Why has English lost so much of its former complexity?

[Mingle]

I'm just curious why they took place and why they don't seem to have in other languages.

And what makes you so sure that it doesn't happen in other languages? Have you read ancient and modern work in a language other than English to compare? What's your basis for saying this is unique to English? I think its natural for languages to decrease in complexity as time goes on and their speaking base expands.

[Mingle]

Old Persian had a complex morphology with a rich case and agreement system. By 331 BC (at the time of the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Macedonian) the language had simplified and had lost most of its cases and agreements.

http://www.zoorna.org/shiraz/introduction.html

According to the link above, Persian also simplified during the Old Persian to Middle Persian transition. It probably underwent another simplification when it transitioned to New (Modern) Persian.

[Smitty]

And what makes you so sure that it doesn't happen in other languages? Have you read ancient and modern work in a language other than English to compare? What's your basis for saying this is unique to English? I think its natural for languages to decrease in complexity as time goes on and their speaking base expands.

I'm not at all sure, hence the question. I just know there still exists far more grammatical complexity in German, Polish, Spanish even, and undoubtedly other languages than in English - although Wikipedia says German too has simplified over time, to your point. Your quote on the Persian language is also interesting.

It seems safe to say that English has undergone more simplification, though, than some languages. And unlike you, I find that counterintuitive. Why, as our culture has gotten more complex, more specialized, and more advanced, has our language gotten simpler? Why did our Anglo-Saxon forebears need more genders, more cases, more inflections, etc., than we do today?

[Smitty]

How do you know are you multi-lingual ? Voulez-vous parlez française avec moi ? All human languages evolve over time and that includes mathematics and mathematics is the most advanced language that humans have ever created and even it changes.

I speak a bit of Spanish, but no, I'm not multilingual. But linguistics interests me, and I have looked a little into other languages. And plenty are more complex than English, grammatically. English language learners will tell you that English is in many ways an easy language to learn.

[Calpurnius]

May be a matter essentially related to the history of England and its conquest by various groups overlapping strata over strata of often different languages as well as the lack of prestige of old English within the medieval European context as a whole, dominated by a reverence for Latin or old French.
I think it's also the reason why in comparison Greek hasn't changed as much from koine Greek despite the various owners of Greece ever since the Roman conquest. Its prestige allowed it to be a strong reference point throughout the ages, while in England for instance after the Norman conquest the elite language had a deteriorating influence over a more purely Anglo-Saxon english, which itself had to compete with Norse languages from Vikings and Celtic languages from Britons et cetera.

In any case, loss of inflections and to some degree loss of genders is a west European-wide phenomenon. Even German despite keeping 4 cases mostly uses prepositions and articles heavily and has almost completely lost noun declination. Not to mention its verb system is also simplified to some degree.

[Ouistreham]

Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" is very different than Venerable Bede's "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" because of the Norman invasion. That means English changed from Old English to Middle English.

Exactly. Following the Norman conquest, for about three hundred years the English language was left in the shadow of Norman French, and evolved freely and quickly without any authoritative scholar or writer to take care of the language.
In other words, English as we know it started as a popular speech — mainly a London slang.

English has all the distinctive features of a slang:
• simplified grammar and morphologies,
• an extremely rich and creative inventory of words,
• including many words of unknown origin (or for which no convincing etymology has been found): bad, dog, big, pink, black, boy, girl, surf, bird, pig etc.
Note that those words are the most typically English of all (short and percussive), and well-known worldwide.
This is a unique phenomenon. There is virtually not a single word of unknown etymology in French or German.

[TheOldNorth]

Many indo-european languages have lost their complexity, German once had like 7 cases an and at least 3 more phonemes. Spanish obviously doesn’t have the number of cases as Latin, though some have became complex in a new way over time like the insular Celtic languages that lost their Latin like case endings, reduced their cases to like 4 and then added consonant mutation and 10 more phonemes

[Óttar]

I think they should bring back the Shakespearean era's thou (informal you, subject) and thee (informal you, object) corresponding to German du and dich. Thou seest (Du siehst), thou art, thou speakest (Du sprichst), etc. I love thee (Ich liebe dich), etc.

[Mingle]

I think they should bring back the Shakespearean era's thou (informal you, subject) and thee (informal you, object) corresponding to German du and dich. Thou seest (Du siehst), thou art, thou speakest (Du sprichst), etc. I love thee (Ich liebe dich), etc.

I wonder if such a thing has ever happened before, where they artificially brought back dead pronouns. The word "thou" (pronounced "tha") is still in use in Yorkshire by the way.

[Bakha]

Russian is also dumbed down tremendously in comparison to soviet times and even much much more, to classical russian language of the 18-19 centuries, which is indeed a truly beautiful one.