Piotr, our esteemed associate, is a linguist. I admire the discipline of linguistics on many levels and some of my professional work has been in formal languages (computer languages, DNA languages). Noam Chomsky was noted for his contributions to computers, languages and psychology. Chomsky’s work was my first and only formal introduction to linguistics.
Piotr and I have different views of origins, and creationists have viewed language as also a special creation. But I’ve always enjoyed his discussion of languages.
One thing I will admit, I’ve been astonished at how rapidly and radically the English language has evolved in the history of the language. For example, the battle records of the Battle of Agincourt in 1414 are written in a way that is completely unrecognizable to me.
The English in the time of the poet Shakespeare and the King James Bible in the 1600’s is a little more recognizable to me. The English of the 1800’s is noticeably different from the 1600’s. Even watching old movies, I can hear subtle changes in accents. So it seems to me, from my limited perspective, languages can evolve and change quickly.
Whatever one thinks of origins of language, I found this article compelling:
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/rapid-rise-human-language-0331
At some point, probably 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began talking to one another in a uniquely complex form. It is easy to imagine this epochal change as cavemen grunting, or hunter-gatherers mumbling and pointing. But in a new paper, an MIT linguist contends that human language likely developed quite rapidly into a sophisticated system: Instead of mumbles and grunts, people deployed syntax and structures resembling the ones we use today.
“The hierarchical complexity found in present-day language is likely to have been present in human language since its emergence,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics and the Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor in Japanese Language and Culture at MIT, and a co-author of the new paper on the subject.
…
Miyagawa has an alternate hypothesis about what created human language: Humans alone, as he has asserted in papers published in recent years, have combined an “expressive” layer of language, as seen in birdsong, with a “lexical” layer, as seen in monkeys who utter isolated sounds with real-world meaning, such as alarm calls. Miyagawa’s “integration hypothesis” holds that whatever first caused them, these layers of language blended quickly and successfully.
…
Miyagawa’s integration hypothesis is connected intellectually to the work of other MIT scholars, such as Noam Chomsky, who have contended that human languages are universally connected and derive from our capacity for using syntax. In forming, this school of thought holds, languages have blended expressive and lexical layers through a system Chomsky has called “Merge.”
Poor Mung. All out of clever things to say.
How dare you! How double dare you!!
Please, people. It’s easy to allow someone you agree with to speak
keiths,
Language takes care of itself even if distinctions are lost. In the passage from Old to Middle English the gender system collapsed, case endings eroded away, verb inflections were simplified, adjectives lost not only case forms but also number and definiteness markers, becoming completely uninflected. Many longer words underwent phonetic reduction, losing one or two syllables. I don’t believe effective communication was impaired in the process. Language is characterised by great robustness and redundancy. There’s always a way to compensate for any lost function.
On the other hand, our respect for tradition and instinctive need to correct children’s errors play an evolutionary role. They reduce variation and slow down change, so that communication is not too easily disrupted in large populations or between generations. Adults, however, never know how to answer questions beginning with “why”, like “Why can’t I say mouses and sheeps?” or “Why do I have to write if I were you?” Most irregularities are frozen accidents of history, and have no rational justification in the present-day state of the language. We just replicate them and don’t ask the reason why.
keiths: Brummie near the bottom
Alan: How dare you! How double dare you!!
Oops. 😳
You mean you aren’t really Alain Renard, native of the Languedoc?
Piotr,
Sure, but it can be awkward in the meantime, as when thee/thou disappeared, you became both singular and plural, and locutions such as “all of you”, “you guys”, and “you lot” moved into the vacuum.
Two syllables for the second person plural is unwieldy. I grew up saying “you guys” but eagerly picked up “y’all” when I lived in North Carolina. Sadly, “y’all” doesn’t fly in California, so I’m back to using “you guys” (where “guys” is sex-indeterminate).
keiths,
I think the accent helped the Beatles, rather than the other way round – it’s a good accent for irreverence and witticisms, and their personalities were part of their appeal. But it has an indelible association in the UK with an inclination towards petty crime and a readiness to fight. Accents are chosen very carefully for advertising. You’ll never hear a Liverpudlian advertise anything! Nor a Glaswegian.
