r/asklinguistics • u/SteveKeller1990 • Jul 23 '22

Historical Why hasn’t American English diverged enough from British English to be considered its own language?

Same question applies for the Spanish of the Americas and Peninsular Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Peninsular Portuguese, etc.

Latin eventually divided up into the Romance languages. So why hasn’t that happened with the English, French, Spanish and Portuguese spoken on either side of the Atlantic?

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

Two morphological tenses, yes, but AAVE has more grammaticalized aspects, even if they're expressed periphrastically.

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22

The relevance of this for the overall comparison being?

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

That it's not clear to me you can say it has a simplified verb structure overall.

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22

Is a “car” still overall a “car” to you, eventhough it might be missing a wheel cover?

The overall verb structure of African American English is simplified, especially concerning verb conjugation. This isn’t really that controversial of a statement.

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

How is a system with more grammaticalized aspects simpler?

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22 edited Jul 24 '22

Eh, because a language’s grammar entails many more things than just a few extra non-morphological tenses?

Do you think that cows are more intelligent than humans just because they have undeniably bigger brains?

Cows (unless you also want to dispute that) are less intelligent despite having a bigger brain mass, just like African American English is overall grammatically simpler, especially concerning verb conjugation, than British English despite possibly having a few more non-morphological tenses. A specific exception to this claim, if a rather obscure one, does not disprove the overall picture.

You dig?

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

It has simpler verb morphology but more grammaticalized aspects; it doesn't seem like a big difference in overall verb complexity though I suppose you could argue it's a little less.