The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

ascertaining linguistic complexity, and hence suggesting some languages to have „declined‟,
is difficult, if not currently impossible, because the problem is still under fruitful debate as to
whether languages can, indeed, be more complex than others. Added to this, of course, is
that complexity is entirely in the eyes of the beholder. The other issue is that there is no
reason why a breakdown of an Empire need imply the breakdown of a language: English
children do not speak a simpler language than their grandparents, simply because the British
Empire no longer exists, and neither is modern Spanish less complex than its sixteenth
century forerunner. Therefore, political decline cannot sensibly equate with linguistic
„simplification‟.
6.9.3 Contact Linguistics
It is also possible that the loss of synthesis could have been brought about by contact,
and subsequent convergence, with an analytic language. It was once widely believed that “a
language‟s morphology tends to be especially stable, by contrast to its syntax and phonology
and, in particular, to its lexicon [...] the morphology is supposed to be immune to contact-
induced language change” (Thomason 1981: 359). However, such scenarios are entirely
plausible on a linguistic level, and it is well evidenced how external factors can effect internal
language mechanisms (Trask 1996: 102-132). There is evidence that such contact can level
synthetic forms to analysis, such as the case of a Polish dialect spoken in Romania which has
replaced the normal synthetic comparative with an analytic equivalent borrowed from the
Romanian form, e.g. nowszy > maj nowy, „newer‟ (Heine & Kuteva 2006: 76). The process
could also have been hastened by the second-language learners who spoke an analytic
language other than Latin as their first tongue: “It has long been recognised that learners‟
versions of a [target language] are subject to varying degrees of influence from their native or
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