Not so sure there is a pecking order, though – up north, we aren’t too keen on RP, and I think that’s true in many parts of the south too. As a kid, there were no regional accents on tv, only a particularly affected type of RP – ‘BBC English’ – and archive footage sounds particularly stilted: no-one talks like that! Including the older versions of those self-same speakers. Now, accents are everywhere.
The most attractive accents in the British Isles — mapped
keiths,
Yes, Southern Irish is definitely the accent to have. Especially with the ladies! ‘Welsh’? It really depends where!
5 words (at least) are being used in different ways so far: create (creation), evolve (evolution), change, develop(ment) and emerge(nce).
Personally, I consider ‘language evolution’ (or ‘linguistic evolution’) a misnomer driven by linguists’ felt need to appear ‘scientific.’ Piotr speaks about language objectively (“Language takes care of itself”, as if [a] language is a sovereign agent like a person), but for most people, language is a subjective humanistic topic, rather than a naturalistic objective one. E.g. studying neologies/neologisms ‘naturalistically’ is just academic, not personal.
In regard to the misnomer of ‘language evolution,’ change is the master category. What kind of change happens with languages (over time and space) is the major question for scholars. Some call it ‘evolution’ while others don’t. Piotr is an ‘evolution’ guy in the field of linguistics. What non-evolutionary change of language does he acknowledge?
stcordova says (and apparently believes, even while doggedly insisting that he must only ever in his life be always called a ‘creationist’) that “language has evolved.”
Let’s ask what the signifiers ‘evolve’ and ‘change’ mean specifically; how they are similar and different.
stcordova says “languages can evolve and change quickly.” So it’s mainly a pace or speed question, qua title of this thread? Too slow is not ‘evolution’ at all; too fast is ‘hyper-evolution’ (or something else)?
Yet there’s a categorical question also. E.g. One cannot say “I evolved my car’s tire,” but one can say “I changed my car’s tire.” They don’t signify the same thing; ‘evolve’ and ‘change’ are not (always) synonyms.
Back to the humanist dimension: When is language change intentional rather than unintentional? E.g. neology/neologism. From a naturalistic scholarly perspective, intention is ghost-like. From a humanist perspective, both scholarly and non-academic, one cannot talk about language change without intention, unless one simply views language change as a series of ‘mistakes’ or ‘accidents’ that are ‘(un)guided’ by ‘chance’ and thus describable by mere statistics.
The Darwinians are the zoologizers and ‘objective’ statisticians in this conversation. The non-Darwinians are the humanists, more focused on ‘character’ than on ‘nature.’ Language is a people thing, not just a material question of information. Language inherently involves purpose, choice, plan, goal; teleology. I’m a non-Darwinian humanist, indeed, I’m a ‘theistic humanist,’ as distinguished from ‘atheist humanists.’
Maybe Piotr, who I interpret as a ‘naturalist’ and ‘evolutionist,’ who has said he is not a theist, could spell out among professional linguists what such ‘subjective’ and ‘humanist’ differences make. What role does ‘agency’ play in his perspective of ‘language evolution’? There are examples of contemporary non-evolutionist linguists, after all.
The vast majority of voices at TSZ are atheists/agnostics (98+%), which Elizabeth Liddle (self-proclaimed quasi-Buddhist and relativist) has gathered together to oppose ‘Intelligent Design’ theory and the Uncommon Descent blog that expelled her. Those are simply relevant facts to be noted. Yet, you’ve got fundamentalist ‘creationist’ stcordova on your side, naturalists, wrt ‘language evolution’! = ))
And he still doesn’t even seem to wonder why he comes across to others as philosophically confused and self-contradictory again and again. This is all just a ‘debate’ game to him, to go back and engineer salvo weapons!
