Why do English verbs inflect so little, especially in regard to "person"?

Question

Most Indo-European languages have verbs which endings change according to the person. I made a table with the most common (and close) languages and focussed on the category of person and the present tense, for reasons of space. The endings for each conjugation have been highlighted in red and separated from the root.

^{If you find mistakes, tell me, I'll correct them and upload the table again.}

My question is: What brought English verbs to behave this way? Why also Norwegian and Swedish have the same characteristics but not German, although they are all related languages? I suppose there must be a point where they split directions.

Side question: You can add this in the end, just for completeness. I'm asking out of curiosity: Apart from Chinese and Japanese that I'm aware of (plus Swedish and Norwegian I mentioned above), are there examples of other languages with similar characteristics, regardless of being unrelated?

N.B. Japanese verbs change a bit yes, but not according to the person.

Answer 1

There are two things which conspired to eliminate most of the English verbal morphology:

Sound changes, especially the reduction and loss of unstressed final syllables, meant that verb forms that had been distinct in Anglo-Saxon became identical by Middle English, and lose their final bits of distinctiveness by Early Modern English. This accounts for the 1sg and all of the plural forms becoming identical in the present tense.

Social changes caused the old 2sg with thou, which had a distinct verbal ending in -st, to fall out in favor of you. This has been discussed in detail on English.SE.

The collusion of these two forces means that only the lonely 3sg form remains distinct in English.

Note that this isn't really unique to English, either. French has suffered a similar loss of unstressed final syllables, which means that in speech the French verb has lost most of its distinct forms. French spelling obscures this fact, though, as do conservative French grammar materials.

Answer 2

A common cause of loss of inflection in a language community is a large influx of speakers of another language (either a close but incomprehensible dialect or one just really far away) in Extreme cases it can be similar to (or is called) pidginization, which when a coherent creole comes out has usually lost most of the inflections existing in the parent language (I don't think this is the only way to lose inflections, just one way).

For English, it is said that the invasion of the Danes (Old Norse speakers) in the north-east, and then later the Norman invasion (Old French speakers) (all languages involved were inflected) killed off most inflections in English.

Answer 3

Your question might be based on some false assumptions or gaps in your linguistics knowledge.

Firstly you need to know about linguistic typology, specifically morphological typology.

Conjugation is a type of verb morphology in inflected languages.

Languages are sometimes said to move from one morphological typology to the next in a cyclical pattern.

English has moved further down the path away from inflection than some of its siblings, but others of its siblings are doing the same.

These typologies are not as neat as they are sometimes made out to be which is why English and Japanese both don't fit neatly, but in different ways.

In inflected and agglutinating languages, the endings can cover a concept of agreement and there are different things with which to agree. Number is one, person is another. These do not all have to be present in a given language just because it has a certain morphological typology.

As for why English is losing some of its inflection, besides this being a trend for inflected languages generally, it has been suggested that one reason was that the Frisian and Norse languages which have both played a part in English's history had a lot in common but used similar inflections in different ways thus weakening them through ambiguity, making them susceptible to being lost.

As for the side question, the languages you invited comparison with, Chinese is an isolating or analytic language with no inflections and arguably no affixation. Japanese is of mixed type where its verbal system in agglutinating which means words take multiple endings attached to each other each with a meaning rather than inflectional where one ending encapsulates several meanings. Japanese is analytic in its noun system though since it uses separate particles/postpositions rather than endings.

Answer 4

It's what we are used to, but it's not a priori 'normal' that verbs inflect for person and number - or indeed for anything. Proto-Indoeuropean did inflect for person and number and that takes a long time to disappear, so that's what most languages familiar to us still do. For various reasons, English is particularly progressive in many respects and has lost the inflections. But sooner or later it will acquire other verb inflections. The example of French shows how that works, because there it's happening right now. So let's look at the history of French. Some of the details may not be completely right as I didn't look up anything. It's only the general idea that matters.

Classical Latin: canto.

The verb has the first person singular ending. If you absolutely want to stress it's the first person singular, you can use a personal pronoun. In the course of the centuries, with increasing frequency people did that even when there wasn't a strong reason to stress anything. Ultimately it became normal to say:

Later Latin: ego canto.

This is redundant. We have a pronoun and a suffix, which both give the same information about person and number.

As everyone already knew the person and number before the verb suffix was even pronounced, people pronounced it more and more sloppily. At the same time, the personal pronoun ego, being used so much, gradually acquired a simpler pronundation je.

French: je chante.

There is little person/gender information in the verb suffix, and it's not needed because this information is already in the personal pronoun. The personal pronoun definitely doesn't automatically feel like it carries stress any more. And we definitely can't leave it out any more.

As a result, a new personal pronoun emerges that can be added to indicate stress:

French: moi, je chante.

In some cases (not this one -- yet), the normal person pronoun is contracted with the verb.

At this point in the development of French, ignoring the spelling and history but only focusing on oral French as it is used today, we could say that French verbs are inflected on both sides and that the empathic pronouns moi, toi etc. are the real pronouns of French. The suffixes will disappear more and more, until French verbs are marked for person and number by a prefix rather than a suffix. For example like this. (The example is not phonetically plausible.)

Implausible but illustrative future French: Moi jchante, toi tchante, il/elle lchante, nous nchante, vous vchante, eux lchante.

Why is English almost finished with suffix shedding? Why does it look as if German has hardly started?

English branched off the German-Danish dialect continuum when people from around the German-Danish border moved to Great Britain. The various constitutive languages were mixed in a natural process in which nobody tried to make the result behave like Latin. Some who were originally speakers of Celtic languages or of French were also involved. The result was a rapid simplification.

The other Germanic languages have been a bit slower with some changes, and German much slower. For a long time it was just a dialect continuum, not a standard language with dialects. The endings got simpler in each dialect, but I guess in different dialects this happened differently. When scholars wanted to create a written language standard (17th-18th century), they were not interested in simplifying the inflections, but in making them as similar to Latin as was possible by picking suitable endings from the various dialects. The result was a standard language more conservative than all the dialects.

If you compare the recent history of German and Dutch, you can get the impression that German is changing much slower because standard Dutch updates when the dialects change, whereas German doesn't. It seems that for most Dutch speakers, standard Dutch is an averaged dialect, whereas for most Germans, standard German is an almost unchanging standard which dialect speakers learn like a foreign language. That's why the endings haven't started to disappear in German yet.