Ah now that I've got the general gist of the arguement I think I understand and agree with you Eddycgn - the age argument aside (on that case I agree with Rogir that there is no real age you can put on these languages technically speaking - but for simplicities sake who cares ).

I would have to agree that the general tendency does appear to be that synthetic (e.g. old Indo-European languages like Latin etc) languages tend to evolve slowly (or in the Ealde Englisc-English case quite quickly) to a more analytical/isolating language. (Similarly, I've heard that word order tends to evolve as SOV->SVO and then occaisionally ->VSO in some cases, or something like that).

That all said, I'm not saying that analytical languages are better or newer than synthetic languages or that this is an absolute truth, but it does seem to be one trend in language evolution that some languages drop their cases and become more analytical over a large period of time. In some cases this mightn't be necessary especially if the case system was already regular and functioning perfectly, but in English's case it clearly wasn't regular due to sound changes etc and so it probably got phased out by speakers.

In regards to an inverse process of an isolating or analytical language becoming synthetic, it wouldn't surprise me if this is how cases came about - by the gradual blending of say tense or case markers with the words they declined. (e.g. if "womende" (Our in Chinese) evolved into "wom'nne" and "wo", "men" and "de" all morphed together). For all we know, it could be a process that has been going around in cycles.

Rogir:When did the vulgar Latin in Gaul become French? When did proto-Germanic in the low countries become Dutch?

When a Gaulish eye-doctor decided to create a language to help stop the fighting between the Roman, Celtic, Gallic, and Germanic peoples (originally named "Esperantus" but later named Français). And the other somewhere around 400-500AD when old Frank got left behind by mean old German who was high and had a sound shift without Frank (but it's ok because English and Frysk let Frank come and enjoy the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law for a bit).

At least that's what creative linguistics tells me. Basically languages become other languages when the people who speak them say they're different. (BTW you're missing a heck of a lot of steps between PGmc and Dutch )

ceigered:I would have to agree that the general tendency does appear to be that synthetic (e.g. old Indo-European languages like Latin etc) languages tend to evolve slowly (or in the Ealde Englisc-English case quite quickly) to a more analytical/isolating language.

English is not such a great example in any case, because its evolution was helped along by the Norman invasion

Basically languages become other languages when the people who speak them say they're different.

Yes, that's exactly right. That's why Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are supposedly different languages, while Chinese is just one language with many (mutually unintelligible!) dialects.

ceigered:I would have to agree that the general tendency does appear to be that synthetic (e.g. old Indo-European languages like Latin etc) languages tend to evolve slowly (or in the Ealde Englisc-English case quite quickly) to a more analytical/isolating language. (Similarly, I've heard that word order tends to evolve as SOV->SVO and then occaisionally ->VSO in some cases, or something like that).

And how many languages outside the Indo-European family have you observed? Because of course it is not very strange for languages of one family to undergo the same transition.

(Not sure if somebody said) English uses a sort of possesive case, the "'s".
In Esperanto such thing as a possesive case doesn't exist, so it must be used a preposition.

en: Earth's salt
eo: Salo de mondo

... and the order is reversed

ceigered:In regards to an inverse process of an isolating or analytical language becoming synthetic, it wouldn't surprise me if this is how cases came about - by the gradual blending of say tense or case markers with the words they declined. (e.g. if "womende" (Our in Chinese) evolved into "wom'nne" and "wo", "men" and "de" all morphed together). For all we know, it could be a process that has been going around in cycles.

Good comment. (I read a similar thing once before in a different forum.)

R2D2!:

Danix:en: Earth's salt
eo: Salo de mondo

Or how about something like “de-monda salo”? Would that be understood as genitive?

—Ilhuıtemoc

No, that would be salt that comes from the earth.

Rogir:

ceigered:I would have to agree that the general tendency does appear to be that synthetic (e.g. old Indo-European languages like Latin etc) languages tend to evolve slowly (or in the Ealde Englisc-English case quite quickly) to a more analytical/isolating language. (Similarly, I've heard that word order tends to evolve as SOV->SVO and then occaisionally ->VSO in some cases, or something like that).

And how many languages outside the Indo-European family have you observed? Because of course it is not very strange for languages of one family to undergo the same transition.

Japanese seems (seems, mostly because it's hard to find out much about the history of that language in English) to have gone from an isolating structure to a synthetic structure (see current verb system, Japonic vocabulary like hitotsu etc), but due to Chinese influence (particularly due to the writing system) there are some "newer" (as new as hundreds of years can be) words which are much more isolating in nature (particularly -suru verbs).

Chinese is absolutely confusing in this regard. It seems to sit on the fence historically, with some thinking the Sino-Tibetan group was originally synthetic, some thinking analytical, some arguing against the existence of a Sino-Tibetan language family. However at the moment Mandarin has been said to be becoming less isolating by the minute with more polysyllabic words coming into the language than before (maybe due to the case system which might be causing problems for mainland China's lingua franca).

Well it more or less depends on the interpretations of the terms synthetic and isolating. Like I was saying it seems to not really happen at all in some languages whilst occurring nearly in an inverse manner or cycle like in Chinese (see "womende" example). And this is all speculative, especially since it requires relying on the histories of languages which are often incomplete or not well understood or completely reconstructed.

Because of course it is not very strange for languages of one family to undergo the same transition.

In languages, EVERYTHING should be regarded as strange and therefore investigated! This makes me want to ask "what are the causes for all these languages in the same family to undergo the same transition?". Irregularities in the original proto-language, or maybe influence from different branches of the family - which ties into what Erinja said. Maybe changes from synthetic-isolating languages are influenced by influence from other languages - e.g. like English and Japanese (the latter being a tentative example, not too sure about it).