Allan Miller,
I know quite a few British linguists who proudly stick to their native varieties and make no effort to modify them in the direction of RP. For example, one famous sociolinguist, known for his pioneering “population linguistics” studies in the UK, speaks with a strong Norwich accent.
By the way, they disambiguate you in Norfolk by adding together in the plural, as in “How are ya together?”
Piotr Gasiorowski,
Liverpudlians confuse matters by using ‘youse’ as both singular and plural!
Gregory:
Of course there are. I don’t deny that language can be to some extent deliberately engineered or “cultivated” by its users, and that prescriptive writers or political correctness activists, for example, may have some effect on its development. So what? The possibility of artificial selection or genetic engineering does not undermine the fact that natural evolution is spontaneous and unguided. Self-styled authorities may insist all day long that you mustn’t begin a sentence with but or end it with a preposition. The effect of such prescriptivism is minimal (and in most parts of the world people speak languages that have no written grammars, dictionaries, or handbooks of polite usage).
Many linguists are obsessed with “functional” explanations, trying to find a function behind every process that affects language, and attributing change to human “engineering” (carried out in order to optimise the system). The idea that language takes care of itself, that change is often non-functional and usually beyond individual control, and that language structure is to a vast extent accidental and illogical, seems to bother them. I don’t think the evolutionary approach that I prefer dehumanises language. You can still use your language creatively and in a personalised way without pretending that you are its owner and master, and can make it change or prevent it from changing.
Gregory,
I suspect it’s all just a ‘debate’ game to most of us. Lizzie didn’t gather us together – we drifted by, and some stuck around.
You must be thinking of cousin Alicia!
There is in fact quite strong regional variation in spoken French, and a very marked one in this part of the Languedoc. Bread, pain, “correctly” pronounced with a nasalized long a, here sounds more like pen(g). Whilst I can’t fool a native speaker, I can confuse a French speaker from the North.
ETA sneaker to speaker.
Saying there is a evolutionary role in language is hyjacking the word evolutiuon for every change in mankind. it means nothing in real mechanisms of evolution as used in biology ot anything.
there is no evolution in language except people changing things in mutual agreement.
language is all about memory. nothing in human language makes sense until the dominance of human memory is accepted.
Thats why the real meaning of words means nothing like how we use them now. Like breakfast. it means to break fast but today is just the morning meal. most don’t know what the word fast means even.
Evolutionism fails in explaining anything about human language bECAUSE its about human intelligence. the intelligence is the origin for the complex language. Yet in reality its just using more sounds in combinations then ones cat.
Language is just dumb noises.
Grunts to grammer is impossible.
Thats why the paper here has to retreat to language being very quick. Just like the Gould retreat in evo bio.
Finally even they realize it doesn’t work.
Speaking of “Ye”,
Matthew 19:14 King James Version “But Jesus said, SUFFER little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
When thinking of Chomsky and “built in” knowledge of basic grammar, don’t forget that once our behavior changes, evolution can go to work making the behavior easier or more accurate.
For instance, once we stopped swinging from tree to tree and started walking on the ground, evolution could modify our pelvises, lengthen our legs, curve our spines and cause other changes that would make us much more efficient and capable walkers.
Once we start to speak, we can invent rules of syntax and grammar and use them to laboriously “think out” the construction and comprehension of each sentence as we go. Once we’ve learned to manually “think out” sentence structure, the rules for the “thinking out” are encoded somewhere in our brains, presumably as chemical potentials in synapses or some such. If evolution can change the chemical potentials in synapses, then it can cause us to be born with the rules for decoding grammar already hard wired in our brains.
Evolutionary Chomskyism.
What about the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, anyone? I’ve always thought the abstraction of language was necessary for complex cognition – so it makes sense to me but I hear its not well supported?
And to think I learned Marain.
The weak form makes sense. In its strong form, it claims too much.
Not at all. “Evolution” is a very appropriate term for language change.
