"Major Variola (ret)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote : >On Ken's >> > All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are >> > the same age. > >At first this parsed because I was thinking in the sense of >"all organisms have ancestries going back the same amount of >time". (And humans aren't the 'goal' of evolution.) Not sure >if non-bioheads got this. Anyway others' complaints clarified >"speciation" --if you are willing to identify a bifurcation point >then you *can* age a species or any other fork --Linux 2.4, >Latin, Corvettes, etc. > I guess bifurcation points and speciation seem very clear because of the aliasing problems in our sampling methods. The speciation exists but is prolly ( probably ) often fuzzier than we think. Almost everyone would say that an American Bison and a Scot's Highland are two different species but they can hybridize. Maybe we non-Biologists measure the distance between "species" inaccurately.
>At 10:36 AM 1/14/03 -0800, Michael Motyka wrote: >>An interesting question that arises out of the observation that some >languages >>are relatively static and others - like English - have been changing >steadily. Is >>there any connection between the evolution behavior of the language and >the >>vitality of the culture? I think so. > >"Vitality" is fuzzy. > Choose your measure : population? power? innovation? environmental impact? rate of change? The US seems more vital by some measures. Less so by others. More dangerous to the species by others. >Clearly America admitting everyone (cf Japanese) helps. >Clearly not having an Acadamie Anglaise helps (cf surrender-monkeys). >Electronic media probably help. > >There's an even more interesting technical evolution: >English is also undergoing "entropic refinement" or Hamming-like coding, >as speakers prune or invent for efficiency. > >As it is, it takes fewer letters in English to say something than every >other common language. >Look at the instruction manuals for your domestic appliances. > That is interesting. >Forms (memory requirements) get simpler ---can you believe that the >surrender-monkeys retain >a gender-bit for every friggin object-- and phonetically simpler too. >The sounds get more orthogonal. >Also the influence of immigrants and children and lazy native speakers >who can't tell a "v" from a "w" or "d" from "th", >or remember the 150 irregular verbs. > >Some of this is natural. I've adopted the southern "y'all" because >English has no plural third person and this >ambiguity is annoying when you're emailing to several people. Note also >the efficiency of the contraction. >You hear "data" used as singular enough times, you say fuck it, I'll >have a beer, or several beer [sic]. Talk to >Eastern Europeans long enough, you'll start dropping your articles, >though you may miss the FEC/prompting >and flash back to Boris & Natasha cartoons... > Is the evolution towards a more efficient language an active or passive process? Is it driven by an internal inclination towards expansion, freeing up system resources as it were, or is it a coping mechanism for sensory overload? Mike
