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The Evolution of Language
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Oct 10, 2007 09:54 PM
from the everything-can-be-measured dept.
from the everything-can-be-measured dept.
TaeKwonDood writes "We all know language has evolved but mathematicians are trying to take how it has changed in the past to predict what it will be like in the future." From the article: "Mathematical analysis of this linguistic evolution reveals that irregular verb conjugations behave in an extremely regular way -- one that can yield predictions and insights into the future stages of a verb's evolutionary trajectory," says Lieberman, a graduate student in applied mathematics in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and an affiliate of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. "We measured something no one really thought could be measured, and got a striking and beautiful result.""
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Of course it's all about the verbs (Score:4, Funny)
Verbs, verbs, verbs, that's all anyone thinks about.
Re:Of course it's all about the verbs (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Of course it's all about the verbs (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Of course it's all about the verbs (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Of course it's all about the verbs (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, Fuck, as in "Fuck you," isn't even properly a verb: English sentences without overt grammatical subjects [rr.com]. To summarize: "Fuck you or I'll take away your teddy bear" is not grammatically correct; neither is "Describe and fuck communism."
And, of course, XKCD has something to say about computational linguists [xkcd.com].
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The Best One Recently (Score:4, Funny)
We get cussed out on a regular basis.
Sometimes the kids get restrained by trained staff and they will say something like, "I can't fucking breathe." This they know is a magic phrase. We had a teacher recently go in and tell a student:
You cannot use a gerund with an intransitive verb. You should say I can't fucking. Or I can't breathe. You cannot use I can't fucking breathe. Make up your mind you are either not fucking or not breathing!
Well this is what happens when english teachers have way to much caffeine.
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Re:Of course it's all about the verbs (Score:5, Funny)
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Hari Seldon... (Score:3, Interesting)
I, for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Easy- a lot of it will go (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store".
whereas the American style is:
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store."
Obviously the former makes more sense because it nests properly: (sentence begins) (quote begins) (quote ends) (sentence ends).
That said
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
System.out.println("Hello, world.");
Because in that case it makes perfect sense.
(code begins) (open paren) (String begins) (sentence begins) (sentence ends) (String ends) (close paren) (code ends)
I have no problem with a sentence like:
Bill said, "Go to the store."
Because in that case, it's logical. Well, almost. You could argue that it should read:
Bill said, "Go to the store.".
Because there's really two sentences there (the narrator's sentence as well as Bill's) but actually putting two peri
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It may "make sense" but as is common in programming it does not fit the original simple requirement, in other words: where has the quote gone?
Re:Programming does that to you (Score:4, Funny)
Because there's really two sentences there (the narrator's sentence as well as Bill's) but actually putting two periods is redundant and I have no problem with the internal period in that case.
I wouldn't say it's redundant, since as you said, there are two sentences. However, language often sacrifices logical consistency for fluency and clarity. Having lots of punctuation marks is typographically ugly, and distracts from fluent reading. Frankly, .". looks like an anime character.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh wait, no I don't, it's a useless extra comma that isn't necessary.
Re:Easy- a lot of it will go (Score:5, Funny)
"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"Well, I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
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Re:Easy- a lot of it will go (Score:4, Informative)
It's taken from a book written by Lynne Truss published in the UK roughly 3 years ago.
Amazon Link [amazon.com]
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As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:5, Funny)
Generally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeiniing voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev alojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:5, Informative)
8th century - Beowulf, which is unreadable for modern English speakers.
1066 - Norman conquest - Old French would have a massive influence on English. Introduction of lots of Latin roots into English.
14th century - Chaucer, somewhat readable for modern English speakers with modernized spellings.
16th century - Shakespeare, more or less readable for modern English speakers without much editing.
Pronunciation of course also changed drastically, and this was reflected in orthography as well.
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Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:5, Interesting)
The printing press was a major incentive to standardise spelling, but also let to one of the few problems translating/transcribing Shakespeare.
Early fonts put a curl to the left on the bottom of the lower case "f" making it look a bit like a letter "s". Because s is much more common than "f", early printers would run out of esses before effs and would substitute an eff for an ess when neceffary.
My dad has a reproduction of early prints of Shakspeare's plays and the Midsummer Nights Dream song "Where the bees suck, there suck I" is on one such page. This caused a bit of a stir backstage and had to be explained, apparently.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
English is actually a good example why the mathematical approach is inappropriate. Your step between Beowulf and Chaucer is the crucial. In this period the linguistic situation in Britain became rather complex, while the vast majority of people continued to speak Anglo-Saxon (a West Germanic language of the Anglo-Frisian branch), the Norman nobility spoke Anglo-Norman, while the clergy used Latin. (Not to forget the different celtic tongues used by the people in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland.) All this produ
Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, apparently this is widely misattrbuted [alt-usage-english.org] to Mark Twain; it's actually from a letter by a guy named M. J. Shields.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:5, Informative)
The verb is indeed irregular in many languages, but nonetheless completely regular in others. One of the problems people have in deciding whether a feature of language is universal is the very small subset of languages they've been exposed to.