Richardthughes: What about the Sapir Whorf hypothesis
What IS the Sapir Whorf hypothesis?
A popular term for the idea of linguistic relativity (acquired linguistic categories determine our cognition and perceptions of reality). It’s a misnomer, since neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated it explicitly anywhere, and the idea is much older than their work. The uncontroversial weaker version says that linguistic categories influence rather than determine thinking.
It is, I would note, very hard to think without words. Whether this means that ‘higher’ thinking depends on having words would be to infer too much – we’d have to ask someone with no language, and they’d struggle to tell us! – but it is interesting that language is not purely a means of interpersonal communication.
‘Linguistic evolution’ and ‘language evolution’ are misnomers promoted by naturalists to try to excuse their ‘scientistic’ anti-theism. If Piotr would conduct a social survey of his fellow ‘linguistic evolutionists’, he might be surprised of the results (especially in his native Poland).
Ok, glad you don’t deny that because it means your ‘theoretical’ approach has challengers and counter-positions. So, does this mean for you that ‘deliberate engineering’ and ‘cultivation’ are examples of non-evolutionary language change? I’m asking you to be more explicit about what ‘non-evolutionary’ means in your ‘linguistics’.
Just as ‘change’ and ‘evolution’ are not synonyms, neither are ‘evolution’ and ‘development’. What then distinguishes them? And why do so many people conflate them? Admitting ‘language development,’ as most reasonable person do, does not necessarily commit them to ‘linguistic evolution.’ Probably Piotr can admit this.
One example, there is a meaningful reason they are not called the ‘Millennium Evolution Goals,’ but rather the ‘Millennium Development Goals.’ In brief, naturalism vs. humanism.
Linguistics is not a ‘natural science’; it is broadly speaking a human-social science. The naturalistic ideology of some linguists, especially palaeolinguists is not necessary, even though some willingly commit themselves to it. Perhaps Piotr would acknowledge that as the only field ‘expert’ posting here. Even the notion of ‘historical linguistics’ need not be invested (read: ideologised) with ‘evolutionist’ language (the wiki page shows this clearly; the focus is language change, not just one simple kind of change).
Piotr, do you not agree that ‘change’ is the master category, not ‘evolution’? Iow, ‘evolution’ is merely one kind of ‘change’ among many.
Again, it depends on one’s ideological pre-commitment and the extent they apply the term ‘natural.’ For me, just as for Darwin, ‘artificial’ things differ from ‘natural’ things. Does anyone deny this? Yet for others nowadays, *everything* is ‘natural’ simply because the only alternative to ‘natural’ they can possibly imagine is ‘supernatural’, which they are both ideologically and worldview against. Their bias is easy to see and accounts for still a small percentage of citizens (not much different in Poland and USA).
Yet, technology is of course not ‘natural,’ it does not ‘grow from seed in the ground,’ is not ‘organic’; it is artificial. Technologies are artefacts of human making, i.e. manufacture, design.
Rober Byers: there is no evolution in language except people changing things in mutual agreement.
In most cases people like to imagine they stick to traditional norms, and they may even try to prevent language change and (see how many “Letters to the Editor” contain angry protest against linguistic innovations). Have you ever been to a public meeting where the proposal of a new language change was discussed and put to the vote?
I mentioned the Norwich dialect in one of the posts above. They have quite a few funny pronunciations there. Foer example, they treat intervocalic /nt/ before an unstressed vowel in a way that is unique in the English-speaking world. The /n/ is deleted and the /t/ is pronounced as a glottal stop (written below as an apostrophe). Twenty, plenty, going to end up as twe’ee, ple’ee, gaw’a. This pronunciation is the outcome of a sequence of historical changes affecting regular articulation habits. They took several human generations to become fixed locally. How did the local people reach “mutual agreement” on it (or on ple’ee of other local innovations) in your opinion?
Piotr Gasiorowski,
Piotr, your examples are all nonsense, once you openly and forthrightly acknowledge intention, purpose and agency.
