Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) has a Facebook post I have to quote in its entirety:
Salish-Ql’ispe has this wonderful structural rule: “Delete everything after the stressed vowel if you want to, but you won’t want to if there’s crucial grammatical information after the stressed vowel.” Thanks to this rule, many nouns are lexicalized in truncated form and no one now remembers the original long form; verbs, not so much, because verbs tend to have a lot of crucial information in suffixes. The elders used to comment occasionally on the shortened words. Pat Pierre, in a eulogy at the memorial event for Clarence Woodcock (1945-1995), urged the people not to cut off their words: If you keep doing that, he said, pretty soon the words will disappear into nothing. And in my continuing effort to wrestle my dictionary files into submission, I just came across this exchange from 2005, with an example of a word shortened drastically even before the stressed vowel:
JMcD: “We try to remember the long forms so our grandkids can learn them.”
JQu: “Kids use REALLY short forms.”
Me: “Any examples?”
JQu: “They just say “kw es” for `you’re a liar, you’re lying!’ It’s short for “esyoqwi”.”
JMcD: “Lotta times we just tell our young people, Just make the sign!” — And she made this sign: Right hand points across the body with index finger and second finger forked. It means `you’re lying’.I have a very few other examples of similarly drastic shortening — nothing at all regular, unlike the optional “everything after the stressed vowel” rule. Oh, and in that example, es- is an aspect prefix; yoqw is the root for `tell a lie’.
Ql’ispe (also written Ql̓ispé [qəˀlispe]), anglicized as Kalispel, is also known as Pend d’Oreille; it’s a dialect of the Salish–Spokane–Kalispel language. We had an example of the language used in a sports logo back in 2013.
In the FB comments, Bill Poser said “What they fear is kind of like what happened to Latin in Gaul, e.g. augustus -> [u]”; there follows an interesting back-and-forth with Marie-Lucie Tarpent about whether people say [u] or [ut]. Bill found a source that says:
Aujourd’hui, la plupart des dictionnaires donnent deux prononciations possibles : [u] (« ou ») et [ut] (« oute »). Elles sont toutes les deux correctes. Au Canada, c’est la forme [u] qui est la plus utilisée, [ut] ne se dit presque pas. En France et en Suisse, c’est l’inverse : [ut] est majoritaire alors que [u] reste peu employée. En Belgique, c’est également [ut] qui domine, même si [u] s’entend plus qu’en France, notamment dans la bouche de personnes âgées.
(I don’t know why Marie-Lucie has stopped coming around these parts, but I wish she’d return.)
There is a similar phenomenon of noun truncation in Yurok, described e.g. here. There is not much nominal morphology to get in the way.
Romance has even more extreme examples of contraction. Latin ad ecce ista dies ‘on this here day’ became in Romanian the monosyllable azi [azʲ] ‘today’.
In Romance-adjacent Albanian, Vulgar Latin imperatore was borrowed as such, and by now has become the monosyllable mbret ‘king’.
*begging* Ask her!
I asked her a couple of years ago and she said something confusing about her computer connection. I don’t want to press her.
If you keep doing that, he said, pretty soon the words will disappear into nothing
In Kusaal, this has actually happened – in several cases (for example, with the animate singular object pronoun.)
The Pobble who has no toes …
Uniflected words & syllables may disappear, but then something else takes their place:
Didn’t the Latin negation disappear from French, only to be replaced by – pas?!?
Just like (in physics) energy can’t be destroyed – it seems that in language information can’t be destroyed.
Rather surprisingly, it is not possible to reconstruct a proto-Oti-Volta word for “fire” (unlike, e.g. “water” – or “beer”, for that matter, if we’re listing the elements.)
It occurred to me, though, that if the Gurma forms continue the historical POV form, the Kusaal cognate would have been m. You can see why there might have been some pressure to innovate …
It can when things become synonymous, like passé simple and passé composé in French or the analogous tenses in German.
No. First pas was added, then it became obligatory outside the highest registers, then ne got omitted in speech. French still has a register where pas is not obligatory but ne is: “this file cannot be modified” is ce fichier ne peut être modifié, at least on Apple computers as of 15 years ago.
As mentioned previously, my favorite example is the complete merger of in den into in in the Bavarian dialects and Viennese mesolect. That’s different from destroying information, though: if you encounter in without an article in a context where an article is expected, only den can be missing. Likewise, if a non-question begins with a verb, only a demonstrative pronoun can be missing, nothing else – unless it’s a joke.
All real human discourse skirts the edge of ambiguity all the time*: the resources are always there to resolve the ambiguity in the few cases where it is both real in context and of any importance at all.
I was just reading somewhere (unfortunately I’ve forgotten where) someone pointing out that castigating ordinary language as riddled with ambiguity is actually a classic case of mistaking a feature for a bug.
* Grice’s Maxim of Quantity.
To be clearer, I should’ve said “eventually replaced”.
The suggestion is not that someone decided one day to replace “ne” by “pas”. It was a gradual process for “pas” to become dominant.
Though in Slavic there could be an exception: The word “že”, used in OCS, has no direct counterpart in modern Croatian.
