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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.""
It's fuck that, suck this, screw that.
Verbs, verbs, verbs, that's all anyone thinks about.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
All I'd like to know is how in the hell did Boston become Bawstan and Chowder become Chowda? And what's with the cities around Massachusetts, anyway? Worcester is pronounced Wusta ... ?!?!? They haven't just evolved - they've completely morphed!
...is that you?
am glad I getted the chance to welcome our new, regularly-conjugated overlords.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
I predict we will "loose" a lot of words and have them replaced by ones with similar spelling.
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Generally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeiniing voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev alojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
I for one welcome our cromulent new verbs!
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
This isn't really news. We linguists have known this for a long time, as the article mentions, and we've known why: a child learning a language tends to regularize irregular forms. If he or she then hears the irregular form enough, the child reverts to the irregular form. This is why you'll hear children learning English go through a stage in which their knowledge of verb forms is skimpy but they have irregular forms like "brought", because they are memorizing individual forms, then through a stage in which they produce incorrect but regular forms, which they could not have learned from adults, like "bringed", because they have learned the rule, and through a third stage in which they learn the exceptions to the rule and the irregular forms like "brought" return. Irregular forms will only be learnable if they are sufficiently frequent. The only novelty of this research is the computational ability to carry out an accurate simulation.
As for predicting the future of the language, that's silly. There is a lot more to language change than what happens to irregular verbs.
As much as that annoys me, I must say that they taught that as a valid way of doing things in my elementary school English classes. Then again, I'm one of those Americans that prefers the British style of punctuating quotes. In other words, I write something like: ;)
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store".
whereas the American style is:
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store."
Obviously the former makes more sense because it nests properly: (sentence begins) (quote begins) (quote ends) (sentence ends).
That said, I refuse to put unnecessary u's in words like armor.
Care about privacy? Read this!
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/
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.
Like what?
// ?
System.out.println("Hello, world.");
Because in that case it makes perfect sense.
(code begins) (open paren) (String begins) (sentence begins) (sentence ends) (String ends) (close paren) (code ends)
I have no problem with a sentence like:
Bill said, "Go to the store."
Because in that case, it's logical. Well, almost. You could argue that it should read:
Bill said, "Go to the store.".
Because there's really two sentences there (the narrator's sentence as well as Bill's) but actually putting two periods is redundant and I have no problem with the internal period in that case.
Care about privacy? Read this!
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!
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
im in ur internetz, evolving ur languages
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Yes, I cry and cry when people forget the Harvard comma.
Oh wait, no I don't, it's a useless extra comma that isn't necessary.
A blog about stuff.
"(code begins) (open paren) (String begins) (sentence begins) (sentence ends) (String ends) (close paren) (code ends)"
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?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"Well, I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Aside from their archive of "least used verbs throughout history" where else do you find these words?
That is a grievous insult to the English language - shrive yourself or I will smite your ass!
(ok, so I don't have occasion to use "shrive" too often, but "smite" is a very useful word)
sic transit gloria mundi
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 only way that COBOL may ever end is when English changes so much that COBOL no longer reads as English.
Table-ized A.I.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As a fluent Japanese speaker and part-time studier of Korean, I can vouch for the grammatical similarities -- most intriguing. And also as a part-time studier of Chinese, I can vouch that Chinese and Korean are about as similar as English and Korean -- Korean has borrowed words from both languages, but structurally resembles neither. Okay, so Chinese influenced Korean (and Japanese too) in terms of how counters are used (words like "brace" in "a brace of ducks", or "murder" in "a murder of crows", or "loaf" in "three loaves of bread"), but otherwise Chinese and Korean have pitifully little to do with each other. For that matter, Chinese is closer to English structurally speaking than it is to Korean, so there. ;)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Yes, but they're all American dictionaries, so they don't really count, do they?
You'll also find "burglarize" in American dictionaries. There's already a prefectly good verb - burgle - from which comes burglar, but you guys get all confused about shortening a noun to verberize it, so you have to make a new, bigger verb so you can feel safe about conjugaterizationerizing that. Does my head in.
No, American dictionaries don't count, sorry.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Because there's really two sentences there (the narrator's sentence as well as Bill's) but actually putting two periods is redundant and I have no problem with the internal period in that case.
I wouldn't say it's redundant, since as you said, there are two sentences. However, language often sacrifices logical consistency for fluency and clarity. Having lots of punctuation marks is typographically ugly, and distracts from fluent reading. Frankly, .". looks like an anime character.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I understand this has pretty much nothing to do with the article but my prediction for the evolution of language is something a little closer to New Speak... just look at text messaging- Surely the written word can not take such a grievous blow without some damage spilling over into the spoken word. Just you wait... the future of language is double plus ungood!
TFA is fascinating. They predict that the irregular form of "be" will persist for tens of thousands of years. But consider the usage by inner-city blacks in America of the phrase "we be," as in "We be leaving," to mean "We are leaving." The basic verb is "be" and the irregular plural present tense is "are." I know that TFA focused on past tense, but could this be an example of a verb becoming regularized right under our noses?
This means in future, we will see or actually hear more use of the words "Such as" and "like"
Every morning I hear the US exchange students (espacially the female ones) in the metro talk, and partly annoyed how the word "like" is used as the every fourth word.
For anyone who liked this:
It's taken from a book written by Lynne Truss published in the UK roughly 3 years ago.
Amazon Link
What's sudoku got to do with all of this?
which is totally what she said
Darwin showed that adaptation is much larger in small isolated communities than in larger ones. English already changes a lot slower than, say, Dutch. If the internet turns the world into one big English speaking community than I wonder of their predictions based on past data hold.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
What do they mean, 'new verbs entering English, such as "google," are universally regular.'? Everyone knows that it's
I google
I gaigle
I have googlen
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
OK, languages and english get simpler over time. But, if we go back in time, why were languages more complex?
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?
Barbara: "Excuse me Stewardess, but I speak Jive."
Stewardess: "Oh, good. Please tell him that I'll be right back with some medicine."
Barbara: (to man) "Jus hang loose blood, she gonna catch you on the rebound with some medicide..."
Man: "Whatchu talkin' bout momma, my momma didn't raise no dummies, I dug her rap!"
Barbara: "Cut me some slack jack! (arguing in Jive) Jive-ass fool ain't got no brains... anyhow."
(Forgive me if I missed a part, trying to do it from memory here....)
And they said zombies weren't real!
I work at a detention facility school.
We get cussed out on a regular basis.
Sometimes the kids get restrained by trained staff and they will say something like, "I can't fucking breathe." This they know is a magic phrase. We had a teacher recently go in and tell a student:
You cannot use a gerund with an intransitive verb. You should say I can't fucking. Or I can't breathe. You cannot use I can't fucking breathe. Make up your mind you are either not fucking or not breathing!
Well this is what happens when english teachers have way to much caffeine.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
I'm not sure if the past evolution of languages is a good guide to what will happen in the future. The last hundred years are unique in human history in that we can (and do) go back and hear exactly how people talked twenty, forty, a hundred years ago. I suspect that this will have a retarding effect on the rate of language change.
The cake is a pie
For what it's worth, I first heard that joke over 20 years ago.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.