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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.

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International Woof (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it’s less that English simplified them and more that it never developed case marks for them.

Well, Old English baggs to differ. English lost its case markings on articles early on and kept them on nouns a while longer while German kept them on articles and simplified nouns much more early on.

In contrast, not only German repurposed the demonstrative “der” (that, which, who) into an article in a cleaner way

... as did English with "se"/"þē" which started as a demonstrative the same way der/die/das did.

but it’s also dumping most grammatical case info into the article

Again, German didn't dump anything into articles but rather lost it everywhere else.

There is this idea that this fostered the process of using der/die/das much more often (which made it from a demonstrative to an article) but I disagree because it was a widespread process, not only in German but in huge parts of Europe, including beside Romance languages also English were this reasoning doesn't work (as shown above).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Well, Old English baggs to differ. English lost its case markings on articles early on and kept them on nouns a while longer while German kept them on articles and simplified nouns much more early on.

That sē is still the determiner, now with an additional function as an article, not an independent article. What I said applies to the article as its own thing, i.e. when "the" and "that" were already independent words - in fact their decoupling is directly tied to the same loss of the endings that caused the morphological case system to go kaboom.

Again, German didn’t dump anything into articles but rather lost it everywhere else.

I'm talking about the informational load, you're talking about the phonetic changes.

There is this idea that this fostered the process of using der/die/das much more often (which made it from a demonstrative to an article) but I disagree because it was a widespread process, not only in German but in huge parts of Europe, including beside Romance languages also English were this reasoning doesn’t work (as shown above).

It's actually both a shift promoted by interactions between languages in the Western European Sprachbund and the result of simple sound changes. Much like a vicious cycle:

noun endings get slightly muddier due to syncretism →
people rely more on a default word order to convey case →
higher usage of demonstratives as "poor man's article" (definiteness might not be the same as topic, but in a pinch it's close enough) →
poor man's article becomes an actual article →
there's less pressure to keep the noun endings distinct, thus against sound changes that would merge them →
noun endings get slightly muddier due to syncretism

Higher usage of demonstratives as articles might be also caused by interference of other languages - that guy spamming "that" and "one" in a language will eventually do the same if speaking some another nearby language. And it also explains roughly why German ended as the exception, as it's right in the middle of the way between "case endings, no articles" Polish and "articles, no case endings" Romance.

Then, in German you got that weird middle ground where word order still conveys topic, but the noun endings already weren't conveying the case any more. The info gets dumped in the article - and that prevents further sound changes and regularisation processes from attacking them.