Denis, your story strikes a Romanian chord. The situation around here is even worse, from what I can tell. But it is quite a fascinating question, with different answers from different points of view.
For an economist, it is a matter of price formation. In the state system, Romanian doctors are paid a fixed (and miserable) wage, largely unrelated to quality or effort. The incentive to pocket bribes is huge, and patients know it so well. In the private sector (with transparent and varied prices for medical services), bribes are almost unheard of. Also, there is a more or less efficient market for bribes. Patients find out how much a doctor expects, usually from past patients, or from other doctors. Surgeons receive more than GPs, professors more than debutants, etc.
But I think there is something more about "medical envelopes", from a cognitive point of view. First of all, there is a vast asymmetry of competence between doctors and patients, which gives the former a large freedom of action. Is this pill better, or another one? Surgery or not? Home treatment or hospitalisation? To make things worse, the post-hoc reckoning is not very helpful, since most decisions may be medically justified, but you might also end up dead. The patient is at the mercy of the practitioner since she does not know what choices are better. The best way to make sure one gets the proper treatment is to insure the benevolence of the doctor, and a bribe is the simplest path to gain the doctor's amity.
Second, there is something special about this particular social exchange: the patient is dealing in an ultimate value - her health. Something everyone in Romania says is that there is no price too high to be healthy. (Paradoxically, giving up smoking somehow does not make the list - self-hint-hint-nudge-nudge). If people would risk not bribing a policeman to avoid a fine, they are extremely unlikely to jeopardise their health in this manner. One cannot afford to stick to abstract principles (like discouraging corruption) when her life is at stake.
Finally, there is something like a Maussian gift in the affair: one passes a fat envelope even without the explicit mention of an economic exchange. It is not that the surgeon would not operate without being bribed - the patient just shows gratitude without visible economic reckoning. Of course, under the veil of generosity stands the solid self-interest of the patient. The fat envelope is meant to make sure that no scalpel is lost in her belly. But no-one says it out loud. It's a "I know that you know that I know etc" which makes sure that the transaction is smooth and polite.
To end with a personal anecdote: I was (and to some extent I still am) very wary of giving out envelopes to doctors. A little bit of moral prudishness, a little bit of fear (what if he feels insulted?), a bit of monetary unsaviness. Those who are more competent in these matters reassured me: "just put the envelope on his desk - he knows what to do next" After all, he is the expert, and I am not.
Exciting issue. I am not an expert, but some factors that might influence the relative regularity of languages have been proposed:
- The proportion of second language learners, and more generally of strangers among speakers. Linguists like Peter Trudgill have claimed that rules were more systematic in 'exoteric' languages, i.e. languages that are learnt and spoken by non-natives. Their main argument is not that adult learners would overregularize more than children (though, for all I know, that is not entirely impossible). Rather, they claim that adult learners demand rules and explanations. (For an exposition of this claim, Wray and Grace 2007 can be useful) If this theory is right, though, your Dorze case would be an obvious counter-example.
- Use in writing by a long-lasting administration. Writing can be used as a tool for grammarians and language-legislator, but it can also freeze many linguistic accidents, thus preventing the regularization that often results from oral wear-and-tear. This might explain your Dorze case. But I admit that the argument cuts both ways, as linguists will sometimes also associate writing with regularization.
- Frequency of use. This one is a personal speculation. We know from quantitative studies, mostly of English, that, inside a given language, the death rate of irregular forms is strongly linked to their frequency of use. Perhaps one could use this observation to guess what shapes between-language differences in regularity? After all, average frequency of use is likely to differ between dialects as well as between words. There are language with few words whose speakers talk a lot (such as international English), alongside languages that have many words but are rarely spoken (like many literary languages). Words would be more frequently used in the former, which would lead me to expect more regularity.
Mostly, though, linguists react with hostility to the suggestion that demography and social structure could influence regularity in languages. This is a short way to noticing variations in linguistic complexity, which is anathema to most linguists. This prevention is slowly giving way, making those issues very exciting to follow.
http://www.mendeley.com/research/the-consequences-of-talking-to-strangers-evolutionary-corollaries-of-sociocultural-influences-on-linguistic-form/
'Words would be more frequently used in the former, which would lead me to expect more regularity."
I meant *less* regularity.
I think it's useful to keep in mind a distinction in the way irregular patterns may relate to the expression of morpho(syntactic) features. Consider two examples from Germanic languages:
(1) ox - oxen, goose-geese, sheep-sheep
(2) Baum-Bäume, Wurst-Würste, Schuh-Schuhe
In (1) we have the traditional examples of irregular number marking in English (including 'sheep', with no phonetically explicit plural marking). "Irregular" here refers to a pattern that is distinct from that created by the rule deriving the majority of plural forms (i.e., suffixation of -s) which is also the productive rule for plural marking (if a new item enters the language, as in the experimental context of the "Wug tests", this is the plural marking it's going to receive).