So you are ‘anti-traditional’, is that right? Does that mean you are a ‘progressive’ or something similar in Polish language?
Why not just say you are anti-Catholic, anti-theist in Poland? This scholarly position seems to mirror your worldview. It is not simply a result of science, but of worldview.
To ignore intention and agency in your ‘nauka humanitarna/nauki społeczne’ (human-social science) is just silly, a fantasy you are entertaining against reality and language history and contemporaneity.
Allan Miller,
Linguistic relativity makes a stronger claim: that depending on which language you speak, your perception of reality is different. For example, there are languages with two different (non-synonymous) words for ‘water’ (roughly, water “in the wild” versus water in a container, “domesticated” for human use). The claim is that speakers of those languages really have two different cognitive representations of ‘water_1’ and ‘water_2’ but no general concept of ‘water’ (liquid H2O). The classic example of such a language is Hopi, but there was a similar contrast in Proto-Indo-European as well:
Water_1
Water_2
Gregory, frankly, I have no idea what you are on about, or why you are trying to replace me with a man of straw. I’m talking about the phenomena I study, not about my ideological inclinations or political views. Of course, like most other people, I also instictively react against what I perceive as a breach of traditional norms (I try to correct what I regard as “mistakes” made by my children, students, and other fellow language users), but — being a linguist and having some specialised knowledge about language history — I realise how little logical justification (and how little effect, in the long run) such emotional appeals to tradition have.
Allan Miller,
Yeah, I hear your suggestion, somewhat, but don’t entirely agree. For many people here, it is personal. Very personal. They *hate* theists, especially YECs, in USA and in the IDM there are many (a vast majority of) theists. It’s like *all* theists are pedophiles, rapists and hypocrites to them. This drives their desperate resistance and interest to debate and ridicule, sometimes harshly.
As for me, it is more than just a debate because I’ve written scholarly articles, presented papers at conferences and engaged in discussions about it with colleagues in a dozen countries. The main topic is essentially science, philosophy and theology/worldview, which is imo much needed in a mature discussion. The third category means *every human being* even non-theists are allowed/involved.
Speaking here at TSZ, with only a small % of scholars and a whole whack of crude, uninformed and hating responses that often border on personal attacks (though penguin Elizabeth is too quasi-Buddhist nice to censor them), the level is quite different than in academia. And I have admittedly engaged differently here than there and responded with lower brow comments, sometimes rather dirty also. Some of which deserve an apology when done in the spur of the moment.
But know of course that I’ve been f&%#d over here too at TSZ as if a gang atheist/agnostic r*pe against vertical belief in a meaningful world. Bi&ch slapping at TSZ is common practise as ‘skeptics’ usually have few social-cultural-national loyalties other than their (Randian) egoistic selves.
stcordova is not a scholar, he makes US weapons, is ‘born again’ (proselytizing) IDist and is an anti-secular evangelist who idolizes himself as a ‘creationist’. If this God-loved human being could ever become a ‘non-creationist,’ his life would likely improve beyond his life-long (Philippines – & I’m cheering for Pacquiao!) immigrant identity & imagination. And he’s already announced that here at TSZ it is for him a game.
Nevertheless, folks here seem ready and willing to play (as with the largely incomprehensible ‘creationist’ Canadian Byers, who has communication confusion). Byers and stcordova just want to provoke atheists, like a good ole’ IDist/creationist in an ID/Brights dance.
I’m more interested in a sincere dialogue and would welcome voices – do any of you Skype? – than mere textual hogwash like Piotr is producing in his anti-theist Polish ‘evolutionist’ ideological hand-waving propaganda so far.
Question repeated, for Piotr’s sake because he doesn’t seem to like answering poignant questions from someone in his region. (That’s not altogether unusual, depending on the personal character of the questions.) There are several other questions in my responses to him already left unanswered, that while posing as an ‘evolutionist’ in linguistics, Piotr doesn’t seem to be able to hold his own bag.
