Can I borrow a cup of conjugations?
Since I'm being all randomy today, here's another random bit.

Commies constantly and falsely believe that vocabulary controls culture. Nope. It's the other way around, and it's not a very strong influence. You can't turn people into feminist wackos by forcing them to say waitperson and ushperson and busperson. Feminist wackos use those words because they're wackos, and they force everyone else to use those words because they're uncivilized brutal savages taking advantage of the suicidal courtesy of civilized males.

Culture controls vocabulary in obvious but minor ways. For instance, when the Normans took over England, they brought new methods of cooking and farming, and we've inherited their words along with native ones. (Beef/cow, pork/pig, mutton/sheep, etc.)

Culture seems to determine grammar as well, which is not obvious and not well explored. The Normans brought caseless nouns, which the Anglo-Saxons picked up along with the beef and pork.

Something similar happened in the Balkans. The normal tendency among Slavic languages was to simplify verb forms and retain complicated noun cases. But there's one exception to this tendency. Bulgarian somehow picked up the Romance tendency toward simple nouns and complicated verbs from neighboring Romanian, without picking up any actual forms from Romanian. Bulgarian retained the original complications of Slavic verbs (and added more!) but dropped all cases from its nouns. Bulgarian also picked up the Romanian habit of suffixing the definite article to a noun, while all other Slavic languages lost the definite article entirely.

Culture also seems to carry intonation. Hungarian and Czech, completely unrelated languages, have remarkably similar prosody, with very little music and distinct variations in vowel length. Czech is the only Slavic language with this pattern; Slovak, which is otherwise highly similar to Czech, has a more ordinary pitch and rhythm pattern.

How did those 'pattern borrowings' happen? It's a genuine mystery, and I suspect it could tell us something about how language works in the brain.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 12:00 PM