The Evolution of Language

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.""

Comments

Re:As suggested by Mark Twain

[Repton]

Actually, apparently this is widely misattrbuted to Mark Twain; it's actually from a letter by a guy named M. J. Shields.

Re:Bawstan Habah?

[pyrrhonist]

All I'd like to know is how in the hell did Boston become Bawstan and Chowder become Chowda?

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!"

Worcester is pronounced Wusta ... ?!?!?

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".

They haven't just evolved - they've completely morphed!

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.

Re: this isn't really news

[Black Parrot]

Rudolf Flesch wrote some books back in the '50's implying that the most modern language we have is...CHINESE! Since Chinese is a spoken language rather than a written language (The writing is mostly pictorial representing whole concepts), it wasn't frozen in place with a bunch of affixes (suffixes, prefixes, etc.) or genders and all that other stuff that makes English hard to learn. Subject, verb, predicate .. That's all there is? You can't regularize verbs better than that! It's a misconception to think that languages evolve toward regularity. There are processes working in both directions. Believe it or not there's an underlying regularity to English's "irregular" verbs - it's just obscured by several thousand years of evolution. (Read up on ablaut, though the Wiktionary article doesn't do the topic justice.)

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.