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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.""
...is that you?
Admittedly, while it doesn't directly relate to the mathematical analysis of language the ideas behind the study of them are similar. After all, before now mapping out the general patterns of human civilization through mathematical formulas sounded just as absurd as mapping out language patterns using math. And yet, here's an article describing how scientists may have discovered patterns to language. Any thoughts?
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/
More interesting to me than irregular verbs is my son's usage of opposites. He wants me to "plug out" the vacuum cleaner, "buckle out" of his car seat, and-- my favorite-- "shut up" the computer (the opposite, of course, of "shut down"). Also the usages of "hot" or "warm"... the difference between something that is too hot such as food, and something that is too hot like a thick blanket in summer. (When I told him the blanket was too warm for summer, he asked me to cool down the blanket.) The other day he tried Tabasco sauce for the first time, and learned another usage of "hot".
So are these usages converging the same way as verb irregularity?
E pluribus unum
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.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
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.
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.
Are you adequate?
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.
I don't therefore I'm not.
In fact, Fuck, as in "Fuck you," isn't even properly a verb: English sentences without overt grammatical subjects. 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.