Reasoning Behind T Loss in English and Dutch

This seems unoffensive enough, but clearly both English and Dutch refuse to allow empty sets in the pronoun paradigm, or one to serve a double purpose grammatically. While this paper is not deep enough or researched enough to formally propose a set of natural personal pronouns, the results seem to indicate that two different 2nd person pronouns are required in a natural language. This idea is not new or far fetched, as it is extremely similar to the shift from pidgin to creole, where children invent new forms to fill in the holes that kept its parent pidgin from being a full fledged language. The new T for Modern Dutch is je/jou, which is obviously related to the plural jij, a simple sound change that brought about a new singular morpheme, while English has been forced to replace V, as V had already shifted to the T position, which was done by creating compound nouns or adding additional suffix morphemes. Both languages were forced to compensate for T-loss as a damaging linguistic change – the loss of T had vast ramifications that, while they appear on the surface to be economic changes based on linguistic efficiency in fact caused each language to spend much more effort than losing any single verb ending could have saved.

Conclusion

With the evidence provided as to the background of the British and Dutch sociopolitical scenes during the obsolescence of T, it is clear that the religious fractures in the Netherlands and England were the direct cause of T-loss in both English and Dutch. The differences between them are also clear – in England, T was stigmatized and marked, whereas in the Netherlands, V was heightened and widened to cover social domains it had normally not occupied. I also hope to have proved that the argument for deflection and economy in the verbal paradigm are unfounded. With religion as the driving factor in T-loss, and the known importance of religion in 16th century Europe, there are no real reasons why social stigmas and government language planning could not have completely caused the damaging loss of T.