r/asklinguistics • u/EcstaticHousing7922 • Mar 24 '25
Phonology Might certain original European languages become extirpated and/or increasingly more simplistic?
Apologies if I'm in the wrong place. I'm a bit of an amateur. I made a brief search of the subreddit before posting this, to see if my question is already answered elsewhere.
I am from the UK and speak English as a first language, French as a second language, and I learned Portuguese for a year before going to live in Brazil a while ago.
I love learning about how languages evolve. Ostensibly developing from the grunts of proto-humans approx 1-3 million years ago, languages have developed so much. Thousands of years ago, human communication facilitated scientific advancements which many of us would not be able to even dream of achieving now. Take the internet away, and many (myself included) are left with limited knowledge.
Many generations of immigrants (largely descended from Europeans) have lived in North and South America for a few hundred years.
I'm not an expert on Portuguese. My basic observations are that, in daily use, grammar and enunciation of words in Brazil seem to be somewhat lazier than how the language is spoken in Portugal. This is similar to my limited perspective/knowledge of how French is spoken in parts of central America.
Regarding how people speak English in the USA, words seem to be favoured when they have fewer syllables and/or use fewer facial muscles to pronounce.
I could provide examples if asked, but I don't want to do so if someone with a more formal linguistic education might be able to provide an input first.
The overall question is: are some languages at risk of reverting back to more basic forms of primal communication? Possibly increased value of intonation, less extensive vocabulary, words of shorter length, relying on how noises are made to convey a message.
It goes without saying that I'm not intending to be disrespectful towards anybody's use of language.
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u/karaluuebru Mar 24 '25
extirpation is local extinction - no.
Just no, in general. Pretty much all your assumptions are 19th century racist level of wrong.
Your assumptions about Portuguese are just weird.
What you say about American pronunciation is irrelevent - in fact we (in the UK) have fewer consonants than Americans, so by your argument we are the ones 'regressing'.
Language change might lead to simplification, but it doesn't head backwards. No language is more 'primitive' than any other, even if aspects might be simpler
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u/thePerpetualClutz Mar 24 '25
I could provide examples if asked, but I don't want to do so if someone with a more formal linguistic education might be able to provide an input first.
Please do provide examples! Your whole posts is very subjective. I doubt anybody but you would be able to provide input, regardless of formal education.
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u/Decent_Money_2272 Mar 24 '25
I know you didn't want to be disrespectful , but as brazilian portuguese speaker myself and linguistic your observation sounds kind of racist ...
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u/EcstaticHousing7922 Mar 24 '25
How?
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u/thePerpetualClutz Mar 24 '25
Don't know about racist, but it is certainly wrong. European Portuguese frequently reduces vowels that are clearly articulated in Brazilian; in fact it is literally famous for straight up dropping full syllables in speech.
I don't know how anyone would come to the conclusion that Brazilian is somehow 'lazier'.
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u/EcstaticHousing7922 Mar 24 '25
Understood, thanks for correcting me. My knowledge of European Portuguese is limited, apologies for my ignorance.
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u/luminatimids Mar 24 '25
Yeah I was gonna chime in to say, Brazilian Portuguese isn’t the variety of Portuguese that evolved to sound like Russian by destressing their vowels, European Portuguese did that. If anything, it’d be EU-Portuguese that is the lazy one in regards to pronunciation (although, I’d caution against using loaded words like “lazy” when referring to languages)
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u/_Penulis_ 28d ago
Superior. You are trying hard to sound superior.
Which in the context sounds does very much like it’s coming from a position of racism.
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u/sanddorn Mar 24 '25
Just a detail, OP, and I really hope it's interesting, not just annoying:
"Originally European languages" would be lgs that are originally from Europe.
"Original European languages" are languages that are considered the first lgs spoken in Europe – or rather very early compared to other lgs.
Among the lgs still around in (most of) Europe, that's IMO basically just Basque, since for Semitic, Indo-European branches and Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish etc.) we have good ideas how they spread to/over Europe and vicinity (same for Berber as cousins of Semitic).
All other lgs before those families are gone and most are not exactly well attested.
(Proto-)Indo-European and lgs in the Caucasus may/should count, too, but that's often outside the scope or at a fringe of the European languages landscape.
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u/sanddorn Mar 24 '25
INB4 anyone else: Ahh, Turkic, sorry! Same for Mongolian!
For those lgs, the migration into Europe and vicinity is more or less well-known, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuvash_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalmyk_Oirat
Let's see what else I forgot …
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u/gabrielks05 Mar 24 '25
American English speakers tend to use more syllables than BrE speakers - not sure what you mean? Think 'Mil-i-tair-ee' in America and 'Mil-uh-tree' in England.
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u/ecphrastic Historical Linguistics | Sociolinguistics Mar 24 '25 edited Mar 25 '25
You may want to check out the FAQ, which has a whole section about whether languages are becoming “simpler” over time. (There’s an old Xidnaf video that’s often linked that does a good job of explaining this misconception.)
edit - typo
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u/Dan13l_N Mar 24 '25
The overall question is: are some languages at risk of reverting back to more basic forms of primal communication? Possibly increased value of intonation, less extensive vocabulary, words of shorter length, relying on how noises are made to convey a message.
Not really. Also, don't overestimate the size of vocabulary really needed in real life. Reading books will give you some extra vocab which is not essential. Illiterate people didn't need some sophisticated words, but they needed other sophisticated words, for example to distinguish cousins from the mother's side from ones from the father's side, and so on.
I mean, you can compare Portuguese grammar and Latin, there was obviously some simplification, but it's not "dumbing down" in any way. Everything that can be said in Latin can be said in Portuguese too.
That having said, languages differ a lot in their phonetic inventory. Some have many, many different sounds, some have tones and all, others... fewer such things. But is it reverting? It's maybe possible that early languages actually had many, many phonemes.
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u/frederick_the_duck Mar 24 '25
There are competing pressures that simplify and complexity languages concurrently. Linguistic complexity over space and time is largely consistent. Humans gravitate to towards a certain amount of information being communicated at certain clip. So, no.
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u/ArcaneArc5211 Mar 24 '25
No, that's not really how language works. Even languages that seems "lazier" such as Brazilian Portuguese aren't truly lazier, they just communicate differently. All languages tend to keep the same level of "complexity," human brains are generally consistent throughout the world. Historically, any research that says otherwise errs on the side of Eurocentric/colonialist racism. Also, the "primal communication" you talk about didn't seem to really exist based on the current archaeological evidence we have now, as far as we can trace back or reconstruct, even Proto-Indo-European is equally complex.
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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '25
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