Intended just as friendly fuel for this cheery and interesting fire:
Well, English has become 'Chinese-like' (i.e. more like
isolating languages and less like inflecting languages)
recently(?) with less and less inflection.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think that's a monotonic decrease. I
think I've seen, just in personal observations, old forms be
rejuvinated by sub-populations looking to distinguish themselves by
their dialect. So I think it's fluid, determined by expressivity
vs. succinctness vs. euphonious qualities.
Can anyone talk about verb forms? IE languages offer many shades of
meaning through subtleties of tense and voice -- do these have
similarly succinct parallels in other languages? I don't remember any
more: How many verb forms are there in Attic Greek?
It (english) seems to me like a kind of ultimate, permanent creole,
having gone through a historic and helpful period in which latin
grammar and french vocabulary had an outrageous influence on the
perceived "proper usage", and continuous historic periods where it
merges with just about every other language. So it has been caught in
a pincher between a striving-for-syntactic-richness and
pressure-for-succinct-and-easy-expression. But maybe that's just
wishful thinking since I'm:
Pitifully monolinguisticly yrs,
-t
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