Physicists Discover Evolutionary Laws of Language 287
Hugh Pickens writes "Christopher Shea writes in the WSJ that physicists studying Google's massive collection of scanned books claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words, marking an advance in a new field dubbed 'Culturomics': the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Published in Science, their paper gives the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English — a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster's Third New International Dictionary has 348,000), with more than half of the language considered 'dark matter' that has evaded standard dictionaries (PDF). The paper tracked word usage through time (each year, for instance, 1% of the world's English-speaking population switches from 'sneaked' to 'snuck') and found that English continues to grow at a rate of 8,500 new words a year. However the growth rate is slowing, partly because the language is already so rich, the 'marginal utility' of new words is declining. Another discovery is that the death rates for words is rising, largely as a matter of homogenization as regional words disappear and spell-checking programs and vigilant copy editors choke off the chaotic variety of words much more quickly, in effect speeding up the natural selection of words. The authors also identified a universal 'tipping point' in the life cycle of new words: Roughly 30 to 50 years after their birth, words either enter the long-term lexicon or tumble off a cliff into disuse and go '23 skidoo' as children either accept or reject their parents' coinages."
Re:Scrabble (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Qi is its about as "english language" as Shinjitai
'Culturomics'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Some Advice (Score:5, Insightful)
See this all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
I see this all the time (I have a PhD in the humanities and I am a software engineer) where someone from outside the field does something and claims it is a universal law but really, they just worked on English and cannot (or will not) prove that it works for other languages. Usually, these papers also lack any kind of literature review and ignore many of the problems that this would uncover. I saw one paper by a physicist that tried to use bit fields to model language change; it was just massively reductionist and couldn't explain anything at all for all the mathematical rigour.
I go to my University's language lunch which has lots of this and scare the pants off grad students by saying "this is all very well but does this work for Japanese or Old Irish or any other language?" This usually makes their faces go white because naturally English is the ONLY language that matters and is therefore "universal".
Re:To the Bane of Grammar Nazi. (Score:4, Insightful)
First off, I'd say your lack of language skills is indeed impacting your ability to coherently formulate an argument. Otherwise you would have noticed that the original post is not, in fact, about grammar at all. Rather, it's about words.
That said, I would also say that HOW you present an argument is just as important (if not more so) than the content of the argument itself. The point of making an argument at all is to convince someone else of the validity of your viewpoint. This task is impossible if you are unable to make yourself understood, and it's very difficult if people have dig through your statements in order to tease out your meaning. Also, the better your language skills, the less the chance your arguments will be misunderstood.
The reality is, though, it doesn't really matter how terrific your ideas are if you are unable to efficiently articulate them. Which makes the better point?
1) "I took my - you know - thing .... the thing thats sits on the round things.... you know - the THING.... yeah - with the keys and stuff - the THING. Anyway, I took the thing to the place... you know - where I do stuff... there's coffee and papers and stuff - the PLACE... and the guy who tells me what to do... you know - the PLACE."
- or -
2) "I drove my car to work."
Re:To the Bane of Grammar Nazi. (Score:5, Insightful)
s/threw/through/g
"through" is an adverb indicating a passage between locations or a change of state.
"threw" is the past tense of throw.
Grammar Nazi's often get a bit extreme but when your basic spelling is up-to-shit the actual meaning of your writing gets lost. Yes language evolves - this means we coin new words, we gradually change laws of grammar - but it is not a license to write whatever you want and claim it means what you intended to mean.
I'm fairly certain from context that you intended to write "through" for example - but if I hadn't recognized it I would have been wondering if you were so badly bullied that teachers actually threw you around in school.
>I have only learned to dislike people who feel the need to correct every detail, and discredit my arguments
It's not a discrediting of arguments to correct grammar mistakes. However, repeating them when you have been corrected just makes you look stupid. Worse, it makes you an asshole. Yeah, YOU are the asshole. Why ? Because using the proper conventions of language (grammar, spelling etc.) is a form of politeness. It makes your writing easy to read.
Furthermore, it is to your own advantage as well. When you ignore good language rules what you write more often than not doesn't mean what you intended it to mean. Some of your readers will simply misunderstand you. Others will be annoyed. Very few will actually have a clue what you were trying to say- because what you were trying to write and what you actually write no longer bear any but the most limited of resemblances.
The only thing that saves the grammar-ignorant from being completely illiterate is the human ability to infer meaning from context - but context is incredibly culture, time and location specific. So the meaning of your words now become discernible exclusively to people who share your background. Everybody else (that could literally be people who live two neighborhoods away) are just sitting there shaking their heads and wondering what the fuck you're trying to say.
Oh and for a little encouragement... I am writing in my THIRD Language and very nearly all of the fucking time I get it right... you first language speakers have absolutely no excuse.
Re:Scrabble (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither is a valid word under the rules of Scrabble, which restricts you to English words.
What.
You're a bit wrong there. Qi and Chi would both be "loanwords", i.e. words taken wholesale from another language, usually with no change in spelling or pronunciation. Here, try some others using the official Scrabble dictionary [hasbro.com]. I'll just throw together a short list, and you see how many of these aren't in there because they're technically not English words at all:
hibachi (Japanese), karaoke (Japanese), cafeteria (Spanish), alpaca (Spanish), gulag (Russian), taiga (Russian), wiener (German), kraut (German), moped (Swedish), brogue (Irish).
There's ten different words from six different languages. Only one of that list is not in there - and it will be as surprising to you which one is not in the dictionary as it was to me.
I get what you're saying, the "je ne sais quoi" example is a good one. But there are certain words from other languages we use that have pretty much been adopted into the language, especially for concepts we really don't have or can explain as concisely. Granted, some you may have never heard - usually only marital artists could describe what a kiai or kata is, for example - but we have loads of loanwords that are in everyday use in our language. (It personally makes me cringe when people say "hibachi" (hee-bah-chee) and "karaoke" (kah-rah-o-kay) and mangle the Japanese pronunciations, but that's accents for you. The Japanes hilariously mispronounce English words sometimes too, and they certainly misuse [flickr.com] our words a lot of the time as well - surely some sort of revenge for all of those trendy kanji tattoos that so many of us Westerners like getting on our bodies.)
Incidentally, "qi" is in the Scrabble dictionary - at least according to the one on the Hasbro website (which I have linked above).