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Originally Posted by freddie
With your unifying philosophy where does it stop really? All former Roman provinces speaking a unified descendent of latin? But in that case why stop there? Wouldn't it be better if all germanic tribes spoke unified proto-germanic? Or all slavics unified proto-slavic? Or to go even further... wouldn't it be absolutely brilliant if the whole European continent spoke a common version of Proto-IndoEuropean from which all European languages stem from?
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Actually yeah, i think that would have been brilliant indeed. Being able to understand each other from Moscow to Lisbon, i can see only positive things in that, i think that would have been a great asset for Europe, the more people understand each other the better.
That doesn't mean that i am against evolution or a conservative, far from it, lol. Proto-Indo-European was an extremely complicated language with many
declensions (8 cases, 3 numbers, 3 genders) and a rich
verbal system. Proto-Indo-European was also a very
synthetic language, a characteristic that all Indo-European languages will progressively abandon to become less and less synthetic and more and more
analytic, which is a fascinating process (the extreme case being English itself which has become much more analytic than synthetic, some linguists think that English may very well become fully analytic - like Chinese - in a future evolution).
So Proto-Indo-European was much more complicated than any of its daughter languages and i certainly don't wish that it had remained that way until modern days, Proto-Indo-European was complicated because it had developed during prehistorical times and was the result of a more archaic stage of human development. The apparition of civilization and of more complex thoughts will cause the language to evolve and become more efficient, less complicated in form and more sophisticated in substance.
Evolution is a natural process and languages evolve all the time, but what i am wary of is not evolution, it's division. A language doesn't have to split to evolve, Latin for example evolved a great deal between Classical Latin in the 2nd century BC and Vulgar Latin in the 5th century AD, to such a point that people from the 5th century (unless they were educated scholars) could no longer understand written Classical Latin, but Vulgar Latin was still a single language, there were regional dialects but they were still mutually intelligible, and if the Western Roman Empire had kept its political unity, it would have remained that way.
And sometimes a dialect can acquire certain awkward features that are not good innovations, it generally happens during troubled periods when there is a lack of an educated elite that can maintain certain proper guidelines for the language. I'll take an example in French (because i know it quite well and hopefully i won't be called a racist if i criticize my own language).
Northern French dialects have acquired a unique and not so good feature among Romance languages. In Latin and all Romance languages (including Southern French dialects called Occitan), the use of personal pronouns is optional because verbs are highly inflected and have different verbal endings for all persons and all tenses, the verb inflection carrying all the information needed, personal pronouns are unnecessary and are only used for emphasis.
Northern French dialects however have undergone a severe change in pronunciation compared to Latin, and many verbal endings became identical because of that change (not always in spelling, but totally identical in pronunciation). At the present tense for example, 4 out of 6 verbal endings are pronounced the same in French whereas they are all different in all other Romance languages. Because of the confusion caused by those identical verbal endings, people started to use personal pronouns systematically, Northen French dialects are the only ones where that happened and this is not a good evolution.
It would have been good if verbal endings had become totally identical inside a given tense, if you use personal pronouns systematically, you no longer need verbal endings other than to indicate the tense, just like you don't need personal pronouns if you have different verbal endings for each person.
But Northen French dialects got stuck somewhere in the middle, not enough verbal endings to allow personal pronouns to remain optional, but the systematic use of personal pronouns did not cause verbal endings to completely drop either. It's redundant and inelegant, and certainly not an improvement compared to previous forms of the language, the French verbal system is typically for me a good example of an evolution gone bad.
And actually, when in the Middle Ages the French kings decided to pick one dialect to make it the official French language, scholars of the time recommended to choose a Southern dialect of the Occitan branch, because Occitan was much closer to Latin and much purer. But the fact that the political center was in Northern France obviously favored Northern dialects, which was obviously a mistake in my opinion, Occitan would have indeed been a much better choice.