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Is most of the world's languages being in a small number of families a recent development? Or has there always been cycles of linguistic expansion?

Probably yes, with a proper definition of "recent". Daniel Nettle argues in his paper Is the rate of linguistic change constant that small speech communities have a higher rate of linguistic change than large ones (and for the purpose of the paper, 50 000 speakers is already large). Thus, there are two different modes in the evolution of language ...

answered Nov 19 at 11:22

jk - Reinstate Monica

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Relationship between possession (“to have”) and tenses (“I have seen”)

I'm not a linguist, but I am a Chinese native speaker. The "have-perfect tense" in European languages is due to the European sprachbund, as described in other answers here and in Is it unusual that English uses possessive for past tense? As mentioned by others, this feature of using the possesive verb to describe the perfect tense is rare and ...

cross-linguistic grammar tense possession

answered Nov 19 at 9:05

Aqualone

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Tag Info

New answers tagged cross-linguistic

Is most of the world's languages being in a small number of families a recent development? Or has there always been cycles of linguistic expansion?

Relationship between possession (“to have”) and tenses (“I have seen”)

Tag Info

New answers tagged cross-linguistic

Is most of the world's languages being in a small number of families a recent development? Or has there always been cycles of linguistic expansion?

Relationship between possession (“to have”) and tenses (“I have seen”)

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