Grammatical Evaporation

It’s a term for how languages, over long periods, can gradually shed their grammatical complexity. Features that were once essential—like intricate case systems, multiple genders, or complex verb endings—slowly wear away, like a stone smoothed by a river. The language doesn’t become “worse” or “lesser”; it simply reconfigures itself, finding new ways to express the same ideas. Let’s look at how this process transformed English and Persian, and why a language like Icelandic chose a different path.

What Old English Looked Like: A Foreign Land

To understand what English lost, we have to look at what it once was. Old English (spoken roughly from the 5th to the 11th century) would be almost unrecognizable to a modern speaker. It was a highly inflected Germanic language, much like modern German or Icelandic. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives changed their endings based on their role in a sentence.

Old English had at least four main cases:

• Nominative: The subject of the verb (The king gives a ring.)
• Accusative: The direct object (The king gives a ring.)
• Dative: The indirect object (The king gives a ring to the bishop.)
• Genitive: The possessive (The king’s ring.)

Consider this sentence:

Se cyning geaf þǣm biscope ānne hring.

In Modern English, this means “The king gave the bishop a ring.” In Old English, the endings do the heavy lifting. Se cyning is in the nominative case (the subject). Þǣm biscope is in the dative case, clearly marking “the bishop” as the recipient. You could even rearrange the sentence to Þǣm biscope geaf se cyning ānne hring, and the meaning would remain perfectly clear because the case endings tell you who is doing what to whom.

So, What Happened?

This intricate system didn’t disappear overnight. Its evaporation was driven by a perfect storm of linguistic and historical events:

1. Sound Change: The most significant factor was phonological decay. In spoken English, the stress almost always falls on the first syllable of a word (think wa-ter, mo-ther, hap-py). Over centuries, the unstressed vowel sounds in the endings of words all began to merge into a neutral, nondescript sound (the “schwa”, like the ‘a’ in sofa). Endings like -a, -u, -um, -an all started to sound the same. When you can no longer hear the difference between case endings, they stop being useful.
2. Language Contact: The Vikings arrived. From the 8th to the 11th centuries, speakers of Old Norse lived alongside speakers of Old English. While the languages were related, their grammatical endings were different. To communicate effectively (especially for trade), speakers likely stripped their language down to the basics, relying on shared vocabulary and word order instead of conflicting grammar. It was a linguistic compromise that favored simplicity.
3. The Norman Conquest: In 1066, the French-speaking Normans took over. For centuries, French was the language of power, law, and administration. Norman French had already shed most of the case system it inherited from Latin. This contact with a less-inflected language reinforced the simplification already underway in English.

As case endings evaporated, English had to find new tools. Word order became much more rigid (Subject-Verb-Object), and prepositions like to, for, from, and with were hired to do the job the old case endings once did.

Persian’s Parallel Path

The story of English is not unique. A similar, and perhaps even more dramatic, simplification occurred in Persian. Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BC), was a complex language with a case system similar to Latin. Its close relative, Avestan (the sacred language of Zoroastrianism), had eight cases, three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and three numbers (singular, plural, dual).

Fast forward to Modern Persian (Farsi), and the grammar is startlingly different. It has:

• No grammatical gender. The pronoun u (او) means “he”, “she”, and “it.” There’s no need to memorize whether a table is masculine or a chair is feminine.
• No case endings on nouns. Instead, it uses prepositions and a special particle, rā (را), to mark a definite direct object.

The transition from Old Persian to Middle Persian and finally to Modern Persian saw a complete erosion of this ancient complexity. Why? The exact reasons are debated, but like English, it was a long-term process involving sound changes that neutralized endings and centuries of contact with other languages, from Arabic to Turkic, which may have accelerated the trend toward a more analytic structure.

Meanwhile, in Iceland…

Not all languages follow this path. Icelandic stands as a stunning example of grammatical conservatism. It is, in many ways, a linguistic time capsule. Modern Icelandic is remarkably similar to Old Norse, the language of the Vikings who settled the island over a millennium ago. An Icelander today can read the medieval Sagas with only moderate difficulty.

Icelandic proudly retains:

• Four cases: Nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive are alive and well.
• Three grammatical genders: Masculine, feminine, and neuter.
• Strong and weak declensions: Nouns and adjectives change endings based on a host of rules.

For example, the word for “horse”, hestur, changes in every case: hestur (nominative), hest (accusative), hesti (dative), hests (genitive). Adjectives must agree with the noun’s case, gender, and number, leading to a dizzying array of possible forms.

The reason for this preservation is twofold: isolation and identity. Iceland’s geographic isolation protected its language from the intense contact that reshaped English. Furthermore, Icelanders have a strong sense of national identity tied to their language and literary heritage. A conscious and state-supported effort to preserve the language has prevented large-scale simplification.

Language is a Living River, Not a Frozen Monument

It’s tempting to think of grammatical evaporation as a “dumbing down” of language, but that’s a misconception. Languages don’t get better or worse; they just change. The complexity doesn’t vanish—it just moves.

English lost its case system but developed a highly complex system of auxiliary verbs (do, be, have, will, shall) and a nuanced web of prepositions. The flexibility that Old English had in word order was traded for the strict SVO syntax of Modern English.

Grammatical evaporation shows us that language is a dynamic, practical tool. It is constantly being reshaped by the tongues and minds of its speakers to meet their communicative needs. Whether it’s the streamlined elegance of Persian, the rugged traditionalism of Icelandic, or the adaptable hodgepodge that is English, each language is a testament to its unique history and the ever-shifting currents of human communication.