Why do quite a few North American languages have such convoluted verbs?

I have no knowledge of N American languages (apart from English and French) but I do know several languages with complex verb systems.

One of these is Georgian, which can encode a huge amount of info in a verb (person and number of subject, object and indirect object, tense-mood-screeve, direction of motion, honorifics etc). If you wanted to make a list of all the possible combinations of a Georgian verb you'd need dozens of pages, in contrast for example to most Indo-European languages where you can conjugate all tenses on a single page.

The important point is this: describing Georgian verbs based on Indo-European model is a crazy way to describe Georgian verbs. Much better to explain hwo to fit the bits together without trying to draw up an exhaustive list of all the combinations. Georgian verbs seem complex to us but this says as much about us as it does about Georgians.

I rather suspect the writer of your Navajo text may have fallen into the same trap. Maybe he learnt grammar from Kennedy's Latin Primer and now he wants to describe Navajo in a similar tome.

I think Andrew has probably hit the nail on the head. What he says about Georgian could easily be applied to Navajo.

I used to live next to the Navaho Nation and discovered, once when I wanted to buy advertising on a Navajo language radio station, that they didn't sell 30 second and one minute spots as I was accustomed to buying on English-language and Spanish-language stations but sold only 15 minute and 30 minute spots. That's how very, very different Navajo is to any European language, it takes A LOT more words and detailed verbs to get the message across. I once attended a political rally on the Navajo Nation. The main non-Navajo speaker was a candidate for state governor. His speech was about 5 minutes long. It took the Navajo interpreter nearly an hour to repeat it in Navajo.

Here's a Navajo-language weather report that aired on a local radio station in Arizona:

Weather Report in the Navajo Language

I rather suspect the writer of your Navajo text may have fallen into the same trap. Maybe he learnt grammar from Kennedy's Latin Primer and now he wants to describe Navajo in a similar tome.

There was an era in which it was thought that Latin was a kind of generic grammar. Thus I was taught English grammar as if it was Latin.

Why is it that North American and some Meso-American languages have such "expressive" and complex verb systems relative to other world languages?

Looking at grammars in total rather than verb systems in particular, I think most languages have complicated grammar. But languages that have been used as lingua francas across large zones have been simplified by the experience of common use by the inexperienced. Languages that develop from such languages are likely to retain that simplicity too - eg, all the mainland Scandinavian languages that developed from a once common Norse widely spread across Viking/Norman empires; meanwhile Icelandic adn Faeroese retained complications.

The OP asked why North American native languages have complex verbs. The why is impossible to determine. It implies that the language was planned, and a deliberate course adopted. Perhaps the refinement of verbs suggests the speakers were more interested in actions than in things. This suggestion fails if they also have highly complex nouns!

The why is impossible to determine.

I tend to think that at a certain stage of human development, when we were still living in fairly small communities, larger than family units, but smaller than large trading nations, languages in general evolved in the direction of complexity. Then it was trading activity across language groups and empire building that were a force for simplication. I think the specific mention of complex verbs, as opposed to nouns, is a red herring.

#6 interesting hypothesis.

I've noticed that most documented language change is in the direction - especially the loss of cases in most Indo-Eureopan languages. Reconstructions of proto-indo-european seem to involve every possible complexity of every successor language and a few extra to boot. This only makes sense if you think language somehow started off very vey complicated and gradually gets simpler over time.

I've always wondered what could make language develop in the direction of greater complexity. I'm not 100% convinced that small communities are sufficient for this, but its an interesting hyptohesis.

Languages can hardly have sprung into being overnight with full-blown declensions and conjugations. At some point they had to have developed them, no? That is, if we call them complexities, they must have grown more complex at some point.

Yes, clearly language started simple, and then became more complex. Some case/verb endings can clearly be identified as formerly being words of meaning, which then became used as grammatical particles, which then became context specific and absorbed as endings. Then analogy created more endings.

So there has been a process of language starting simple, gaining the greater complexity required for communication in more complex social/cooperative situations (cooperative hunting seems to be sociallly complex enough, if one looks at the mind-bogglingly complex Inuit language), and then later, in some cases, being simplified. Simplification seems to be favoured by lingua franca situations.

This much is uncontroversial. What is more controversial is my suggestion that at some stage in their development, all languages became really complex. I don't really have any proof. I just suspect that when we were all at the same stage of social development as pre-Colombian Inuit, ie, small tribes of hunter gatherers, we all needed more subtle languages, and the easiest way was to become more complex. It took later larger social structures to refine subtle, but less complex, languages out of that.

Edited by: iviehoff