Something my Latin teacher said today added weight to an idea I’ve had floating around in my mind for many months. “Languages,” she said, “simplify over time.”

Languages are as static as the flora and fauna in a rainforest, in that they are not; they are as mutable, fluid, and uncontrollable as the undulating sea, constantly changing, diverging and sometimes converging. A prime example is the English language, a Frankensteinian creation stitched together from the spare parts of the French, Germanic, Latin and Greek languages. Dialects are the result of a particular “mutations” gaining ground among a large portion of a region’s population, and the survival and accumulation of these seemingly minute per se changes are the force that drives the evolution of language.

The English we speak today is not the English that was spoken two-hundred years ago; vocabulary comes and goes and grammar is constantly changing. As recently as the 20th century, “will” took over the role in expressing the future tense, largely displacing “shall” in the vernacular. From Wikipedia’s article on the matter, I learned quite a funny joke:

There is an illustrative old joke about the Scotsman who drowned in a river because he had cried “I will die! Nobody shall help me!”

Since the British at this time were still using “will” to express desire and volition (e.g., “I would have you over for dinner”, which we today would express as “I want to have you over for dinner”) while “shall” was used to express futurism and intent. Thus, the Scotsman meant that he would die if nobody helped him, but the British surrounding him thought that he wished to commit suicide and that he was forbidding anyone from helping him.

There are plenty of largely inconsequential (in respect of difficulty of a language) changes like this happening all the time; all that’s happened is that one word’s use has been replaced by the other. It is equally true, however, that some languages have undergone extensive simplification. English and romance languages have lost much of the inflection–adjustment of the form of a word based on its role in the sentence–that was present their predecessors; compare Latin’s five major noun cases and extensive verb inflection (there are ~300 ways to conjugate a normal verb based on six tenses, person, voice, and mood) to English’s comparatively almost nonexistent inflection. Take this sentence from the beginning of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, commonly known as The Golden Ass, for an example:

Latin: Lector intende: laetaberis (word count: 3)

English (literal): Strain, reader: you shall be happy. (word count: 6)

English (preserving tone): Lend me your ear, dear reader, and you shall laugh. (word count: 10)

The moral here is clear: what Latin did with inflection English has to do with articles, auxiliary words, and prepositions. This is potentially a simplification and probably a change holding no sway over the languages’ complexity, but as it seems to me it is by no means a complication of the language; simplification or allotropy is thinkable, but to argue that this shift is complication is quite a difficult view to defend. I realize how subjective a judgment this is to make, calling a change in one form to another not complication, so I will give a better example; there are other changes in languages that are almost unarguably simplification. Ancient Greek, the kind Brad Pitt spoke when he donned smooth hardened leather armor and fought for Agamemnon (oh wait), had several interesting features, most noticeable among them the presence of a dual number, and the existence of a middle voice.

The dual number is what it seems to be: an inflection that denotes that there is not one, not many, but specifically two of the specified object. This has complete vanished in Modern Greek, leaving only the singular and plural numbers to take care of everything. Simplification–and it is simplification, the entire removal of a feature–has occurred.

Voice is a linguistic term for the way a verb relates to its subject. A passive verb denotes that the subject is being acted upon while an active verb denotes that the subject is doing the action. I needn’t supply examples. The middle voice in Greek, being named as such, is a bit of both. Middle voice verbs often show reflexive action or action in the favor of the one who is doing the action. Louo, I wash, is active while Louomai, I wash myself, is middle. To look at it another way, active voice verbs emphasize the action while middle voice verbs emphasize the actor. This voice was present in Proto-Indo-European language, the common ancestor of Indian languages like Hindi and Sanskrit and most European languages like English, German, and Latin, yet has wholly disappeared in most modern languages. Simplification, again!

Simplification is an inexorable component of lingual drift, I contend, as has been shown. When was the last time you heard someone say, “Hey, let’s make a new inflected case!” or “Hey, let’s split up the uses of ‘with’: ‘with’ will continue to be used whenever dealing with inanimate objects, but will be changed to ‘wift’ when dealing with a living being.”? My guess would be never. I repeat: although there are plenty of changes taking place within languages that are not necessarily relevant to the complexity of a language, simplification does occur almost as a rule and explicit obfuscation comparatively almost never occurs.

If we can accept this thesis to be true, then the ramifications are interesting to ponder upon. Consider the stereotypical depiction of a caveman: in the cartoons we so cherish, a stock character is the caveman or forager, club in hand and clothed with a leopard skin, whose intelligence the animators convey by making them speak purposely butchered English: “Meat good,” Uglor the hunter, haunch of mammoth meat in hand, said to his mate Kaga while she was foraging for berries. But this can’t be true with our assumption; Uglor the hunter would be speaking with nine different noun cases and with one of a thousand verb inflections in that simple statement of his satisfaction with the mammoth meat.

We could argue that complex language only developed by necessity at the dawn of civilization as surplus allowed for activities other than looking for basic needs, but even this is a bit of a stretch on what common sense might dictate. Proto-Indo-European is thought to have had seven major noun cases. How did these develop? Who constructed this system and conveyed to others the specific roles of each inflection? Did a rather basic language (pointing and grunting) evolve into a highly developed language? Why has effusive divergence and specialization occurred only in the distant past and not in the present?

Perhaps there is some error in my argument; indeed, I think it is quite probable, but let it suffice to say that for now I am thoroughly perplexed if I am to believe that such an intricate system came from nothing and has been degenerating ever since even though mankind has supposedly been rising in intelligence. Your thoughts?