The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence
She seems to reverse cause an effect by talking about certain languages as being somehow esoteric or exoteric, and blaming the relative ‘success’ of those languages on those supposed properties.<p>I think languages tend to go along for the ride with whatever culture happens to speak them, and that if they managed to conquer a lot of territory or do a lot of trading, the language would become more popular. And popular languages have people that study them and write grammars and dictionaries and make the language more accessible.<p>English is one of the most irregular languages in the world and has a lot of properties that she would classify as esoteric, and that obviously hasn’t had much impact on its success. Turns out that having a massive army is more important than having an easily learned language.<p>She also at one point jumps from Hittite to Akkadian to demonstrate the development of subordinate clauses, but the languages aren’t related at all — Hittite is Indo-European and Akkadian is Semitic. Then she jumps right to Finnish, which is from yet another unrelated family of languages.