 Imagine if someone looked at some mountains and said, holy crap you guys, I don't think these things are gonna last much longer. Wind and rain and earthquakes and humans are constantly wearing them down, making them a little shorter and flatter each day. It might take a while, but if we don't do something to stop it, eventually there'll be nothing left. Now you and I know that this is silly, but the whole thing seems kind of reasonable if you don't know much about how mountains work. Like, we can see wind and rain and erosion, but it's a lot harder to notice or understand the forces that push mountains back up. The same is true for languages in a lot of ways. Like, it's pretty easy to look at Old English turning into Modern English or Latin turning into the Romance languages and get the impression that languages are naturally prone to simplification. And, okay, what makes a language simple or complicated is really ambiguous and no one agrees on a way to measure it. But for the sake of this video, I'm going to talk about two ways that it might seem at first like languages are getting simpler. Phoneme inventory and inflectional morphology. Phoneme inventory refers to the set of possible sounds, or phonemes, that a language has available to build words out of. My dialect of English has about 38, assuming I counted right, but different languages and even different dialects of the same language will have different inventories. Now, if you look at the history of the pronunciation of English, you find a lot of examples of sounds that used to exist, either merging with other sounds or being lost entirely. We used to have sounds that were pronounced e, e, u, ou, and u. But people started saying e the same as e, and they started pronouncing u and ou the same as u. With the result that pain, pain, do, do, and do are all spelled differently, even though the first two and the last three are all pronounced the same. At the same time, people just stopped saying altogether, which is why there are these useless G-H letters at the ends of these words, which used to be pronounced nacht and tocht. Now, merging sounds like this all the time does seem kind of dangerous. Like, what if we start merging so many sounds together that we can't tell what words we're saying anymore? How will people tell if I'm talking about a pet or a bet or a net if p, b, and n are all pronounced the same? But it's never actually that bad. When sounds merge with each other, you'll probably wind up with some words that used to be pronounced differently and are now pronounced the same. But this is never actually a big problem, because, one, not many words merge together. Usually there were also other differences between them that people can still use to tell the difference. Two, the words that do merge together, you can often still tell apart from context. When I say, I'm going to have to do a lot of work if I want to collect enough do by the time it's due, you can still tell exactly what I mean, even though these three words were all pronounced the same. Three, in the rare event that we really do lose the ability to distinguish between two things in our speech because of a merger, people will just make up a new word for one or both of them. Heck, people just make up new words all the time, even when they don't have to. It's just fun. We're not going to run out of words anytime soon. Now, obviously, if we lose enough speech sounds, it would eventually get hard to communicate. The number of words that have merged together would grow and grow and grow until it became unmanageable. But in the long run, people add speech sounds just as often as they eliminate them. It can just be a bit harder to see as it's happening. Usually the way it starts is with a sound being pronounced differently depending on the context, like how an old English the was just how you pronounce the when it's in between other voiced sounds. At first, people won't think of these as new sounds, but just as different variants of the same sound, like how right now we perceive the h in house and the h in hue to be the same sound even though they're actually pronounced a bit differently. But then, as time goes on, those differences become more and more exaggerated until people start interpreting them as two distinct sounds instead of two forms of the same sound. For a while, this won't help anyone distinguish between sounds because you can still predict which sound it'll be depending on the sounds around it. But eventually, people will start using this new distinction to make up or borrow new words that wouldn't have been possible before because before they would have been pronounced the same as existing words. The result is that over the long run, the overall size of the phoneme inventory stays about the same and people never merge enough sounds to hurt their ability to communicate. Now, the other way it might look like languages are getting simpler is with respect to what's called inflectional morphology. Morphology refers to how a word is built from smaller parts called morphemes. Inflectional morphology refers to how words are marked for various grammatical properties. It's a little unclear to me how to tell if something counts as a grammatical property, but usually linguists start talking about things like number or case for nouns or tense or voice for verbs. Now, it might look at first like the inflectional morphology for a lot of languages has been getting simpler the past couple thousand years. It looks this way because that's exactly what happened. Latin used to have like 12 different forms for each of its nouns depending on whether they were plural or not, but also depending on the role they played in the sentence. Not a single romance language has that kind of inflection for its nouns anymore. Old English had stan, stane, stane, stana, stana and stanum, where today all we have are stone and stones and holy crap, our verbs used to be complicated. And this isn't just limited to English and the romance languages. You see similar patterns in almost every single Indo-European language, but while it is true that the number of forms that words take has been decreasing for all of these languages, I think it's worth pointing out that this doesn't necessarily mean that these languages are getting simpler overall. In Old English and Latin, all these different word forms used to do a lot of the work of communicating what words meant and what they were doing in the sentence. But it's not like we can't figure that stuff out anymore. We just have separate words that do the same thing, as well as rules for what order the different parts of the sentence need to appear in. All the same information's there. It's just being expressed in different places. That being said, the fact that so many languages are moving towards less inflectional morphology does seem kind of weird, until you consider the fact that most of these languages are part of the same language family and the language they're all descended from, Proto-Indo-European, just happen to have some very complicated inflectional morphology. It's hard to imagine it getting any more inflection from there, so of course most languages descended from it have been losing inflection instead. That same pattern doesn't hold for non-Indo-European languages. Languages can gain inflectional morphology just as easily as they can lose them, but it can be harder to notice because new inflectional morphology doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It happens when separate words that used to carry grammatical information combine with the word they're describing. Chinese, for example, seems like it might be starting to develop some new inflectional morphology for the first time in a long while. This word used to be a normal verb that meant to finish, but these days people are using it as a suffix that you attach to the end of a verb to mark its tense. You can see similar things happening in English. Most of the time, we barely have any inflectional morphology anymore, but when I am going to gets compressed into I'ma, or when of becomes a quick little uh attached to the beginning of a word, you can see the beginnings of how complicated markings for grammatical properties form. In the moment, this looks like people are just sort of slurring their words together, but if you go back far enough, these same processes are probably where all of those complicated inflection systems of Latin and Old English came from in the first place. And we're not gonna run out of new words to make new inflections out of, because, again, people can't stop making up new words even if they wanted to. Now, if I can go on a quick tangent, there's a theory out there that languages tend to move in a cycle where fusional languages become analytic languages, which become agglutinative languages, which go back to being fusional again. If you don't know what any of those words mean, that's okay because I only wanted to bring it up to say that this theory isn't actually that popular. Wikipedia talks about this kind of thing a lot, and my old historical linguistics teacher liked it, but as far as I can tell, most linguists don't even think that these three terms are that useful for categorizing languages anymore. All right, tangent over. What I find really amusing is that you could look at any of the types of change we've talked about and make an argument that there is simplification of language, or that they're making language less clear. If you're losing inflections, oh no, words are getting smaller and slowly breaking down. If you're gaining inflections, oh no, words are slurring together into a giant mess. If you're losing sounds, oh no, we're gonna pronounce everything the same as everything else. If you're gaining sounds, oh no, no one's pronouncing sounds consistently anymore. The reality is that language needs rules and complexity in order to function as a means of communication, and if a possible change would make language unusable, then no one starts talking like that in the first place. Whenever old rules stop being followed, new ones are created, and whenever language gets simple in some ways, it usually gets more complicated in others. It doesn't get better or worse or more elaborate or more efficient, it just changes.