The Evolution of Language 528
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.""
Bawstan Habah? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hari Seldon... (Score:3, Interesting)
Efforts to stamp out irregularity (Score:2, Interesting)
(Zonk has, of course, given up hope on regularizing "to be".)
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]
Re:this isn't really news (Score:4, Interesting)
So are these usages converging the same way as verb irregularity?
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:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:2, Interesting)
Just look at them damned Chinese characters and the reform they underwent last century -- compare the characters used in Taiwan or Hong Kong, those in Japan (that were adopted after the Chinese simplified them once) and those that are used in China now (which were simplified gradually even more). The more them characters evolve, the more they look the same.
Probably in the end it'll all end up where Korea is -- they have more or less given up on characters and switched to alphabet. Which is where English was back then
Re:this isn't really news (Score:3, Interesting)
In Flesch's book, "How to Write, Speak and Think more effectively" he suggests getting clear communication by pretending you were composing in Chinese. Hmmmm..I need to find that book...
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!
Lolcats (Score:2, Interesting)
im in ur internetz, evolving ur languages [icanhascheezburger.com]
Re:Programming does that to you (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: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.
Re:Yes, well...however...there are other methods. (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 grammar; people invent and adopt new words spontaneously all the time, but not, say, morphological paradigms, case agreement, or new forms of valence-changing rules like the passive or the causative alternation. (Yes, I'm using words that most people who read this won't understand, but that's the point--if you don't understand terms like that, your "insights" into laguage aren't very valuable.)
That sounds like a combination of myth and hyperbole about a perfectly ordinary language standardization process (e.g., the kind that happened in Spain during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile, and again after the publication of Antonio de Nebrija's grammar). I don't know what Korean king you're talking about here; my first thought was Sejong the Great, but the timeline is wrong (he lived about 600 years ago, not 400). At any rate, his great contribution was an orthography (Hangeul) that wasn't adopted until much later.
Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:0, Interesting)
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.
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].
Re:That's Sick (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (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 produced a contact situation in which social (prestige) factors and political developments influenced the linguistic "evolution".
Of course one can model any change of state over time using a mathematical evolutionary approach, but it won't help in understanding what actually happened. Current mathematical approaches to language change are much to over-simplified to discover anything significant, but if it makes them happy, I guess it won't hurt anyone.
Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:3, Interesting)
Going back in time (Score:2, Interesting)
Latin is more complex than french or spanish. Then, were the ancestors of latin (indogermanic) super-complex? This is odd, as I guess that prehistoric societies were more primitiv and there was no literature, so why would they have had such complex languages?
Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:3, Interesting)
The past as a guide (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Easy- a lot of it will go (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:As suggested by Mark Twain (Score:3, Interesting)
I specifically referred to a page on a reproduction of a genuine contempory (to ol' Bill) print of a Shakespearian play. The word "suck" doesn't and didn't have a long s. On the page it is definitely spealt with "f" and there is a foreword which explains the frequent use of "f" instead of "s".