Recent Activity
Poll
Current Bloggers
User login
Recommended Books
Esperanto: Learning and Using the International Language.
By David Richardson.
See more recommendations for
beginners, next steps, and advanced readers.
We support...
E-USA: Esperanto-USA
For more information, contact info@esperanto-usa.org
Or call 1-800-ESPERANTO.
RSS
Comments
External language and straw men
Dr. Reagan is spot-on when he argues that language is not an independent, monolithic abstraction that exists outside the minds of its speakers. His seeming ascription of this idea to Chomsky and modern Linguistics, however, is a straw man argument. (It’s not entirely clear to whom he’s ascribing it, but he does speak of the idea of “language as an abstract entity in the Chomskyan sense”.)
Yet this conception of language was long ago rejected by Chomsky—and I don't believe it's a tenet of modern linguistics. Chomsky has been very careful to distinguish between so-called I-language (the internalized set of rules unique to the mind of each individual speaker-hearer), as contrasted with E-language, the ill-defined average of individual idiolects—the abstract entities we colloquially refer to as “English”, “French”, etc.
Even in Zamenhof’s day, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure made similar observations. In his pioneering Course in General Linguistics, he observed that the abstractions we call "languages" are in fact just an averaging of many different individualized versions:
So the object of study for linguists, according to Chomsky, is not an externalized abstraction of E-language, but the individualized, idiolectic reality of I-language. In other words: there is no disagreement here. Chomsky agrees with Reagan that there is not “one English”, but in fact “many Englishes”.
For more, see this Wikipedia article.
December 24, 2009 by hoss, 2 years 6 weeks ago
The evolution of language
I read a fascinating book a while ago that discussed the evolution of language. The idea of many individuals forming a type that shares a common ancestor with other types is very nearly analogous to the biological species concept. However, the process for evolution of languages appears to be completely different. In biological evolution, mutations arise randomly: they are not directed. According to the book I read, (this may be have been David Crystals "how language works" -- pardon if I'm wrong or oversimplifying here) there are basically two forces that drive change in language: simplification, where complicated sounds and word combinations get worn away and generalization, where something irregular that looks like a rule, gets turned into a rule and generalized to other contexts. The author argued that basically all regularity in language arose this way.
December 24, 2009 by limako, 2 years 6 weeks ago
Language change and biological analogies
This is kind of like the concept of replicating ideas—or memes, to use the term coined by Richard Dawkins. In a sense, they do evolve and compete like genes do. But as you mention, the methods of replication, recombination, and mutation are totally different. The analogy with genes is awfully tempting... but I don't know if it's really meaningful or helpful.
The forces of language change you describe sound like some of the regularizing processes in creolization, in which limited rules can be generalized to new cases, for example. But there are other forces which make languages less regular. Over time, regular features can become fossilized, and instead of having a simple rule that can be applied almost everywhere, one's left with a crazy mishmash of forms that just have to be memorized. There are lots of examples of this in English—spelling being perhaps the most infamous. Spellings that were once phonetic are still present, but the pronunciation no longer matches the spelling. It just has to be learned. Or learnt, even.
Speaking of which, verb conjugations are another example; there are lots of obsolete bits and pieces of older, semi-abandoned systems still knocking around, much to the misery of non-native speakers. At one time these systems may have been used in a regular fashion, but now they're just leftovers that we have to memorize by rote. Consider the different ways to indicate simple past tense, for instance:
I believe only -ed is regularly applied to new verbs now. A test: what's the past tense of ”to cheney” (to accidentally shoot someone in the face)? Most people would probably say “cheneyed”, but not “choney”, etc. :-)
December 24, 2009 by hoss, 2 years 6 weeks ago