Most of the languages you can name off hand are all part of the Indoeuropean family of languages, which has a very large number of speakers, but does not constitute a large number of languages. Thus a lot of features common to Indo-european languages are taken to be linguistic universals when really they are common only to a very small subset of human languages.
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Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:5, Informative)
Compare I bike, you bike, we all bike.... the distinction by person is useless the way it is in english, I wonder if it'll disappear completely outside of "to be". (for other words you have the "he bikes" thing)
Thing is, this actually -did- make sence at some point (or atleast it served a purpose) in many languages that universally have different forms for different persons, you can remove the personal pronoun, since it's clear from the verb alone which person is meant.
"I am a boy" is superfluous; "am boy" conveys the same meaning since "am" can only be used for "I". Works that way in finnish, for example:
"puhun Suomi" (I speak finnish) "puhut Soumi" (you speak finnish), with enough grammar you can do away with many small words, and you can make the sequence of words more freely choosable. In english you make questions by reordering words. "you can have a cookie." "can I have a cookie?", with grammar that can also be done away with; In finnish you use -ko to symbolise question, so no need to reorder words (or add "do you" or similar antics)
"puhutko Saksa?" ("Do you speak German?")
In general though, it seems that the trend is that -less- grammar and -more small-word and word-sequence is used. English sure is losing grammar at a noticeable rate, same for Norwegian and German.
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Werd Up (Score:5, Funny)
this isn't really news (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't really news. We linguists have known this for a long time, as the article mentions, and we've known why: a child learning a language tends to regularize irregular forms. If he or she then hears the irregular form enough, the child reverts to the irregular form. This is why you'll hear children learning English go through a stage in which their knowledge of verb forms is skimpy but they have irregular forms like "brought", because they are memorizing individual forms, then through a stage in which they produce incorrect but regular forms, which they could not have learned from adults, like "bringed", because they have learned the rule, and through a third stage in which they learn the exceptions to the rule and the irregular forms like "brought" return. Irregular forms will only be learnable if they are sufficiently frequent. The only novelty of this research is the computational ability to carry out an accurate simulation.
As for predicting the future of the language, that's silly. There is a lot more to language change than what happens to irregular verbs.
Re:this isn't really news (Score:4, Interesting)
So are these usages converging the same way as verb irregularity?
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Re:this isn't really news (Score:4, Informative)
One can also expand their English vocabulary by working with Indians. Took me a while to figure out WTF 'prepone' meant. As in (say with your best Apu imitation), "We need to prepone the meeting an hour or so." Prepone being the opposite of postpone.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: this isn't really news (Score:5, Informative)
Another example is that Modern English has a "weird" class of adjectives beginning in 'a' that don't be have like other adjectives: asleep awry alive, etc. -- there's a pile of them. I talked to a professor of linguistics, who had published a fairly well known textbook on syntax, and he seemed genuinely puzzled by them. But a basic familiarity with language change reveals that they are actually fossilized prepositional phrases. Cf. the line in A Clockwork Orange, "While you are on life" = "While you are alive". So what looks like an unmotivated class of irregular adjectives is actually just the evolutionary reflex of a very normal, regular syntactic structure.
To add to the confusion, we're now getting a similar class of irregular adverbs with the derivation from the article 'a' rather than an old preposition, "alot", "awhile", etc., which while denegrated as ignorant spelling are actually a clue to the writer's understanding of the language. In a hundred years (or is that "ahundred"?), people without knowledge of English's history will think we have a class of irregular adjectives *and* adverbs, blissfully unaware that they are just evolved forms of very regular structures.
Oh, and the properties of Chinese have nothing to do with writing or a lack thereof.
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Psychohistory? (Score:4, Interesting)
Brief history of psychohistory for those who haven't read The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov:
Psychohistory is the name of a fictional science, which combined history, sociology, and mathematical statistics, in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, to create a (nearly) exact science of the actions of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire.
From Wikipedia, obviously:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory/ [wikipedia.org]
Predicting the future using language (Score:5, Interesting)
Stanislaw Lem wrote a book -- I think it was _The Futurological Congress_ -- which included people who predicted future inventions by predicting possible words. The theory being: things won't be popular unless they have a good name, so by thinking of good names, and then considering what might have those names, you can predict future developments.
