I have to start this post before the below observed consilience slips my mind. So please forgive its scattered, incomplete nature.
Many of my posts discuss the odd parallels between linguistic phenomena and other cognitive or social phenomena. E.O. Wilson famously stated that all knowledge must be connected at some level and coined the term “consilience”.Today I observed an example of consilience between linguistics and music.
MUSIC:
I will try to find the source, but I heard of a study which started with the commonly held assumption that music has become simpler over time: classical music being complex in melody and modern music featuring very simple repetitive melodies. The study found out surprisingly that the complexity has remained rather stable, but its distribution has changed. Though modern music may have simple melodies, it has increased in its sound layers and other factors. Music’s complexity is redistributive.
LANGUAGE:
Languages generally fall into one of three large categories (though mixes exist). I have put these categories in terms of grammatical complexity:
- Isolating → Words are like Lego blocks that don’t change (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Lao).
- Agglutinative → Words are built by adding many clear suffixes, each with one specific job. (Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Finnish)
- Fusional (also called Inflectional) → Words change shape a lot, and one change can mean many things at once (Romance languages, Russian, English, Greek, German, Arabic).
Though, for an English speaker, Chinese or Japanese are hard to learn, their grammars are much simpler and more straightforward than those of most European languages. What makes them hard is that they belong to different language categories and different language families. But grammar? Give me an inflectional or agglutinative language any time!One odd question, given the clumsy complexity of languages like Russian, is why complexity evolved at all.Complex inflectional/fusional languages (like Latin, Russian, Sanskrit, or Ancient Greek) did not start that way. They usually developed from simpler systems. Here is the most widely accepted theory:
Grammaticalization + Phonological Erosion
In small, stable, isolated communities with mostly native speakers (especially children learning), complexity can build up and be maintained. Independent words (e.g., pronouns, adverbs, auxiliaries) gradually attach to main words and become suffixes. Over time, sound changes cause these suffixes to fuse together. One ending ends up expressing multiple meanings (tense + person + number + gender, etc.).
Isolating → Agglutinative → Fusional through natural sound erosion.
Nonetheless, the dominant trend in languages is simplification over long periods, especially in fusional languages. Languages are not steadily becoming “simpler” overall. Instead, they redistribute their complexity. Heavy contact favors analytic/simpler morphology, while isolation can allow complexity to rebuild. There is no clear “progress” toward simplicity or complexity — it’s more like a dynamic equilibrium influenced by social history.
Complexity can increase again in more isolated languages or through new grammaticalization (new tenses, aspects, evidentials, etc.).Languages often show trade-offs: they lose complexity in one area (e.g., noun cases) but gain it in another (e.g., stricter word order, more auxiliary verbs, tones, or particles).
Conclusion: You see, both music and language (human creative communication and meaning) redistribute their complexity over time. Future teaser: The above consilience is related to the more nuanced understanding of entropy (a physics property) and life and meaning. This is a seed for a potential future post. All knowledge is connected!
Triangulations