Alex – How many of these 112 languages are Indo-European?

I’m a little puzzled by your remark about third person singular -s in English as this has nothing to do with gender. In general in Indo-European languages gender is not involved in verbal morphology.

https://wals.info/feature/30A#2/26.4/141.9

I speculate that the third-person singular -s has been retained because English’s gender system is so vestigial. That is, most things use “it” and “they/them” doesn’t distinguish gender at all. So we need *something* to help disambiguate in the third person.

I suspect that English has fewer/less prominent dialects because of centralizing forces of commerce, early adoption of broadcast and rail technology, the British Empire etc.

Spelling-wise, Danish and Tibetan are similar. Like English, Tibetan settled on a writing system before major changes in the way the language was spoken.

Thanks for these comments. All, especially your longer comparative thoughts, quite interesting.

You remind me that I actually have no idea how common gender is in languages outside the Indo-European world. I am in relatively easy access to Chinese, Arabic speakers and possibly speakers of South Asian languages. Must try to raise that. More fun than just looking it up… I am curious how the phenomenon would have arisen.

One of your comments put me in mind of a thought I recently had in some other contexts. English does seem simple to an educated native speaker once we’re past some very early hurdles. But it may hinder us with other languages [obviously not all of us, but perhaps those of us a bit deaf to languages could do better if our first language were simpler], and it sometimes seems to me that both the role of English as a lingua franca and the trends in education in English-speaking countries are moving towards simplification on utilitarian grounds. Even on a day to day basis I think something is being lost.

It’s a trade-off. Once upon a time a relatively small number of elite pupils learned the best and most sophisticated english and were also offered the most challenging opportunities to learn other tongues. We may be democratizing both but I’m not sold on every consequence.

I only speak English, though. So there’s that. I can force my way through Burns and wrestle inconclusively with The Kingis Quhair of James IV. So even my ancestors’ culture is closing to me. Thank goodness I don’t have to speak Gaelic. I take Gaelic poetry in nice modern English side-by-side when I can get it.

As for English spelling the written Chinese language has no relation at all to the spoken language. As difficult as it is to learn English spelling it is much more difficult to learn Chinese ideographs or kanji for written Japanese.

I doubt that English is all that unique and all that complex. The morphology of English is certainly pretty simple compared say to Icelandic. While consonant clusters of up to 4 consonants occur in English, in some Caucasian languages consonant clusters of 5 or 6 phonemes are common. Tlingit has five different lateral phonemes none of which are exactly like the English “l”. For something that will drive you bat-shit crazy try to understand the “topic” syntax of Tagalog.

One thing about English and all Indo-European languages is that they have plenty of diphthongs. Most languages have no diphthongs. But some Chinese languages have triphthongs. Also some English dialects particularly in the US have lots of rhotacized vowels which are very rare in the world’s languages in general. Only a few percent of the world’s languages have rhotacized vowels. But this small number includes in addition to American English also Mandarin Chinese.

Going back to gender a lot of languages have “weird” features. In the languages of the Andaman Islands every word is associated with a part of the body and the grammar of these languages is organized around this association. In some languages different words and grammatical constructions are used by men talking to men, men talking to women and women talking to women.

I remember struggling with this in grade school French- my first introduction to the possibility of rejecting something on a metaconceptual level.

I wonder if any linguistics scholars have analyzed why this is such a common feature?

Scots as used by Burns is sufficiently different from 18c English [which we understand more or less as modern] to be a problem but half, sure. It’s more about vocabulary and spelling.

Scots as used by James IV stands about in relation to Burns as the English of Henry VIII would have stood to that of George III. So as early modern English is a bit of a poser for us, so early modern Scots is more difficult than Burns.

Scots is conventionally considered a separate language that slowly died into a dialect, some would say. But it was for centuries a separate Germanic language, parallel to modern English and derived from the Northumbrian Old English via northern Middle English, as standard modern English came from southern Old English via southern versions of Middle English. Scots also had different loanwords from French, probably more, and preserved different Germanic roots or older definitions of words. Examples:

Gang. The verb to go, as in German. A long survivor. Preserved in dialect versions of Scottish English well into the 20th century. Survives in at least one clan motto, Gang Warily.

Braw. “Brave”, in the older and broader English meanings familiar to Shakespeare. Courageous, bold, but also Grand, magnificent, impressive, and just an expression for “very good”. Survived in slang well past WW2. Compare Christopher Marlowe, “Is it not brave to be a King, and ride in triumph through Persepolis?” He didn’t mean, showing courage in face of danger.

Still, as most of my Scots forebears might casually remark, he’s dead now. So’s he. Him, he’s dead too. And so on.

For languages extant today, I’ve heard Frisian too. Willing to bet I couldn’t get half of it.