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

For instance, the "classic" work on Navajo-language verbs is called "The Navajo verb: a grammar for students and scholars," and it runs 452 pages, most of them filled with dense explication of the Navajo verb. The author apparently studied the language for more than 20 years before daring to produce his treatise.

Why is it that North American and some Meso-American languages have such "expressive" and complex verb systems relative to other world languages? Even languages from separate families within those areas.

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

Vinny, I agree with you. Its easy to imagine languages startnig with nouns for geographical features, foodstuffs or tools. Then you can imagine verbs in the present tense. Just because its easy to imagine doesn't mean its what happened, of course.

Its much harder to imagine how a pluperfect subjunctive tense came about. AFAIK, to the extent we have written records of language, these all show reductions in grammatical complexity. Its frustrating that we have no recorded historic examples of increasing complexity that we could use to study how this change happens. Maybe there's something about language being recorded that brings complexity to a shuddering halt.

If number of tenses is a measure of complexity, then I think we have plenty of recorded examples. The progressive/continuous tenses in English are one example. Shakespeare would have said "He sleeps" where we would say "He is sleeping." The passive continuous tenses ("The house is being painted") only arose in the eighteenth century and were still being denounced by prescriptivists in the nineteenth. Can we say "The house will have been being painted" even today? I don't think so, but maybe next century it will seem normal.

I'm not satisfied that we have a satisfactory definition of complexity, by the way.

I guess we'd also have to ask why certain individual languages (like Navajo) have verb rules that are even more complex than nearby "peer" languages such as Hopi, which was spoken in some of the same geographic areas as Navajo. Hopi verbs are complicated, but that language is regarded by linguists as easier to for outsiders to learn than Navajo.

As for the Navajo grammar book, you can preview parts of it on Google Books:

The Navajo Verb, by Dr. Leonard M. Faltz

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.

Well, he studied Navajo for decades; I think he's using the verb as a window to describe the whole language, since so much of Navajo is encoded by verbs. Nouns get rolled into verbs. I've seen Navajo verbs described kind of like this (though this particular example is general and may not be grammatically accurate):

In English, you would use a sentence like "She picked up the things," and "things" might be any noun. Eg, "She picked up the sticks" or "She picked up the flower" or so on. The noun at the end of that sentence leaves the other parts of the sentence intact.

In Navajo, most or all of that information gets encoded by a single word which acts as a verb. The literal translation of such a verb might be something like "The act of a female human bending down and retrieving two stickish objects with her hand, with the speaker as the observer."

If you change any part of that (with a third party as the observer, with a male human, with three sticks rather than two, etc.) the whole verb changes.

Well then, that's why Navajo verbs are so complicated. Because they convey a lot more information than, say, English verbs do.

I will check my reference material when I get home, but I don't remember complexity in the verbs in Eskimo languages (note that Eskimo is the polite term in Alaska and Inuit is not.) I do remember a lot of complications with demonstratives, though. I'll post more when I get home from work.

Following up on what I posted in #13, it looks like the verbs are similar to what is written in #12, although I don't see a marker for gender.

Regarding the demonstratives, here are a few interesting ones:

-that, for a thing that is visible to us and across a river or on the coast
-that, for a thing that is not visible to us now because it is behind a barrier, like a wall
-that, for a thing that is inside a house and in a large container
-that, for a thing that is not visible to us because we are in a house and it is on the enclosed front porch

And, VinnyD, #14, another reason that Navajo has such complex verbs, IN ADDITION, to the reasons posted by folks more knowledgeable than me, is that Navajo verbs have no "time tenses" as we are accustomed to. If a verb needs to indicate the future or the past, there's a whole NEW word used, rather than the various conjugation schemes used in European languages. At least that's what I have been told (by both native-speakers of Navajo and by students of the language). I'm far to linguistically challenged to have learned much more than some common politenesses in Navajo, even though I lived "next door" and did business on the Navajo Nation. Even in Spanish, now my second language after nearly 15 frustrating years, I can only claim to be at the "me defiendo" – I get by. – level, even though it's the only language spoken in my house. I'm a terror in simple, well-pronounced Spanish, though, with the emphasis on SIMPLE.

#15--

Those demonstratives look like something Borges might have invented, Diana. Very cool, assuming one isn't going to have to memorize it all.

#16--

It seems to me that that would make the verbs more numerous, but less complex (as we have been using the term). More vocabulary, less grammar.

For what it's worth, there are lumpers who think they can identify three superfamilies of American languages. Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene (which includes Navajo, the Apache languages, and a dozen other, mostly Canadian, languages), and all the others, including Hopi. Nobody puts Hopi and Navajo and Yupik (or any other Inuit/Eskimo language), or any two of them, into the same family. Most linguists, as far as I know, think the idea of the "all the others" superfamily remains to be proven.

If a verb needs to indicate the future or the past, there's a whole NEW word used, rather than the various conjugation schemes used in European languages.

All languages need to deal with the situation that someone constructs a new word, what endings to give it, how to express it in the past. So I suspect that there is something you do when there is a new verb, to create these "new words" from it for the other time senses. For example, in German, 80% of plurals are "irregular", but there is a regular ending for new nouns.

This verb situation isn't completely dissimilar to the situation in Russian. Russian verbs come in pairs, perfective and imperfective, to get all the tenses, and, like the German nouns, mostly you need to learn them as a pair, as there is not a regular formation in the broad generality of cases. Though if someone invents a new verb, people will know what to do.

Perhaps there is another factor I haven't thought of before. Perhaps when a people lives in a small and fairly well-contained language unit for a very long time, like for example appears to have happened in New Guinea to create the enormous language diversity there, where many languages are only used by a handful of villaegs, perhaps these small languages can become really, really complicated and really really irregular, because these idiosyncrasies can be shared within a small community in a way that just wouldn't transmit to a larger language community.

It occurs to me that English has a couple of verbs along the lines that mazgringo says are typical for Navajo. If you want to use "go" in the past, you have use an entirely unrelated word, "went". If you want to make a past of "I am" you have to reach for the unrelated "I was"; for the present perfect, "I have been, unrelated to either. The past of Latin fero, I bear, was the unrelated sustuli. The past participle was sublatus, unrelated to either (except for the prefix shared with sustuli).

They're called suppletive paradigms, and it may be that Navajo has a lot more of them.

Vinny, the Borges comment was funny. I have wondered what a Mark Twain essay on Iñupiaq would look like.

I'm glad you mentioned Yupik, because I meant to say that those demonstratives I posted are Iñupiaq, though I think Yupik has similarities this way.

They're called suppletive paradigms, and it may be that Navajo has a lot more of them.

Well probably some of that. But probably also there were once some regular productive methods of generating them, but probably those productive constructions fell out of usage, and then passage of time corrupted them so that they no longer looked regular. That is plainly what happened with the Russian perfective/imperfective situation. And with lots of Spanish irregular verbs too. A few things like that, plus a lot more passage of time, etc, can generate lots of irregular forms for the dictionary, especially if you don't have countervailing simplification pressures.