Re: Odp: -l > -w

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 851
Date: 2000-01-11

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Alexander Stolbov
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2000 7:53 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: -l > -w

Alexander writes:
"The tendency is in fact universal" - does it mean that average length of words in all the languages (or in successions of daughter languages) progressively decreases through centuries and millenia? I doubt. Maybe, the shorter becomes a word the higher is its ability to form new complex words (adding affixes or combining with other roots)? Am I right? Are there any statistical investigations in this field?
You need no statistics to see that words from any protolanguage get shorter and shorter in the daughter languages -- the ease of articulation leads to the "erosion" of the phonetic substance of words. Note how Latin Augustus > French aou^t, pronounced [u], or English hla:f-weard > hlaford > loverd > lord. This is just enthropy at work. But you are absolutely right about the compensatory process which produces new, longer words by affixation and compounding, so that the overall length of an average word does not vary much over the centuries or millennia, and may increase as well as decrease within the bounds of reason.
 
Piotr.