Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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.
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.
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."
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?
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?"
Worcester is pronounced Wusta"It's at the Tweetah Centah for the Performin' Ahts!"
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.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Wanna see morphing? Come to Australia. Even we have trouble keeping track of the changes.
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."
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.
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 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
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