An Eastern European guy like Piotr goes silent when feigning to positively talk about ‘non-evolutionary change’ because he’s built his English linguistic career on pretending otherwise (like a virgin evolutionist) and idolizing ‘Nature’. The sad thing is that he will probably go into disciplinary jargon details to try to salvage his obvious (non-scientific) desire to avoid more serious questions to his worldview/ideology.
None of us would have guessed that. I cannot recall any of your posts at TSZ that seemed to show an interest in sincere dialog. You come across as an arrogant twit.
Since I haven’t told you what my position is, please don’t attack me for what you imagine I believe. This is what the straw-man fallacy is all about. I hope you don’t resort to such rhetorical trick or to personal attacks (which I’m going to ignore) when you interact with scholars or give conference presentations.
Of course to coin a neologism you have to do some creative intellectual work. You may have a purpose in mind (“Now, what shall we call this new device we’ve just invented, which amplifies light by stimulated emission of radiation?”), you may make deliberate choices (“Luminoamplifier? — No, too long and too clumsy”) until you come up with laser and you see that it is good. But it’s one thing to coin a new word, and a wholely nother thing to get it into circulation. You have little if any control over the fate of your coinage. You may use it yourself, but unless other people pick it up and start using it, it will not become part of language evolution. The chances of its long-term survival are similar to the odds that a novel mutation will become fixed in a biological population (and they are so for similar reasons).
Can you tell us how many commonly used English words you have invented? In other words, what is your personal contribution to the evolution of English?
A guy like me goes silent on an Internet forum when he is having dinner (as in this case), or when he has a review to write, a lawn to mow, or a dog to take out for a walk. As regards all this unprovoked ad hominem, I beg you most humbly to sod off. Your post belongs in Guano.
I agree. Post moved.
@Gregory,
If you have a problem with that, PM me.
‘Language evolution’ is a myth that some scholars use to console themselves in their naturalistic worldview, Piotr. You are a confessed naturalist and evolutionist ideologist are you not? Such is an agent-less fantasy bereft of value for inherently teleological human-social scientific work.
Language ‘changes,’ of course it does! On that, Piotr, we don’t disagree. But people, their intentions, meanings and agency are involved in the changes, which you have shown yourself unable to directly admit. The term ‘evolve’ is thus a biologistic misnomer, as quite a few scholars have shown. These are your opponents, whose names you’ve not yet revealed.
That you define your scholarly identity with ‘evolutionism,’ Piotr, is simply coincidence and that you’re now being called out on it here, a predominantly atheist/agnostic site where you would normally be ‘validated’ for it is also coincidence. Might you learn anything from this line of direct questioning (other than calling it ad hominem so to conveniently avoid it)?
What seems obvious so far is your complete sociological naivety. Utter awareness of agency, purpose, plan, goal, vision; an ateleological, ‘unguided’ change of language that for whatever ‘Darwinian’ or other ‘evolutionist’ traps that you choose to call ‘evolutionary linguistics’, Piotr? This too, was part of the Soviet legacy that you seem to have welcomed; it was and still is a freefall into atheist, naturalist evolutionism.
But perhaps you are from that in-between generation in Poland – 45 – 60 years old, educated into atheism, naturalism and evolutionism – to loosely feel it somehow, but yet not uncover it and eventually face it?
As for the naturalist misnomer “the evolution of English”, only ideologist dreamers talk like this anymore. Development, adaptation, change, adjustment, growth, etc. are freely considered *outside* of evolutionist ideology. And in human-social sciences, so they should be with agents and intentions involved!
As to your pointed question, well, I’ve made a few neologisms and some more await, a couple of which have limited usage and one which already has widespread usage. Why shy away into zero personhood yourself for choices made, creations, inventions and innovations proposed? Is it predominantly a native language issue or something more than that wrt ‘evolutionist’ ideological futility?
What about your (potential) agency as a neologist, Piotr? Is it that ultimately futile too?
