NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/sci/lang/8654

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-06 | 1.8 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!pipex!demon!cix.compulink.co.uk!petex
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: [e-mail] (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: Origin of English?
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 23:23:00 +0000
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In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Gustaaf Van Moorsel,,,)

>
> Then why has modern Dutch lost most of their conjugations and declensions, too,
> where there was not such an obvious mix of Germanic languages? Granted, the
> simplification has not gone as far as in English, but when compared to German
> the lack of 'grammar' is striking.

Well, Eric's point about multilingualism is only part of the story.
The complete or partial loss of distinctions between inflectional
categories in the Germanic languages as a whole is largely a result
of the strong stress on the root syllable resulting in a weakening of
unstressed syllables, so that there are fewer distinctions available.
At which point either the whole system beaks down (as in English) or
keeps going in a radically simplified form (as in German). In fact
*real* spoken German is much less inflected than the standard written
language and much more like English and Dutch.
There's a similar effect in French where the stress on the Latin
antepenultimate syllable caused all following ones eventually to be
lost, which is why French has final stress.

Peter
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Peter Christian
  Dept of European Languages              [e-mail]
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            [e-mail]
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