Comment on [deleted]

• spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  English seems to lean in a lot harder and consistently as time goes on compared to other languages.

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  • hakase@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It isn’t though.

    It may seem like it is, but English is actually becoming more regular over time in many dialects.

    Dialects dropping the 3rd person singular -s, dropping irregular (and even regular!) plurals, dialects eliminating the subjunctive, and past tense/participle distinctions. In the phonology you have marked features like English’s interdental fricatives going away as well. All of these processes are producing less marked and more regular structures across the English-speaking world.

    As always, there are processes countering these and introducing more irregularity, but as cattywampas mentioned, these are the sorts of processes that all languages are always undergoing. English really isn’t special - it’s just a natural language like any other.

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    • cattywampas@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Plus English is almost entirely gender-neutral, making vocabulary much more simple.

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      • hakase@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        True, but as usual, that’s offset elsewhere in the grammar (and a binary or ternary noun class grouping doesn’t really introduce that much complexity into the system).

        English still has number distinctions with multiple irregular patterns (and plural/collective distinctions like “fish/fish/fishes”), and even lesser recognized animacy distinctions that must take up some space in the grammar too (“my face” is fine, but “the face of mine” is odd, while “the clock’s face” and “the face of the clock” are both fine).

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    • witchybitchy@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      got some examples of what you listed in the second paragraph?

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      • hakase@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        One example of such a process is subregular patterns getting extended instead of always levelling toward the most productive constructions.

        In many southern dialects, for example, even though the productive past tense is the “-ed” past (just like it is in all modern varieties of English), and so we normally would expect to get regularization like “cleave/clove/cloven” > “cleave/cleaved/cleaved”, we instead in these dialects get irregular examples like “bring/brought/brought” being regularized not to expected productive “bring/bringed/bringed”, but rather “bring/brang/brung” on the pattern of “sing/sang/sung”, “drink/drank/drunk”, etc.

        Extending subregularities like this can cause irregular patterns to persist and grow stronger over time.

        I suppose that technically this isn’t introducing a new irregularity so much as it is helping an older one persist, but it’s a similar process.

        Other recent innovations include things like Canadian and northern US English “I’m done my homework”, northern positive anymore (“Anymore, I go to the store on Fridays”), and prepositional “because” (“I can’t come tonight, because homework”).

        Again, this isn’t exactly the development of new irregular morphology specifically, but these are analogous processes elsewhere in the grammar.

        It’s also worth mentioning that English is becoming more and more of an isolating language over time (a language with less morphology), and so we’d actually expect irregular morphology specifically to become less common in these systems.

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