It seems that within your unfortunate pseudo-scientistic linguistics, dys-agency, naturalistic ideological evolutionism, you consider your agency and intention as meaningless or almost zero. And to me, Sir, that is both really sad and unscholarly.
My posts address a human being who has apparently been led far, far astray from reality. They are not directed with any ‘ad hominem’ anger, but rather with the aim of raising awareness both gently and firmly. Even if unwelcome, the good intention is there if you should change your attitude to it.
Nothing personal against you but simple recognition of the dehumanising views you have demonstrated so far here at TSZ with your linguistic evolutionism, although this place usually just supports skepticism instead of proposing a more hopeful and humanistic alternative.
If you’re prepared to talk about ‘non-evolutionary change’ then talk about it and stop feigning dog-walking, lawn mowing or a scholar who simply won’t acknowledge powerful counter-positions to his chosen ideology. We can see through this tactic easily.
p.s. Alan, your waffling character, defending any legitimate challenge to atheists and agnostics here is noted yet again. Please publically identify the supposed ‘ad hominem’ that is both make believe to you and Piotr. I’ll erase it if identified. And then the remainder of a long post can be reinstated. But you complain about a single period so you can delete a message, which is your pattern.
If a human-social scholar can’t speak reflexively, he or she is not much of a scholar after all! Catholic Poland is obviously not so finicky as Piotr or you! Even though you are not a human-social scientist, Alan, you should be able to recognise the difference between a naturalist and a humanist and accept the ‘tone’ and questions as appropriately valuable in this place.
What utter shoite, Gregory. I’ve seen new words emerge, portmanteaus become adopted and words get repurposed in my lifetime, as well as syntactic and grammatical changes.
Now I suppose we could argue there is a design component, let’s say if someone fails spectacularly at a TEDX talk we elect to call it a GREGX talk. Then it goes into a wider usage of fail commentary: “OMG he GREGXed that one!” Then it becomes part of a trope or meme: FEDX: “When it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight”, GREGX: “It’s not going anywhere, is it?” Etc.
Talk about ad homs!!
Yes, of course they do. I TOTALLY agree with you. The point is that it is PEOPLE that ’emerge’/create/neologise them. That’s the point! Do you really not get this?!?
No, don’t guano him, Alan. He’s an atheist, after all. Leave him free to say ANYTHING ad hominem simply for that reason.
Language must ‘evolve’ simply because Alan believes it contrary to *any* solid arguments against a disenchanted evolutionist linguist.
Then why not finally tell us what you believe?!
You *seem* to be promoting linguistic evolutionism. Please tell us if you are or are not. It seems quite obvious to me from what you’ve said already.
Go and take a logic class, Gregory. Look at the intersection between ad hominem and hypotheticals and report back with your findings.
Thanks!
We agree people create, or sometimes don’t (grauniad) new words but their roll is closer to the environment – the selection process. I doubt ‘GREGX’ will take off for many reasons.
Evolution is being used here in a broad sense, and isn’t perfectly analogous to biological evolution. This is clear from life cycle, extinction events etc. But Languages do have a “tree of life”, with some horizontal transfer (more these days to globalization), just like biological life.
Because he finds you unpleasant?
Gregory,
I happen to be quite interested in the broad picture from when we might safely say that hominid populations had not developed the capacity for complex verbal communication, say 500,000 years ago, to the point where we can safely say it has happened, at around the dawn of modern human diaspora from Africa. say 70’000 years ago.
The gap in our knowledge of the path along the way allows amateurs like me to speculate wildly what precisely was the path and timescale. What I am convinced of is that this is a process of biological co-evolution. Language development is undeniably an evolutionary process in the biological sense.
One of the interesting things about how language evolves, is that ridiculous ideological pedants such as Gregory have very little impact.
Why don’t you have a go a rewriting a nicer version, Gregory? Alan does enough cleaning up after you.
