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

I, for one...

[exploder]

am glad I getted the chance to welcome our new, regularly-conjugated overlords.

Easy- a lot of it will go

[dbIII]

I predict we will "loose" a lot of words and have them replaced by ones with similar spelling.

Re:Of course it's all about the verbs

[JoshJ]

Fuck is actually much more than a verb, you dumb fuck. Now fucking give me the money or I'll blow your fucking brains out.

As suggested by Mark Twain

[Wizarth]

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.

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:As suggested by Mark Twain

[langelgjm]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "Middle Ages", but written English certainly did change quite a bit from the 8th century to the 16th century, and most people place the Middle Ages somewhere in there, if not starting before that. Here are some examples of the change:

8th century - Beowulf, which is unreadable for modern English speakers.
1066 - Norman conquest - Old French would have a massive influence on English. Introduction of lots of Latin roots into English.
14th century - Chaucer, somewhat readable for modern English speakers with modernized spellings.
16th century - Shakespeare, more or less readable for modern English speakers without much editing.


Pronunciation of course also changed drastically, and this was reflected in orthography as well.

Re:As suggested by Mark Twain

[Jimmy_B]

The trend for simplification is positively there, and the math is right -- the more complex and often-used it is, the bigger the pressure to simplify.

No, that is the OPPOSITE of what happens (and what this paper says)! The more often something is used, the LESS likely it is to be simplified. These simplifications aren't the result of someone deciding to change the way they speak; rather, they're the result of successive generations learning their parents' language imperfectly. If an irregular verb is used all the time, you have to learn it or you'll sound like an idiot. Thus, all native English speakers know all of the conjugations of 'to be'. On the other hand, if you only use an irregular verb twice in your lifetime, you probably won't remember its conjugation, so you'll fall back on general rules. When everyone does this, the regular conjugation becomes the standard.

Re:As suggested by Mark Twain

[Max Littlemore]

16th century - Shakespeare, more or less readable for modern English speakers without much editing.

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.

Re:As suggested by Mark Twain

[iogan]

Thanks for pointing this out, and for bringing up the verb "to be." This is, by default, the oldest verb in any language (except perhaps Russian, which they tell me doesn't have it), and therefore the most irregular. Based on this, I have formulated the theory that "to be" is irregular in every language (that has it). In good scientific methodology, I am seeking out evidence to the contrary. Can anyone provide any?

Russian does have the verb "to be", just not in the present tense. Its usage varies considerably from English, but then so do most languages. A lot of languages lack the copula-verb (as it is known) in the present tense, and do very well without it. When Borat says "She niiiice" you understand what he means perfectly well without the copula. :)

The verb is indeed irregular in many languages, but nonetheless completely regular in others. One of the problems people have in deciding whether a feature of language is universal is the very small subset of languages they've been exposed to.

Most of the languages you can name off hand are all part of the Indoeuropean family of languages, which has a very large number of speakers, but does not constitute a large number of languages. Thus a lot of features common to Indo-european languages are taken to be linguistic universals when really they are common only to a very small subset of human languages.

Re:As suggested by Mark Twain

[Eivind]

To be retains a lot of cruft that has fallen off less used verbs, such as distinct forms for different persons. I am, you are, he is, someone who doesn't know english won't even see any signs that these are the same word at all.

Compare I bike, you bike, we all bike.... the distinction by person is useless the way it is in english, I wonder if it'll disappear completely outside of "to be". (for other words you have the "he bikes" thing)

Thing is, this actually -did- make sence at some point (or atleast it served a purpose) in many languages that universally have different forms for different persons, you can remove the personal pronoun, since it's clear from the verb alone which person is meant.

"I am a boy" is superfluous; "am boy" conveys the same meaning since "am" can only be used for "I". Works that way in finnish, for example:

"puhun Suomi" (I speak finnish) "puhut Soumi" (you speak finnish), with enough grammar you can do away with many small words, and you can make the sequence of words more freely choosable. In english you make questions by reordering words. "you can have a cookie." "can I have a cookie?", with grammar that can also be done away with; In finnish you use -ko to symbolise question, so no need to reorder words (or add "do you" or similar antics)

"puhutko Saksa?" ("Do you speak German?")

In general though, it seems that the trend is that -less- grammar and -more small-word and word-sequence is used. English sure is losing grammar at a noticeable rate, same for Norwegian and German.

Werd Up

[da3dAlus]

I for one welcome our cromulent new verbs!

this isn't really news

[belmolis]

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.

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.

Psychohistory?

[Xgamer4]

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/

Predicting the future using language

[Repton]

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.

Re:Yes, well...however...there are other methods.

[belmolis]

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.

Re:Easy- a lot of it will go

[Anonymous Coward]

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

"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."

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.

MOD PARENT UP -- GP is talking out ass

[zooblethorpe]

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,

Re:Of course it's all about the verbs

[Hal_Porter]

In the UK the Daily Telegraph, a right wing newspaper quoted someone as calling someone else a "F*cking Nigger". The Guardian, a left wing paper, said that they should have written it as as "Fucking N**ger" which I thought was funny.

Re:Of course it's all about the verbs

[evanbd]

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.

Re:Easy- a lot of it will go

[fiendie]

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

To google

[Ed Avis]

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

The Best One Recently

[chasisaac]

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.