Examples (2) show one of the morphologically alternative ways to code plural number in German nouns. The irregularity here lies not in the main exponent of the feature [+plural], which is -e in all forms, but in the behavior of the stem. "Irregular" means that in addition to the rule-based generalization linking plural formation with the attachment of -e, there's an unpredictable (in the sense of being something external to the morphological rule itself) pattern whereby particular lexical items have to be marked as undergoing a vowel quality change ('Umlaut').
Now, the key question is: what's the status of the vowel quality changes in German? This is by no means a settled issue in Linguistic Theory (with similar patterns abounding in a variety of languages; e.g. Greenberg 1950: 150-151 on Nilotic languages) but it is likely to have consequences for our thoughts on the historical dynamics of such patterns. If the stem vowel changes are seen as simple 'phonological adjustments', being then "side-effects" of -e affixation in German (or rather, a an adjustment triggered by a [+plural] feature, or triggered by a floating phonological feature), then these patterns have in a sense no functional importance, as far as the expression of number is concerned (cf. e.g., Halle & Marantz’s 1993 Distributed Morphology). If, on the other hand, these vowel changes are seen as part of the expression of the notion of plurality, then these markings do have functional significance (Spencer 2001). It’s also important to note that for several researchers who opt for the first analysis, forms such as sheep (plural) and geese in English should be analyzed as having a ‘phonologically null’ affix as the exponent for the notion of plurality, thus: sheep-0 and geese-0. This affix is a regular morphological formative for such theories, much as -s or -e, with the sole difference that it happens to be phonologically void.
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As a final note, once one assumes that that even sound change, which is ‘regular’ in the sense of being conditioned by phonetic factors alone, may be conditioned by morphological factors, for example, when the application of such changes could led to the deletion of a marker for an important grammatical feature (Kiparsky 1972, Campbell 1974) than the relation of such ‘irregular’ morphological patterns to the morphosyntactic features they may, or may not, express is of great relevance to an understanding of the historical outcome or the historical origins of such patterns.
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Campbell, L. (1974) “On Conditions on Sound Change” In: J. Anderson & C. Jones (eds.) Historical Linguistics II. North-Holland Eds.: 89-97.
Greenberg, J. (1950) “Studies in African Linguistic Classification V: Eastern Sudanic” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 (2): 143-160.
Halle, M. & A. Marantz (1993) “Distributed Morphology: The Pieces of Inflection” In: Ken Hale & S. J. Keyser (eds.) The View from Building 20. MIT Press: 111-176.
Kiparsky, P. (1972) “Explanation in Phonology” In: S. Peters (ed.) Goals of Linguistic Theory. Prentice-Hall.
Spencer, A. (2001) “Morphophonological Operations” In: Spencer, A. & A. Zwicky (orgs.) The Handbook of Morphology. Blackwell Publ.
Many bona fide professional linguists share my impression. In their 2007 book on language complexity, Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil and Peter Trudgill describe exactly that situation (see here). Like me, they feel that the notion of languages differing in complexity is not accepted in many, though not all, academic circles. Being linguists themselves, they have, like me, a lot of respect for the profession. None of us is claiming that "linguists are uninterested in all sorts of interesting things". On the contrary my comment was stressing the fact that, I quote, "this prevention is slowly giving way, making those issues very exciting to follow." Ex-ci-ting. I love and respect the work of those linguists, as that of many others.
Thanks for your reply, but I am in no way an "angry reader". Frustrated, sure. But "angry" goes a bit too far. I am just a reader who, by virtue of my academic profession, you predicted would be "hostile" to your speculations about answers to Sperber's question and view them as "anathema". I think it's useful to call people to account every now and then on the stereotyping of linguists, because it is a weird and counterproductive problem of today's academic world -- and that's all I did (proceeding immediately to some more constructive remarks). The fact that a blurb for a book edited by some "bona fide professional linguists" agrees with you is neither here nor there.
P.S. My co-authors and I actually spent about a page on the culture/structure issue in our Language article about Pirahã (http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411). See the discussion on page 358.
There is a rather long – 288 pp – attempt to answer this and similar questions in my new book Sociolinguistic typology: social determinants of linguistic complexity published by Oxford University Press. The short answer seems to be that there are tendencies to regularisation and other forms of simplification in all languages. But there are also tendencies to irregularisation in all languages. And there seem to be sociolinguistic factors which influence which of these tendencies are most likely to predominate in the long run and in the short run. Those factors are: degree of adult language contact; degree of social stability; density of social networks; amount of communally shared information; and, yes, community size – but this latter is by no means the most important factor. It follows that some languages are indeed more complex than others – at least using my definition of complexity, which makes it equivalent to L2 difficulty. Some linguists still find this controversial. Sociolinguists and dialectologists who have studied adult language contact-induced simplification at first hand have, on the other hand, never had any problem with the notion of non-equicomplexity.