Re: Case Systems and Chaos

Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Thu, 6 Nov 1997 05:19:56 -0600

At 4:33 PM -0600 11/5/97, clayton bartholomew wrote:
>Stephen C. Carlson wrote:
>>
>> No, the Second Law does not apply to languages nor even to
>> the planet earth, for they are open systems. Entropy may
>> decrease in open systems, although in closed systems it
>> increases.
>>
>> It has been evident that, from an information science
>> perspective, losses in distinctions according to one
>> mechanism, e.g. case endings, have led to the
>> preservation of the same kinds of distinctions via a
>> different mechanism, e.g. mandatory prepositions. Another
>> example, is the French verb system. Phonological changes
>> resulted in most of the verb forms having identical
>> pronunciations, forcing the mandatory use of subject
>> pronouns.
>>
>
>Stephen
>
>This is a fascinating response. I was under the impression that
>languages deteriorated over time. Where did I get this idea?
>Is there not a observable pattern outside of natural sciences
>that shows a tendency for things to *fall apart.* Language is a
>social phenomena, other social phenomena have a tendency to
>move from organization to disorganization. A few examples of
>this are Civilizations, Nations, Clubs, Churches, Families,
>Tribes, Businesses. All of these move from ordered states to
>disordered states with a fairly predictable pattern.
>
>Now you will probably argue that Languages are not like
>Civilizations or Families, that this is an unseemly comparison.
>Perhaps you are correct in making this objection (if you make
>it). But I think there is more to be said about the tendency
>towards disorder than what the second law of thermodynamics
>states. After all the Chaos dragon had been around several
>millennia before thermodynamics came along.

Well, presumably Clay is here proposing a notion that extends beyond
case-systems, so let me just add a note regarding verbs bearing on this
question from a perspective I've stated in this forum before: I think
languages are, in varying degrees at different times and places, unstable
and in flux, undergoing changes and being used by different persons and
social strata in somewhat different ways all the time. Perhaps I shouldn't
state that universally, because I don't know that many languages and most
of the ones I know are Indo-European. But I would call attention to a few
facts about Greek and Latin that I find interesting:

(1) classical Attic Greek and Koine Greek both show an alternation of
voices in the verb EINAI between the different tense-systems, e.g. present
EIMI, impf. HN show active forms, while the future is ESOMAI, middle. In
Koine we find an impf. middle HMHN. Modern Greek, unless I'm mistaken, has
middle voice for all tenses, including the present: EIMAI, impf.
HMOUN--this strikes me as a move in the direction of order rather than
chaos;

(2) modern Greek, because it forms the future tense periphrastically from
QA + subjunctive (what in ancient Greek would have been QELW hINA + subj.)
has TWO forms of the future tense, one using the Present subjunctive, the
other using the Aorist subjunctive--and consequently Modern Greek is able
to distinguish two different aspects in the future tense; this strikes me
as a change in the direction of intelligent differentiation;

(3) an as-yet unfinished task on my agenda is a response to Ward Powers'
account of the first aorist forms in NT Greek, but in an earlier phase of
that (temporarily interrupted) thread, I called attention to the fact that
the active alpha-endings (-A/-AS/-E/-AMEN/-ATE/-AN), in a process that
appears to have begun already in the Homeric period and that extends over
several centuries, gradually become regular in ALL past tenses in Greek;
this is surely another movement in the direction of order rather than
chaos. Although I'm not a linguist, I believe that linguists refer to
analogous assimilation (my phrase, not theirs) as a standard process of
linguistic change in the direction of tidier morphology;

(4) another curious phenomenon I've noted previously in my discussion of
Greek voice is the fact that proto-Indo-European evidently had only an
active and a middle/reflexive voice, the middle/reflexive being used
occasionally to express a passive notion. We know that in both Greek and
Latin the middle/reflexive voice came to be used increasingly in a standard
fashion as a passive voice and also that in Greek the -QH- aorist active
forms came to be standardized as a passive inflection. Now already in
classical Latin one can observe a tendency toward the formation of
reflexive verbs that function in the same manner as the much older
middle/reflexive forms that are currently being used regularly in a passive
manner (e.g. CONFERTUR in earlier Latin would have been a middle/reflexive
3d sg. present tense; in the classical period it is a passive; yet
classical Latin now has a reflexive form CONFERT SE that has replaced the
function of the form CONFERTUR which is now used in a strictly passive
sense; late Latin displays a vast multitude of such reflexive verbs, and
anyone with even minimal experience in the Romance languages knows the
importance and the plethora of reflexive verbs there. One interesting fact
in this regard is that these reflexive verbs function, apparently, like the
PIE middle/reflexives--they occasionally are used as passives: e.g. Sp.
"Aqui se habla espaħol", "Spanish is spoken here." Would one call this
process of change from PIE to neo-Latin a movement to chaos or rather an
instance of the French proverb, "Plus ‡a change, plus c'est la mŠme chose"?

In sum, I rather suspect that languages are always in flux and that the
direction of change may be sometimes toward chaos while clearly in other
cases it is toward greater regularity.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/