(And yes I am aware that Croatian is not directly descended from OCS.)
It occurred to me, though, that if the Gurma forms continue the historical POV form, the Kusaal cognate would have been m. You can see why there might have been some pressure to innovate …
I forgot where but a few years ago you discussed a possible POV form whose regular Kusaal cognate would have devolved entirely to zero. I want to say it was for “horse” but not very confident…
Romance has even more extreme examples of contraction. Latin ad ecce ista dies ‘on this here day’ became in Romanian the monosyllable azi [azʲ] ‘today’.
I love the common French phrase Qu’est-ce que c’est? both for its repetitiveness (all the words in it occur twice) and for its shortness in actual pronunciation (/kɛskəsɛ/, seven phonemes for six words). AFAICT most of the words in it weren’t that much longer in Latin, though.
I forgot where but a long time ago I’ve seen a reconstruction of the Proto-Germanic ancestor of the English word every. It was quite a lengthy sentence.
a possible POV form whose regular Kusaal cognate would have devolved entirely to zero
“Neck”, probably. However, science marches on, and now I reckon that the expected development would have been ʋn /ʊ̃/ (plural in /ɪ̃/.)
it seems that in language information can’t be destroyed.
Certainly information can be destroyed in language change, but this is a special case of one of the few genuinely exceptionless nontrivial generalisations about language: every language, at every moment, has at least one productive negation strategy.
Maybe it will be like Canute versus the tide, but “I don’t want our language to end up like French” seems a perfectly reasonable concern.
“Inherited from Middle English every, everich, eaver-euch, averiche, aver alche, ever ælche, from Old English ǣfre ǣlċ, ǣfre ǣġhwelċ (“each and every”), equivalent to ever + each and/or ever + which.”
For ever the etymology gets interesting:
“From Middle English ever, from Old English ǣfre, originally a phrase whose first element undoubtedly consists of Old English ā (“ever, always”) + in (“in”) + an element possibly from feorh (“life, existence”) (dative fēore). Compare Old English ā tō fēore (“ever in life”), Old English feorhlīf (“life”).”
Similarly each:
“From Middle English eche, from Old English ǣlċ, contraction of ǣġhwelċ, from Proto-West Germanic *aiwgahwalīk (“each, every”). Compare Scots ilk, elk (“each, every”), Saterland Frisian älk (“each”), West Frisian elk, elts (“each”), Dutch elk (“each”), Low German elk, ellik (“each”), German Low German elk, elke (“each, every”), German jeglich (“any”).”
The PWG form is a red link, and the *wg looks like a mistake, but I’m too lazy to try to figure it out. It’s definitely composite, though.
Even which is composite:
“From Middle English which, hwic, wilche, hwilch, whilk, hwilc, from Old English hwelċ (“which”), from Proto-Germanic *hwilīkaz (“what kind”, literally “like what”), derived from *hwaz, equivalent to who + like. Cognates include Scots whilk (“which”), West Frisian hokker (“which”), Dutch welk (“which”), Low German welk (“which”), German welcher (“which”), Danish hvilken (“which”), Swedish vilken (“which”), Norwegian hvilken (“which”), Icelandic hvílíkur (“which”).”
…and the *hwi- part turns out to be why, one of the three instrumentals of who/what.
The Gurma language Akaselem has gone a long way in this direction: thus, compared with its close relative Gulmancema:
ḿpɩ̀ “arrow”, Gulmancema pìèmú (Kusaal piim)
ŋkpe “river”, Gulmancema kpénú (Kusaal kɔlʋg)
ùnyìì ‘person”, Gulmancema nìlō (Kusaal nid)
dɩ́ŋɛ́rɛ́ “navel”, Gulmancema ŋúlūbū
Nobody really needs final syllables. They just slow you down.
Eventually, if you are determined enough, you will end up speaking Yoruba.
Uniflected words & syllables may disappear, but then something else takes their place:
‘Cursive singing’ is inescapable – but is it any goyidd?
Come to think of it, the Akaselem examples neatly mirror DM’s point re French negatives: Akaselem has developed class prefixes from old “articles”, which mean that despite the ditching of entire final syllables (entailing the complete loss of the inherited class suffixes) the language can still distinguish singular from plural in flexion, as with e.g. ḿpɩ̀ “arrow”, ɩ́pɩ̀ “arrows.” However, the development cannot be explained as a way of repairing the damage, because it is also found in Gurma languages in which the final syllables remain alive and well.
On the other hand, I suppose it may have enabled the loss by making the class suffixes essentially redundant. The only non-Gurma Oti-Volta language that has developed fused class prefixes is Ditammari, which also shows great attrition and frequent complete loss of final syllables: Ditammari kūpīē “arrow”, īpīē “arrows”, where the most closely related language to Ditammari, Nateni, has pēǹkū “arrow”, pēǹcī “arrows”, corresponding exactly in structure to Gulmancema pìèmú, plural pìèmí.
It seems to be an areal thing: the language immediately to the south of Ditammari, Miyobe, shows the same development, and it’s not even an Oti-Volta language.
Outsourcing the tracking of number (and case and gender) to the articles while final syllables are lost is also an ongoing long-term trend in German.