X liked Y” meant “Y liked X.” Passionate speakers switched the direction’f like, and that switch has stuck.

Metaphor and Analogy

While we may associate metaphor with poetry and literature, archaic and active metaphors litter our everyday speech. It’s hard to craft a single, solitary sentence without butting heads with abstract phrase. Of course, it’s not literally hard, as hard refers to things we can touch. There’s also no physical crafting and (one would hope) no butting of heads. A sentence also can’t be solitary, as that refers to interpersonal relationships. You get the point, and we could spend all day noting the metaphors in even the most boring writing, even though no one could can physically spend a day or get points.

Still, you might not notice the ex-metaphors present in so much of our common words. “Abstract,” for example, started as noun referring to the literal removal of an object. Decide meant “cut off,” and linguists note a similar origin for other language’s “decide” equivalent. “Sarcastic” referred to the cutting of skin, “suggest” referred to carrying an object under something, “employ” to the act of folding, “rival” to two people who lived near the same river, and “redundant” to overflowing waves. We also rely on metaphor to express space and time. The words “front” and “back” referred to body parts (front being the face). We state concepts like “between 2 P.M. and 4 P.M.” or “on Monday” without considering the fact that you can’t really put anything “between” or “on” a time. Prepositions work also metaphorically, as Americans speak “in” English while Germans speak “on” German. In many cases, it’s difficult to imagine the non-metaphorical version. How would one express the concept of “understanding” or “discovering” without an analogy to something else?

Metaphor, like economy, can change grammar. I mentioned earlier that French future tense started by adding their word for “have” to the end of verbs. Similarly, us English speakers express future-ness by putting “will” in front. Will originally meant “want,” and that meaning remains in words like “unwilling.” Speakers used the “want to” metaphor as indication of future activity until that non-literal deployment became the standard conjugation. German speakers did the same with “werden,” meaning “become.” Metaphors also create possessives. Few languages feature an English equivalent to “have,” so they use phrases like “in the hand of” or prepositions like “at” to indicate possession. Prepositions can themselves derive from metaphors, such as the Chinese word for “with” coming from their word for “follow.”

Metaphor also refers to human propensity for pattern recognition, even when no pattern exists. In the “economy” section, I mentioned that irregular plurals like “beek” became regular ones like “books.” Speakers recognized the noun + “s” pattern and incorrectly applies to “book” until the previously incorrect usage seemed normal. Pattern recognition can also crate irregularity. People used to say “dived,” since we append “ed” (really just “d”) to indicate past tense. Since “dive” sounded similar to “drive” and “ride,” however, people switched to “dove,” and the verb has stayed irregular ever since. It’s not hard to see how case, gender, or conjugation systems can develop, as people over-apply patterns they see in a subset of words. The strangest version of pattern recognition comes from Semitic verbs, where a series of vowel changes have to led to consonant-only roots.

Since speakers lack the history of their own language, analogies can create new words and grammatical structures. English speakers know that we can create new nouns by adding “-or” to a verb, as in “visit” to “visitor.” Unrelatedly, some Latin nouns like “author” and “doctor” end with “or.” Modern speakers can’t differentiate the nouns that came from verbs from the nouns that always ended in “or.” The noun “editor” happened to end in “or” (like “doctor”), but people presumed it derived from a noun (like “visitor”), thereby creating the word “edit.” Upon entrance verbdom, we started saying “edits,” “editing,” and “edited.” Likewise, we once called a single one of those sweet, red fruits “a cherries.” People presumed the “s” indicated a plural, so we started saying “a cherry.” English speakers also invented the word “greed” by assuming that “greedy” followed the same noun + “y” pattern of other adjectives. Looking at other languages, erroneous pattern recognitions created the vowel-change plural system in German and the “-age” ending for nouns in French.

The Future

Deutscher ends The Unfolding of Language with some speculation. Through these three forces, language complexity can drift in either direction. We can add or subtract cases, genders, or other strange grammatical constructs. When it comes to languages with long written history, however, the change seems to only head in one direction: lower complexity. We always see the most bizarre grammatical systems in ones spoken by tribes or small communities. This could remain a coincidences, and year-3000 English might have 30 cases and 5 grammatical genders. Still, it’s hard to for popular languages to simplify. Deutscher hypothesizes that literacy and civilizational complexity might causes this. An intricate case and plural system may be easier to maintain in a tribe of 500 people than a country of millions. Literacy, meanwhile, forces speakers to visualize the spaces between words. The English phrase “nick name” started when speakers misheard “an eke name” a “a neke name,” with “eke” being an archaic word for “also.” It’s hard to imagine the same mistake occurring today.

Deutscher avoids specific predictions, but I’ll make two: the death of our “th” sounds and the rise’f copula dropping. The “th” sounds remain rare among the world’s languages, and we don’t hear them in other Germanic tongues like German, Swedish, and Dutch. Even English speakers hear these sounds replaced with an “f” or “d” in dialects on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m guessing there’s something “unstable” about these sounds, and this instability should hit the majority of English speakers at some point. Next is copula dropping. The copular refers to the word for “to be” such as “is” or “are.” When one says “I am hungry,” we don’t need the “am.” No one would remain confused by “I hungry,” and many languages function without copulas. Most English speakers have long since amputated the vowel part of the copula, as we see in contractions like “he’s” and “I’m.” As with the “th” sounds, some dialects have already dropped the copula. While the Toronto Raptor’s “We The North” motto distorts geography (Portland plays further north), it accurately depicts some spoken dialects. Both changes would align with the history of English and other Germanic languages.

1. There’s actually two “th” sounds in English. Put your hand in front of your mouth while saying “the thing.” You’ll notice some air from the second th but not the first.