Language contact and grammatical simplification

[Argyraella]

I've read about the idea that languages that are recently learned by a significant proportion of non-native speakers are usually grammatically simpler than closely related languages, argued for by John McWhorter in the book Language Interrupted in which five examples of simplification are discussed (English, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Arabic and Malay) Supposedly these languages were subject to great amounts of non-native acquisition and because the non-natives didn't completely acquire some of the grammatical complexities (e.g. extensive verb conjugations) the resulting language was stripped of such complexities.

Of course, this idea is controversial and someone does indeed disagree: Sarah G. Thomason of the University of Michigan discusses some of the points McWhorter makes in this paper, and one quote rings true to me most of the time:

If you simplify a language’s structure in one place, you are
likely to complicate it somewhere else.

What do you all think? How convincing are McWhorter's arguments?

[eldin raigmore]

What do you all think? How convincing are McWhorter's arguments?

Pretty convincing IMHO FWIW.

But I don't think the Thomason quote is incompatible with McWhorter's argument (maybe some other part of her paper is).

Consider for example the circumlocutions (relative to Standard English) that Pidgin English goes through to make some points that could be made in fewer words in Standard English.
Pidgin English has a smaller lexicon, and also fewer inflections and derivations applying to words in the lexicon; so a word in Standard English sometimes has to be glossed as a phrase in Pidgin English.
One thing is simplified, leading to something else being complicated.
If there is something for McWhorter's PoV vs Thomason's, it's probably that, usually, in the "simplified" version of the language, the complexities are optional, while in the standard, "complex" form of the language, the complexities are mandatory.

Why should one always have to say whether the event one is talking about happened some time ago or will happen some time in the future or is happening right now?
Why should one, before mentioning a noun, know and always have to say whether one is talking about just one of them or more than one of them?

In both cases it's reasonable to think that there would be "tensing" words (perhaps particles) or "pluralizing" words (also perhaps particles) that one could use if one really wanted to communicate when something happened or how many things it happened to. But why should one be required to communicate that if one doesn't know or doesn't care or just doesn't want to say?

For an example, there are North American Native languages in which one is never required to say when the event one is asserting took place; but one is always required to say how one knows.
In such languages a speaker could easily say "it happened yesterday" or "it will happen tomorrow" or "it's happening right now" if one wanted to; but no speaker must say it.
OTOH in English a speaker could always say "I can see it right now and so can you if you'll just look" or "I saw it with my own eyes" or "I heard it first-hand from a usually reliable eyewitness" or "rumor has it" or whatever; but certainly it is perfectly grammatical to assert some clause in English without any hint as to how one knows.

It is such complications that McWhorter says "drop away" when large numbers of people who acquired the language as an L2 as adults, have no other language in common in which to conduct business. But they don't "drop away" completely; rather, what used to be mandatory drops away from being mandatory, and the optional replacement means to communicate the same thing usually is more work than what "dropped away".

In short:
1) What can be said in any natlang can also be said in any other natlang, though often not as succinctly;
2) Languages differ more in what one must say than in what one may say.

These are axioms (or maybe cliches or aphorisms) of any kind of cross-linguistic study. People who've known them for a long time probably don't really need to hear them again; but if one does not know them they are big news.

And I think it's in these two facts that one can find the seeds of the reason Thomason's statement (statements?) and McWhorter's statement(s) can both be correct.

---

But as I said, that's just my opinion. I'm not an expert, and I could be wrong; nobody's going to base a major part of their own work on my ideas.

[Squall]

Those languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic and Malay) are spoken in a large area and have a large number of speakers.
That may increase the lexicon and the number of idioms.

Why should one always have to say whether the event one is talking about happened some time ago or will happen some time in the future or is happening right now?
Why should one, before mentioning a noun, know and always have to say whether one is talking about just one of them or more than one of them?

If the tense is absent, what is the meaning of: "I to-have lunch."?
Of course, the verb does not need a tense mark if we have adverbs (yesterday, not long ago, right now, already, soon, tomorrow), but I do not understand the sentence without any temporal info.

Is it the effect of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in my mind?


When I see a noun, it makes me remind the object alone.
If the sentence is "INDEF dog be.PRES here." and the meaning is "A dog is here." or "Some dogs are here.", I will be confused.
The best translation is "At least a dog is here.".
Of course, a language does not need to have plural. It could mean singular in the default form and express plurality with strategies like "a group of dogs".

[thetha]

If the tense is absent, what is the meaning of: "I to-have lunch."?

If it's 12:30 pm then it probably means "I'm having lunch"