Complex sentences and compound nouns

There is a line in this piece on language complexity which sparks a thought. From The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence by Julie Sedivy.

But that leads to a curious puzzle: Complex sentences are not ubiquitous among the world’s languages. Many languages have little use for them. They prefer to string together simple clauses. They may even lack certain words such as relative pronouns that and which or connectors like if, despite, and although—these words make it possible to link clauses together into larger sentences. Allegedly, the Pirahã language along the Maici River of Brazil lacks recursion altogether. According to linguist Dan Everett, Pirahã speakers avoid linguistic nesting of all kinds, even in structures such as John’s brother’s house. (Instead, they would say something like: Brother’s house. John has a brother. It is the same one.)

This can’t be pinned on biological evolution. All evidence suggests that humans around the world are born with more or less the same brains. Abundant childhood exposure to a language with layered sentences practically guarantees their mastery. Even adult Pirahã speakers, who have remained unusually isolated from European languages, pick up the trick of complex syntax, provided that they spend enough time interacting with speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, a language that offers an adequate diet of embedded structures.

More useful is the notion of linguistic evolution. It’s the languages themselves, rather than the brains, that have evolved along different paths. And just as different species are shaped by adaptations to specific ecological niches, certain linguistic features—like sentence complexity—survive and thrive under some circumstances, whereas other features take hold and spread within very different niches.

Sedivy's point is well taken; language, like people, exist in pre-specified contexts. We have to understand the context in order to begin to discern the likely selection pressures driving language evolution.

Languages with very simple sentence structure are, for the most part, oral languages. It’s the languages that have a culture of writing, developed over a long span of time, that display a fondness for stacking clauses onto one another to create towering sentences. This pattern raises the possibility that the invention of writing, a very recent innovation tagged on to the very last millennia of human evolution, can dramatically alter a language’s linguistic niche, spurring the development of elaborate sentence structure, and leading to the shedding of other features, on a timescale that cannot be achieved through biological evolution. If that’s so, then the languages that many of us have grown up with are very different from the languages that have been spoken throughout the vast majority of human existence.

For example:

Many of the world’s oral languages are quite unlike European languages. Their sentences contain few words. They rarely combine more than one clause. Linguist Marianne Mithun has noted some striking differences: In English, 34 percent of clauses in conversational American English are embedded clauses. In Mohawk (spoken in Quebec), only 7 percent are. Gunwinggu (an Australian language) has 6 percent and Kathlamet (formerly spoken in Washington state) has only 2 percent. An English speaker might say: Would you teach me to make bread? But a Mohawk speaker would break this down into several short sentences, saying something like this: It will be possible? You will teach me. I will make bread. In English, you might say: He came near boys who were throwing spears at something. A Kathlamet approximation would go like this: He came near those boys. They were throwing spears at something then.

The evolution of language complexity can occur with remarkable speed.

The divergence between spoken and written language can be witnessed around the world, at all time scales. Compare, for example, the number of Finnish subordinate clauses in the old oral tradition to modern written Finnish. There are embedded clauses in The Kalevela (a collection of folk poetry that constitutes the Finnish national epic). But there are not very many: a 1,300-word sample yields three fairly simple examples, but a 1,300-word stretch of current written Finnish would typically contain about 60—and these would be more varied and more complex. A more recent example: The Somali language had essentially no written tradition until 1972, when it became the official state language. Over a mere 20-year period, researchers have observed noticeable changes to the written language, such as the emergence of longer and more complex words and greater elaboration of sentence structure.

Read the whole thing. This is one of those essays where you could spend hours digesting new knowledge, new insight, and mulling which propositions to accept and what the likely implications might be. Consequently this is not easily blogged. I'll just play out one line of thought. Sedivy identifies two different linguistic trends.

Complex sentences - With the technique of recursion, they enable complex and semantically precise communication. They are, however, cognitively taxing, dependent as they are on memory and hierarchy. Complex sentences are associated with literate cultures where there is a prevalence of written communication. Interpretation requires a knowledge of grammatical rules which is enhanced through the continuing practice of reading and writing.

Compound nouns - The distillation of a complex concept into a single noun form. Also known as jargon. Her example is when "a surge in the level of water due to a storm" becomes the compound noun of "storm surge." While compound nouns contain inherent in them a density of information, the drawback is that they presume a pre-existing body of knowledge. They don't lend themselves to ready explication without prior awareness of the whole body of knowledge.

A language characterized by complex sentences is acquired through purposeful practice whereas a language characterized by a high reliance on compound knowns is acquired through a greater dependence on rote memorization. Sedivy notes that languages steeped in compound nouns are much more difficult to acquire and are, in that respect, exclusionary.

Departing from Sedivy, I would play out a couple of ideas.

Efficiency density - language with dense use of compound nouns which are understood through continuing immersion. Highly efficient at transferring information but only to those "in the know." Efficiency precludes access. Noun complexity.

Effectiveness density - language with heavy use of recursive clauses which allows flexibility and access at the expense of increased linguistic complexity. Grammar complexity.

From here, there is, of course, a matrix:

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To which one might apply a normal distribution:

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With an implied distribution:

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And, perhaps, a categorization:

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Increasing Societal, economic and technological complexity are driving an increase in jargon (words with a specific meaning that cannot easily be comprehended absent immersion in the original domain of knowledge.) That jargon is more efficient but is also exclusionary.

I wonder if this does not touch on the increasing OECD disillusion of citizens with their clerisy? Specifically, as government becomes more involved in a broader reach of activities, and as those activities become more complex (owing to increasing social, economic, and technological complexity), is that perhaps isolating the small tip of people involved in government and punditry and policy? Because of the discursiveness (recursiveness) and the increase in domain specific compound nouns ('CBO scored', 'revenue neutral', 'marginal tax rate', etc.), perhaps the suspicion of citizenry of governmental insiders is, at least in part, due to an increasing incapacity of the insiders to speak to the citizenry in a language they can understand?