A Look at Linguistic Evolution
In today’s, Evolution: Education and Outreach, Anastasia Thanukos takes A Look at Linguistic Evolution:
Anyone who has ever tackled a Shakespeare play knows that English has changed substantially in the 400 years since Elizabeth I ruled England. In fact, Elizabethan English can seem like a completely different language from the one we speak today. Just try describing your mood with the Shakespearean terms allicholly and tetchy—you are more likely to get confused looks than sympathy for being unhappy and irritable. Four hundred years from now, English speakers will likely feel the same way about the language we speak today. Unless you are keeping up with the latest additions to the Oxford English Dictionary, you might already be behind the times: Do you know if you would be eligible to participate in a girlcott? Or whether you would want a job as a helmer? Or when it would be appropriate to wear a jandal?
The full-text is available at the EEO website here.
Posted on 
July 13th, 2008 by 
Simon Greenhill
5 Responses to “A Look at Linguistic Evolution”
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Email Henry Updates to Me
July 14th, 2008 at 12:48 am
This is yet another attempt to bring linguistics into the fold of real science.
It’s rubbish.
Darwin didn’t invent evolution; he discovered Natural Selection.
There’s nothing natural about selection in languages. People actually have to invent new words or phonetics - perfect example of Lamarckism.
And there’s absolutely no guarantee that anyone’s children will inherit their parents’ way of speaking, and keep it.
If a new smart guy rolls into town, they’ll copy him.
They might use their parents’ accents, handed down to them, (phonetical genetics) when they adopt the new words (mostly) or they may adopt a phoneme totally unknown before.
What is interesting here are the ‘genetic’ phonemes. If you can’t distinguish between L and R (because your parents didn’t, and nurtured you so), then you’re going to adapt that ubermensch American phrase to:
Light Onnn..!’
In short, your parents hand on, by nurture, not nature, most aspects of your language.
This “genetic tree” works very well in the Austronesian languages of Polynesia, only because each island settlement led to another, totally isolated (no smart guys coming in).
And that’s why those ‘genetic trees’ of Austronesian languages always head towards Polynesia (the easy bit) and totally ignore the 95% of Austronesian speakers left behind.
To attempt to attach linguistics to Darwin’s coat tails
July 15th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Sorry, got cut off. Must have fallen asleep under the pressure of the sheer brilliance of my ideas.
So start again:
To attempt to attach linguistics to Darwin’s coat tails -
is doomed, because languages evolve, certainly, but not through the same mechanisms.
Chance biological mutations can be dealt with, by invoking statistics, to smooth the path.
You have written a very good paper on the ‘punctuation’ of language changes. Couldn’t these be related to specific people movements when archaeology gets sophisticated enough to detect them in detail?
July 31st, 2008 at 2:48 am
This is a fairly general view of the subject, from PLoS Biology recently
Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution
John Whitfield
PLoS Biology
http://tinyurl.com/5cqexh
July 31st, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Hi Richard,
Thanks for that - interesting read, I’m friends/colleagues with about half of the folks quoted in that! This is, I think, the third review on this area this month - definitely generating a lot of noise.
–Simon
August 2nd, 2008 at 5:21 pm
This might also be of interest:
http://anthropology.net/2008/08/01/simulated-linguistic-evolution-in-the-laboratory/