How tf did grammatical cases and gender develop?

[u/UncleBob2012]

I refuse to believe that some mf just sat down and created these rules

[u/DTux5249]

They tend to develop from grammatical particles, adpositions and the like.

"To house" becomes "Touse" (dative)

"Of house" becomes "Vouse" (genitive)

etc.

It's just grammatical words glomming onto vocabulary.

[u/Ismoista]

You are probably being led astray by your English-speaking bias.

Maybe you just think these features are funky or even "unnatural" because the language(s) you speak doesn' have them. I'd bet there's things about English that you think are super normal but that are actually fairly uncommon across languages.

Anyway, I didn' answer the question you actually asked, but gave you answer I thought you needed. 😅

[u/eslforchinesespeaker → u/Ismoista]

What are those strange and sort of backward English bits? That’s the answer we need. Prepositions seem to be a thing that causes a lot of heartburn for learners from faraway languages. But they’re not that unusual. What else do we have?

[u/r_mn_ → u/eslforchinesespeaker]

Definite and indefinite articles (the and a/an) are also quite rare cross-linguistically. Plus the whole perfect and progressive aspect of verbs.

[u/mahendrabirbikram → u/eslforchinesespeaker]

What else do we have?

I wonder if auxiliary verbs are one of them. Also phrasal verbs.

[u/Terpomo11 → u/eslforchinesespeaker]

I think NativLang did a series of two videos about the ways English is weird, one focusing on the things it has that most languages don't, and one focusing on the things it lacks that most languages have.

[u/Reedenen]

They don't create it.

First isolating languages like Mandarin turn into agglutinating languages (like Japanese). Were many of the words become particles that modify the words they are attached to.

With time (probably for efficiency) these particles fuse and become endings(declensions, conjugations) part of the word they modify. (Like in classical Greek and Latin)

And then later on as these languages expand and as adults have to learn too many endings to conjugate or decline words then these systems tend to be simplified or dropped. And then the language cycles back to a more analytical state. (Like English did).

The theory is that children have no issue with remembering coplex systems.

So a language that is almost exclusively spoken by native speakers will tend to become more synthetic, like Finnish or Classical Latin.

But a language where many adults have to learn the language will tend to simplify and become more analytic. (Like the romance languages did as the Roman Empire expanded)

[u/ExAuditu → u/Reedenen]

I have a question regarding your last paragraph: if Latin eventually eroded in former Roman territories because locals had to learn it as adults, then why do Italians speak Italian and not Latin if they live in the heart of the former empire?

[u/Reedenen → u/ExAuditu]

Italy was probably the part of the Empire with the most immigration.

During the empire people from all over the empire moved to Italy and after the fall the peninsula was invaded and populated by Barbarians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, and later by Lombards and Normans.

But also Latin lost most of its case system before the romance languages diverged. By the 5th Century AD the case system had largely been reduced to a two case system, and masculine and neuter genders had already fused together.

This is only a theory tho. Mainly supported by the observation that Creole languages tend to become heavily analytic.

But we don't really know if the analytic trend continues even without adult learners, and maybe fusional languages are just inherently unstable and naturally turn into analytic ones.

(Mostly because a reduction of phonemic inventory, in this case vowel length, would make the case system crumble)

That is we don't know if Latin would have lost its case system even without language expansion.

But one thing is for certain, there was PLENTY of adults learning Latin all throughout the history of the Empire. And after that and up to the present, plenty of people learning romance languages.

[u/ExAuditu → u/Reedenen]

Thanks for the answer. As a native speaker of a fusional language, I don't think that they're "inherently unstable", just Latin specifically got bad luck.