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Do we know of any cases where the grammar of a language was influenced by the imperfection of its writing system? For example, has any language become isolating because it had a logographic writing, which didn't express inflections?

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Interesting question. I guess there are cases where a "rule" of prestige language has changed the general grammar, and perhaps some of these might have come from oddities in the writing system. I can't think of an example, though, and it might be difficult to prove that that was the origin. I'm reminded also of the way that Japanese script constrained Japanese grammarians not to think in terms of consonant-final roots; but I'm not aware of any grammatical change that arose from this. – Colin Fine Dec 5 '12 at 12:03
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Hello Lev, welcome to Linguistics SE and nice question! – Alenanno♦ Dec 5 '12 at 12:20
This might have affected some creole languages. Japanese is a case where it conspicuously didn't happen (they add okurigana after the logogram). Chinese might be an example, but probably hard to verify. – Mechanical snail♦ Jan 28 at 5:24
Creole languages? But most of them are not written! And I suppose none were written initially. – Lev Jan 29 at 8:11

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