How did they go from the vast verb system of PIE to just two grammatical tenses...

how did they go from the vast verb system of PIE to just two grammatical tenses? did only the brainlets move to northern europe or something? even the most vulgar modern romance language has a more complex system for verbs.
and modern germans are even bigger brainlets when it comes to verbs. absolutely abhorrent.

Attached: proto-germanics.png (657x683, 38K)

You need to look into history. Before we adopted Latin runes, our alphabet was constantly worked on to be more efficient. Same thing goes for the language.
If you look up rune alphabets (not the Latin one) you'll see how few letters there are.
It was snot until we got converted that we had to adopt another alphabet so that we could write Latin.
To conclude, were not brainlets, just efficient.

Isn't there some meme theory that languages cycle?

Agglutinative >>> fusional
Fusional >>> isolational
Isational >>> agglutinative

I wouldn't know

the swedish language is extremely easy to read due to its simple grammar and short words. it is however, extremely difficult to understand when spoken due to the absolutely incomprehensible swedish dialects and tendency to smush as many words and sounds together as possible.

>Hörru fattaru Elle?

that doesn't really relate to what I was asking.
how is fewer verb tenses/complexities more efficient? if anything it is less efficient because you need modal verbs and other helper words to complete thoughts
seems like a meme to me.
tbqh imo languages go from analytic -> synthetic over millennia in isolation and then synthetic -> analytic over centuries in contact with other languages

>Because having to remember a bunch of tenses is so efficient
Jump
>hoppa
Jumped
>Hoppa(de)
Going to jump
>(Ska) hoppa
Simple as

it's not hard to remember when it's your native tongue or a tongue you've been immersed in for a while

Its not as efficient then is it?

swedish is overly efficient though. you lack the breadth of expression in your language that english has. im far from fluent, but things as simple as swedish not even really having a word for "enjoy" really struck me.

it is more efficient because it takes less time to say and write, and more complex thoughts can be used more easily
example:
English
>I would have led
Latin
>duxissem

>tbqh imo languages go from analytic -> synthetic over millennia in isolation and then synthetic -> analytic over centuries in contact with other languages
why do you think that

Its not more efficient.
Having a universal prefix and suffix is waaayyy more efficient.

Easier language = better language, it's not a pissing contest

languages are not conciously made to be more efficient
that's nonsense
how would you measure efficiency anyways?
simplicity? then why does swedish have articles and genders?

I spend my free time browsing wikipedia articles on the grammars of various esoteric languages and I've noticed languages like english and dutch experience severe deflexion
and approach analytic status but insular languages retain declension and conjugation systems and at times expand on it afaik

Attached: gigachad.jpg (1080x1331, 132K)

But old Norse literally went through a simplification process and no, we don't have genders.

i don't really care about a language being "better" (imo having a complex language is nice, but the most important thing that makes a language good is if it has good literature and other forms of expression) but i'm just curious how they went from extreme complexity to ooga booga speech so quickly. Something must have happened.

let me tell you about your language. you do have gender: common and neuter
how do you define efficiency? I think we are having some fundamental misunderstanding here.

>Efficient language
No over complex gender or verb tenses and universal rules.

>english and dutch experience severe deflexion
>and approach analytic status
that's just two languages out of ~6500 which have been in the same sprachbund for the last millenium which have only been written down for ~1500 years.


>old Norse literally went through a simplification process
swedish is just simpler in your eyes because you grew up with swedish grammar. If you grew up with old norse grammar you would find the use of prepositions and word order confusing.
Even if you could say it was simpler it didn't happen on purpose like you implied.

>we don't have genders.
en hund vs ett hus
you literally do have grammatical gender

>verb tenses
why does swedish need verb tenses or conjugations at all?

>efficient
>achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
i.e. more conjugations/tenses allows fewer syllables in sentences, fewer pen-strokes in writing et cetera.
what you're describing is simplicity.

>>english and dutch experience severe deflexion
>>and approach analytic status
>that's just two languages out of ~6500
same can be said about german, swedish, danish, romance languages, and just about every indo-european language (maybe not extreme deflexion, but significant nonetheless)
Same thing happened with chinese.

>every indo-european
What about ukrainian, polish and lithuanian, sanskrit and assamese (amongst others) they retained a large number of cases and assamese even gained one or two from PIE.
the languages you mentioned are all in the same sprachbund
and still it's a case of a small scope. There are 136 language families.

>Same thing happened with chinese.
but it didn't happen with hungarian or tamil or georgian or kyrgyz

You do know Papuan and Abo languages are the most ""complex"" in the world (ie. they have more conjugations/tenses) right? If anything, languages with little declension tend to be more efficient than what you call complex languages.

>You do know Papuan and Abo languages are the most ""complex"" in the world (ie. they have more conjugations/tenses) right?
didn't know about papuan, but I knew about abo languges (at least in terms of nouns). it's because they're isolated, that's my point.
What about ukrainian, polish and lithuanian, sanskrit and assamese (amongst others)
all went through quite a bit of deflexion (i get lithuanian is more conservative, but that's because the baltic languages are kind of irrelevant so no one learned them). sanskrit further simplified later.
this might be a case of me not seeing the whole forrest, but idk

>papuan
papuan languages are some of the least isolated languages in the world though. There are 800 of them on that one island

>this might be a case of me not seeing the whole forrest, but idk
yeah you're quite literally look at just one tree. Though your assumption is made quite often

Attached: papou1.png (3887x1604, 237K)

not really, swedish is much more standerdized than norwegian. and if you think swedish is bad, you should look at danish, they dont even pronounce half the word.