I can see how different grunts could come to mean 鈥渂ear鈥�, 鈥渄eer鈥� or 鈥渞un鈥�. But how do grammatically complex languages get their cases and declensions?
Paul Seedhouse
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Newcastle upon Tyne, UK This can best be answered from a broader perspective on the evolution of complex life and by understanding languages as complex, life-related systems.
All life on Earth began with our last universal common ancestor (LUCA), an organism similar to extant bacteria. Once life started, it evolved to become ever more diverse and complex, eventually developing the human brain, the most complex object ever found on Earth. The human brain co-evolved with the complex adaptive system of language to co-develop complex thought, technologies and societies. We cannot be sure for how long, but most estimates are for over 100,000 years.
As early Homo sapiens spread out around the world, they evolved and adapted in various ways to the new and changing environments they encountered. Their bodies adapted physically. For instance, people living at high altitude developed over time the ability to increase the amount of oxygen they acquired from thin air. Our ancestors also developed what we now call cultures in relation to new environments, for example by using new animal resources to develop new foodstuffs.
As early Homo sapiens spread out around the world, they developed what we now call cultures in relation to new environments
As part of the new cultures, they developed new languages in ways that seemed to them best suited to their new environments and societies. Around 7000 of these languages survive nowadays and there is astounding diversity in how they express and deliver the basic businesses of being human.
The questioner asks how grammatically-complex languages get their cases and declensions, which refers primarily to Indo-European languages. When these developed, their users found verb cases and declensions useful to deliver the specific businesses of their societies, cultures and belief systems 鈥� they embodied distinctions useful to them.
However, many other societies developed varieties of languages that managed human activities in their specific environments equally well, but via different linguistic means. For example, verbs don鈥檛 decline or have cases in Thai or Chinese 鈥� both make use of tones instead.
It is as impossible for us to know why complex verb cases and declensions were so important for our Indo-European ancestors鈥� societies around 6000 years ago as it would be for such an ancestor to understand our tweets today. However, the short answer is that languages co-evolve with societies.
A case in point is English, which has evolved to lose many of its cases and declensions and all of its grammatical genders. However, English is nonetheless able to adapt itself to new technologies and cultures and help us manage the complex business of being human in a digital world.
Graham Jones
Bridgham, Norfolk, UK
The regular structure of Latin and other historical and contemporary languages, with their genders, cases and declensions, suggests a degree of design. I suspect this happened as a mechanism for the elite to control the masses. The people who designed such languages had the time and support to learn the arbitrary grammars and master the delicate manipulations needed to write them. But I doubt that the written forms bore much relation to the spoken forms of the time.
However, language continued to evolve, allowing the masses to learn to read and write at the same time as growing food and fighting wars.
This evolution has reduced the arbitrary complexity of languages like the Latin I tried to learn at school in the 1960s. So, German retains masculine, feminine and neuter genders; French only has masculine and feminine; and English only uses gender as a grammatical concept in archaic forms such as the feminine names for ships. Grammatical cases are replaced by the use of prepositions or conjunctions to achieve almost all these functions.
In different regions, language has evolved differently, so American English still has 鈥済otten鈥� 鈥� a form that British English lost several centuries ago.
I think languages will continue to evolve and will converge to an international pidgin with a reduced vocabulary and negligible grammar.
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