In a nutshell, evolution is change in the frequency of heritable variants over many generations, in a population whose size is limited (not all variants can survive). It isn’t just any odd kind of change. You need a population of entities which undergo replication (produce copies of themselves), a source of variation (imperfect replication, recombination, influx of new replicators), and a finite-size population.
(1) Linguistic forms spread by imitation-based learning (replication).
(2) The process isn’t foolproof: learners make mistakes; people may borrow or invent new forms (variation).
(3) Speech communities are finite, so different forms playing the same function must compete for limited resources.
Additionally, there are reasons why speakers may preferentially use some variants rather than others (selection). In small communities the success or failure of an innovation may be the accidental consequence of random re-sampling (drift). I see no reason not to call this kind of change “evolution”.
Of course analogies don’t end here. We have all the expected macroevolutionary effects as well: speciation, common origin, horizontal transfer, hybridisation, etc.
I think it should be sufficient to sling epithets and pejoratives to prove one’s point.
Why should hyperskeptical atheistic materialists also require reason?
This seems like its going to be one of biggest ‘avoid answering’ threads yet by a PhD at TSZ (among the 5 or 6 here). 😛
I can guarantee everyone here that, even though Piotr is probably 15-20 years older than I am, in comparison, I have studied what ‘evolution is’ and what ‘evolution is not’ far beyond Piotr Gasiorowski, if only due to the fact of interdisciplinarity. His protest of what ‘evolution is’ rings hollow because he can’t answer simple questions about what ‘evolution is not.’
Piotr is now likely very uncomfortable (so he went to mow the lawn and walk his dog, i.e. provide irrelevant excuses for not answer simple questions). Then he came back with disciplinary jargon that anyone could query (spread, imitation, replication, finite, foolproof, etc.), but wouldn’t answer simple, direct questions.
I asked a very simple question: “What non-evolutionary change of language does he acknowledge?”
He seemed to answer (engineering & ‘cultivation’), but wouldn’t back himself up how or why these are ‘non-evolutionary’ changes. And he gave no references.
Aren’t engineering & cultivation both ‘natural’ after all in his worldview?
Otoh, I was very specific, clear and precise leaving no doubt about the question.
Piotr Gasiorowski, the only linguist posting here, has gone silent, reverting to evolutionist ideology. But it’s the evolutionist ideology that he’s supposed to be defending! It seems for Piotr, naturalism & evolutionism are default views that cannot & should not be questioned…ever!
I asked him in simple English (a language which Piotr has majored in):
But he dodged it with sophistry. Why is this question so hard for linguist to answer?!
It is now obvious that Piotr doesn’t want to admit something that would challenge, nay, perhaps even threaten the ideology on which his career has been built: linguistic evolutionism. Does anyone wonder why strictly on the terms of the argument that Piotr the linguistic specialist is dodging?
I’ll tell you why. His is a dehumanising, naturalistic, objectivistic, wanna-be natural science, agent-less, ateleological fantasy perspective of linguistic history and absence of choice and purpose based largely on his anti-theistic worldview.
This is something evolutionist ideologists simply cannot bring themselves to even consider.
You have to read this bit in hushed, whispered tones for maximum effect.
Gregory, kindly provide an example of non-evolutionary change to language.
ETA:
In my lifetime I’ve seen or read about attempts at spelling reform (failed), attempts to standardize word usage (failed), attempts to standardize grammar (failed), attempts to introduce new words (can’t think of any that came from the top down, except for trade names, which are mostly generated by computer algorithms).
In short, I can’t think of any successful top down changes to language. I’m sure you are going to provide some.
Gregory,
Yes, Gregory, let’s have some meat in this sandwich. One example of non-evolutionary change in a linguistic context would help us all understand what point it is you are trying to make.
Let me make a distinction between the evolution of language which, I suggest took place in Hominids somewhere between half a million and a hundred thousand years ago and modern language development that covers the period since. I agree, if that is your point, that the latter process is analogous to biological evolution.