Language Evolution, it's Fantastic, it's Incredible

[Dr Sardonicus]

Hmm. All this stuff about refraction reminds me of an ad, many years ago, flogging a wondrous new kind of furniture -- a refractory table! Perhaps this is the kind of table where you sit down to drink false cognac. Or, possibly,an oopsadaisy for "refectory."

Refraction is a curious thing, because for many materials the index of refraction depends on wavelength. This is what causes prisms to spread white light into a rainbow, and what gives diamonds their "fire." It takes a fair bit of art to minimize this "dispersion" in refracting telescope lenses.

The well known property that "the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection," as well as the formula for refraction known as Snell's Law, are both corollary to Fermat's Principle of Optics, that light takes the path of least time. Yes -- THAT Fermat.

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by LaurV

What are you talking about man? Which western romance languages? Spanish is one of the most inflected languages in the world, and Portuguese follows closely with its 11 inflection modes or so... Except for the case there is a more western romance language which I don't know about, hehe....

I should speak more accurately. All the romance languages retain large amounts of inflection, but only in the verb conjugation department. In the noun declension department, they have largely moved, like English and Dutch, to a non-cased system heavily dependent on word order to specify how the nouns relate to the verb. Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian nouns do not change form except for singular/plural, which is the same as English, and different, apparently, from Romanian. All 5 of these languages rely on prepositions and word order to determine noun-verb relationships. (Diminutives are different, and are widely used in e.g. Portuguese and Italian and to a lesser extent in Spanish, but those are not inflections, either of case or of number, instead representing new meanings entirely, at least from the perspective of the grammar.)

(Unlike the Romance languages, English is losing inflections even in its verbs, instead in the process of moving to an analytic structure with auxiliary/modal verbs to express complex tenses, aspects, and moods. This process is of course incomplete still, with most notably the past tense and present third person singular retaining inflections.)

Originally Posted by LaurV

However, the fact that the old PG languages were inflected is news to me, I always assumed that the modern languages got this from Latin, which was an extremely-high inflected language (and Romanian kept most of it).

Allow me to re-emphasize: all languages descended from Proto-Indo-European either are or were heavily inflected, like the mother language. The Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, Ancient Greek, you name it, it was inflected with mostly free word order. Obviously further evolution has affected this, with most notably the grandkids of Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic having mostly (but not entirely) evolved to analytic/word order structure; Persian, for example, has mostly lost case endings as well, and Hindi is kind of like Romanian in that it retains a few cases, but is largely simplified from Sanskrit/Latin full case systems (at least if I understood its Wikipedia page correctly). The Balto-Slavic family is of course the primary example of the greatgrandkids retaining a heavily cased system with free word order, with e.g. Russian and Polish standing out as having particularly complex grammar even among that family.

Well, really you should just read up a bit about proto indo european itself, as well as its expansion and descendants As a first step:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-...age#Morphology

Proto-Indo-European nouns are declined for eight or nine cases...

There were three grammatical genders...

Proto-Indo-European verbs, like the nouns, exhibited a system of ablaut. The most basic categorization for the Indo-European verb was grammatical aspect...

Verbs have at least four grammatical moods...

Verbs had two grammatical voices...

Verbs had three grammatical persons...

Verbs had three grammatical numbers...

Verbs were also marked by a highly developed system of participles, one for each combination of tense and voice, and an assorted array of verbal nouns and adjectival formations.

...


Since all the early attested IE languages were inflectional, PIE is thought to have relied primarily on morphological markers, rather than word order, to signal syntactic relationships within sentences.[34] Still, a default (unmarked) word order is thought to have existed in PIE. This was reconstructed by Jacob Wackernagel as being subject–verb–object (SVO), based on evidence in Vedic Sanskrit, and the SVO hypothesis still has some adherents, but as of 2015 the "broad consensus" among PIE scholars is that PIE would have been a subject–object–verb (SOV) language.[35]

The SOV default word order with other orders used to express emphasis (e.g., verb–subject–object to emphasise the verb) is attested in Old Indic, Old Iranian, Old Latin and Hittite, while traces of it can be found in the enclitic personal pronouns of the Tocharian languages.[34] A shift from OV to VO order is posited to have occurred in late PIE since many of the descendant languages have this order: modern Greek, Romance and Albanian prefer SVO, Insular Celtic has VSO as the default order, and even the Anatolian languages show some signs of this word order shift.[36] The inconsistent order preference in Baltic, Slavic and Germanic can be attributed to contact with outside OV languages.

[CRGreathouse]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

I should speak more accurately. All the romance languages retain large amounts of inflection, but only in the verb conjugation department. In the noun declension department, they have largely moved, like English and Dutch, to a non-cased system heavily dependent on word order to specify how the nouns relate to the verb.

Declensions are the *worst*, glad VL got rid of them. Keeping conjugations around is a small price to pay.

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by CRGreathouse

Declensions are the *worst*

That's a highly debatable opinion I tend to agree, but I think that's largely influenced by my own native language (guess what it is) being a non-declined language. But of course the drawback is that to emphasize a topic that isn't a natural subject, we have to go though long metalinguistic/prose gymnastics to promote the thing to the subject, e.g. "It was the girl that was stung by the bee" as opposed to "the bee stung the girl (and not the boy)". These sorts of literary hoops to jump through are the trade for declensions with free word order. Not to mention an otherwise-complex syntax that can occasionally be difficult to parse.

Edit: Here's a fine example of an (apparently) controversial grammar feature born of the literary tendency to put the emphatic/important things first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englis...ouble_genitive

[CRGreathouse]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

That's a highly debatable opinion

Definitely -- though I wasn't being entirely serious.

[Nick]

If language becomes too precise then you lose a whole class of jokes!

[a1call]

French literature on "Big band theory."

https://youtu.be/FlPjwUKocZw

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by Nick

If language becomes too precise then you lose a whole class of jokes!

What, exactly, is humour?

The unexpected? The subtle? The outrageous?

I sometimes think I'm being really funny; often others disagree.

[a1call]

Fun"ny, n.; pl. funnies (?). A clinkerbuit, narrow boat for sculling. [Eng.]

https://www.websters1913.com/words/Funny

[a1call]

This is a general comment and not necessarily related to chaisal which I do find humourous at times (I am a bit embarrassed to say).

Personally I think comedians which rely solely on profanity to get a laugh are not very talented in their profession. It reminds me of 1st graders who break out in laughter/giggles as soon as someone utters the f word or the likes in the class.
A real comedian can get a laugh without resorting to profanity or in spite of it like Lewis Niles Black (my favourite ).

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by a1call

A real comedian can get a laugh without resorting to profanity or in spite of it like Lewis Niles Black (my favourite ).

I completely agree with you.

However, as a sometimes manager, sometimes dropping the "F' word" gets the point across more clearly. Such as "What the F' did you think you were doing?" when a major mistake was made.

As a white person, however, I would never use the "N' word". And yet several of my people would use it between themselves. Jokingly.

Language is a subtle yet powerful tool.