I read this book about a decade ago for college! I remember finding it fascinating.
On complexity, the important factor is probably contact between different languages--specifically, adult second language learners. Adults have an impaired ability to master languages, so large numbers of adult second language learners tend to lead to simplification of languages. English, for example, seems to have lost its case system when it had a large influx of non-native English speakers settle in the British Isles (iirc my class on the history of English). These (mostly) men took English wives and had English children who copied some of their fathers' idiosyncrasies in their own speech, including likely their fathers' non-mastery of case, eventually eroding the case system to basically nothing.
You can see somewhat similar process still happening with some of the only remaining case markers, "who" and "whom". Even native English speakers can't reliably remember which one they're supposed to use when, and so each following generation is even shakier on how to use them and so stop making any distinction.
Not following sport in general or the Raptors in particular, I wouldn’t know, but you must: is We the North ambiguous, like we (is/are) the north, but also like We the people, as in this here is a preamble and I am about to tell you what North is all about.
Klaus, this was a terrific article--informative and full of entertaining examples! (I, for one, loved your pronoun and amateur joke.) In my experience, most book reviews mostly summarize the book anyway, and include only a bit of praise and criticism near the end. So I appreciate your honesty in saying you were just going to tell us what the book says.
I find it fascinating how languages evolve to become more simple, almost as though the people said, “Heck no! This is stupid and needlessly complicated. We’re going to say it this way from now on.” In college I studied Anglo-Saxon (Old English), and you could see this happening over the thousand years it was spoken. The intricate case system had totally broken down by a couple hundred years before Chaucer. Same in Latin: the flawlessly constructed periodic sentences of Cicero--I remember once hunting through a two-page-long sentence to find the main verb, which was right in the center--gave way to the Medieval Latin of, for example, Aquinas, where word order rather than case determines meaning. In contemporary German, the genitive case has almost completely disappeared for every situation except possession (and even sometimes then) and has been replaced by the dative.
The two exceptions in my experience to this principle are quite interesting. French retains its (to me) excessively complicated verb tenses--especially the subjunctive. But I wonder whether this is because there is a government agency specifically devoted to preserving French and fighting against linguistic evolution. And Czech stubbornly clings to its insanely difficult grammar (four genders and seven [!] cases, and you have to decline both the noun and the adjective--and the rules for each are irregular). But Czechia is a young country, and it’s tiny (10 million people), so maybe the small country rule applies here.
Anyway, thanks for writing such a useful account of Deutscher’s book!
I read this book about a decade ago for college! I remember finding it fascinating.
On complexity, the important factor is probably contact between different languages--specifically, adult second language learners. Adults have an impaired ability to master languages, so large numbers of adult second language learners tend to lead to simplification of languages. English, for example, seems to have lost its case system when it had a large influx of non-native English speakers settle in the British Isles (iirc my class on the history of English). These (mostly) men took English wives and had English children who copied some of their fathers' idiosyncrasies in their own speech, including likely their fathers' non-mastery of case, eventually eroding the case system to basically nothing.
You can see somewhat similar process still happening with some of the only remaining case markers, "who" and "whom". Even native English speakers can't reliably remember which one they're supposed to use when, and so each following generation is even shakier on how to use them and so stop making any distinction.
Moo*
Not following sport in general or the Raptors in particular, I wouldn’t know, but you must: is We the North ambiguous, like we (is/are) the north, but also like We the people, as in this here is a preamble and I am about to tell you what North is all about.
Thank you!
This was fascinating!
Klaus, this was a terrific article--informative and full of entertaining examples! (I, for one, loved your pronoun and amateur joke.) In my experience, most book reviews mostly summarize the book anyway, and include only a bit of praise and criticism near the end. So I appreciate your honesty in saying you were just going to tell us what the book says.
I find it fascinating how languages evolve to become more simple, almost as though the people said, “Heck no! This is stupid and needlessly complicated. We’re going to say it this way from now on.” In college I studied Anglo-Saxon (Old English), and you could see this happening over the thousand years it was spoken. The intricate case system had totally broken down by a couple hundred years before Chaucer. Same in Latin: the flawlessly constructed periodic sentences of Cicero--I remember once hunting through a two-page-long sentence to find the main verb, which was right in the center--gave way to the Medieval Latin of, for example, Aquinas, where word order rather than case determines meaning. In contemporary German, the genitive case has almost completely disappeared for every situation except possession (and even sometimes then) and has been replaced by the dative.
The two exceptions in my experience to this principle are quite interesting. French retains its (to me) excessively complicated verb tenses--especially the subjunctive. But I wonder whether this is because there is a government agency specifically devoted to preserving French and fighting against linguistic evolution. And Czech stubbornly clings to its insanely difficult grammar (four genders and seven [!] cases, and you have to decline both the noun and the adjective--and the rules for each are irregular). But Czechia is a young country, and it’s tiny (10 million people), so maybe the small country rule applies here.
Anyway, thanks for writing such a useful account of Deutscher’s book!
So interesting! I’d like to read the whole book. I’m a big fan of both th sounds. They make English special lol.