Re:Predicting the future using language (Score:4, Funny)
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Keep the 'mitten' in 'smitten' (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure what fancy-pants sources these guys are using, but 'shirve' and 'smite' are definitely not low frequency verbs in my crowd. I say keep the 'mote' in smote. They will rue the day when 'smitted' crosses my lips!
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That is a grievous insult to the English language - shrive yourself or I will smite your ass!
(ok, so I don't have occasion to use "shrive" too often, but "smite" is a very useful word)
Internet might change these results (Score:3, Insightful)
To google (Score:5, Funny)
I google
I gaigle
I have googlen
The Future of Linguistics... (Score:4, Funny)
Stewardess: "Oh, good. Please tell him that I'll be right back with some medicine."
Barbara: (to man) "Jus hang loose blood, she gonna catch you on the rebound with some medicide..."
Man: "Whatchu talkin' bout momma, my momma didn't raise no dummies, I dug her rap!"
Barbara: "Cut me some slack jack! (arguing in Jive) Jive-ass fool ain't got no brains... anyhow."
(Forgive me if I missed a part, trying to do it from memory here....)
Re:Yes, well...however...there are other methods. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but this is absolutely false. Korean has dialects that differ significantly from each other - there is no single unified language. Nor did the king ever standardize the language. Korean is no more artificial than any other human language. This appears to be a garbled version of the development of the Hangul alphabet by king Sejong and his advisors. This was a great development, but it was just a writing system, not a standardization of the language itself.
Furthermore, it is not true that someone who speaks Chinese or Japanese can quickly pick up Korean. Chinese and Korean are not only unrelated but of radically different types. Chinese speakers find Korean quite difficult. Japanese speakers find Korean somewhat easier because the two languages are very similar in grammatical type, but even so most of the vocabulary is quite unfamiliar and the morphology, though similar in a general typological way, is quite different in detail.
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MOD PARENT UP -- GP is talking out ass (Score:5, Informative)
As a fluent Japanese speaker and part-time studier of Korean, I can vouch for the grammatical similarities -- most intriguing. And also as a part-time studier of Chinese, I can vouch that Chinese and Korean are about as similar as English and Korean -- Korean has borrowed words from both languages, but structurally resembles neither. Okay, so Chinese influenced Korean (and Japanese too) in terms of how counters are used (words like "brace" in "a brace of ducks", or "murder" in "a murder of crows", or "loaf" in "three loaves of bread"), but otherwise Chinese and Korean have pitifully little to do with each other. For that matter, Chinese is closer to English structurally speaking than it is to Korean, so there. ;)
Cheers,
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Linguistics 101 lesson: a language is not a bag of words. Any generalization about language that treats it as if it is some bag of words (e.g., in this case, that language change consists of new words entering the bag, while other words fall out of it) shows a profound ignorance of the fundamental ideas of linguistics. A language is a gram
Re:Bawstan Habah? (Score:5, Informative)
As a Massachusetts resident, I have no idear what happens to the ahs.
What really cracked me up is the day they decided to rename, "Great Woods Performing Arts Center", to the, "Tweeter Center for the Performing Arts". It's like they tried to purposely add more ahs!
"Hey Boston Guy, where's the concert?"
"It's at the Tweetah Centah for the Performin' Ahts!"
It depends on the speaker. Sometimes its more like Wista. Either way it's usually followed most times by, "Spag's", as in, "If we're going to bother to go to that wretched hive of scum and villainy, Wista, we might as well stop at Spag's".
To the point where sometimes people don't understand the normal pronunciation!
True story:
One day I went to a, "Boston Market", with my coworker for lunch. On this particular day, we were unfortunate enough to be waited upon by a guy with a Southy accent so thick you'd swear he was an extra from, "Good Will Hunting".
In case you're lucky enough to be from another country and have never encountered one of these abominations of cuisine, some explanation is in order. Boston Market is a fast food restaurant that sells mainly rotisserie-cooked poultry dishes with your choice of side. At Boston Market you can get a chicken dish that consists of a leg and thigh, which is called a, "Quarter Dark". This is the item that I was prepared to order.
I am not originally from Massashusetts, and so my pronunciation of these two words are almost identical to anyone in the civilized world (not entirely, or that would be, "civilised world"). I approached the register and ordered:
Me: "I would like a quarter dark, please."
Him: "Excuse me?"
Me (loudly): "A quarter dark, please."
Him: "What?"
Me: "QWAHTAH DAHK!!!"
Him: "Oh, a qwahtah dahk..."
At least, "job", isn't pronounced like, "jaerb".
Yet.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Re: Love! (Score:3, Funny)
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