TOTW: Random Evolution of Language

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TOTW: Random Evolution of Language

Postby iguanamon » Wed Oct 23, 2019 2:55 pm

Not being a linguist, I can't opine one way or the other on what I just read in this article today in The Atlantic magazine- The Randomness of Language Evolution English is shaped by more than natural selection.. I find it interesting in a general knowledge sort of way and the argument raised does make observational sense to me.

Even though I'm not a linguist, some of our members are, or have studied linguistics as amateurs. I'm interested in seeing your opinions on the argument the article raises about language evolution having a large degree of randomness involved more so than has been previously acknowledged. Excerpt:
Ed Yong- The Atlantic wrote:Joshua Plotkin’s dive into the evolution of language began with clarity—and also a lack of it.
Today, if you wanted to talk about something that’s clear, you’d say that it has clarity. But if you were around in 1890, you would almost certainly have talked about its clearness.
Plotkin first noticed this linguistic change while playing with Google’s Ngram Viewer, a search engine that charts the frequencies of words across millions of books. The viewer shows that a century ago, clearness dominated clarity. Now the opposite is true, which is strange because clarity isn’t even a regular form. If you wanted to create a noun from clear, clearness would be a more obvious choice. “Why would there be this big upswing in clarity?,” Plotkin wondered. “Is there a force promoting clarity in writing?”
It wasn’t clear. But as an evolutionary biologist, Plotkin knew how to find out...

edit: grammar
Last edited by iguanamon on Wed Oct 23, 2019 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby Cenwalh » Wed Oct 23, 2019 7:38 pm

Thanks for the article!

I got a little peeved when the search on Google Ngrams wasn't on there - even though I know that's not really the point of the article - but here it is in case anyone else wants to see it. The slight switch the other way is interesting!

Clearness and clarity on NGrams.PNG
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby Iversen » Wed Oct 23, 2019 7:46 pm

Instead of juxtaposing two abstract notions like drift and evolution it would be better to use something that can be measured, like global changes versus local changes (including changes in one word at a time). And they don't have to run into opposite directions - sometimes a local fad that only concerns a couple of words will spread, and then we suddenly have a global change.

The article discusses the case of negations with or without 'do'. In the kind of Medieval (and regional) French brought to Britain from 1066 there was a double negation just as in modern French, just not with the word "pas" (step), but with words like "goutte" or "mie" (droplet, crumb). In modern English the grammatical parallel would be expressions like "I don't give a damn" rather than "ah dunno nuttin'". So where did the 'do' come from? The article assumes that it first popped up in questions and then spread from there. My guess is that it goes all the way back to Early Anglosaxon, since the closest parallel are certain emphatic expressions in Low German, and Low German descends from Old Saxon, a sister language to Anglosaxon. So the germ was there, but it was a fad in Elizabethan English that set the humble 'do' on its path towards greater glory. And this has nothing really to do with the double negation in French - except that the do-thing was favoured by the use of negations without a reinforcing element* in Middle English. It could simply develop in a simpler environment.

You would normally expect languages to simplify things, but how did we then get all those complicated endings? The typical case is that a simplification leads to something really complicated: you take a couple of words, and then you speak slightly faster and they start to coalesce. That's for instance how the futures and conditionals in Romance language developed from an infintive plus an auxiliary. Then you apply some sound changes and suddenly the simple agglutinations turn into complicated inflections. In the system of the article this would probably be seen as evolution, but nobody wanted the language to become complicated - they just wanted to speak slightly faster than their ancestors did. And then havoc broke loose.

However the forms that became endings on those verbal forms were taken from an auxiliary verb, which people got into the habit of placing after an infinitive. That is: ONE specific verb with ONE special behavior. And then you could probably speak about drift, but the result became an evolution in the morphology of some languages. Or maybe it's just me who can't separate drift from evolution...


* PS: I first wrote *simple negations" in this sentence, but there are lots of double negations in Middle English. However these are typically of the type with the main negation word "ne" - later "not" - plus some other inherently negative word, NOT "ne" or "not" plus a reinforcing element like "damn" or "goutte" or "mie".
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby tungemål » Wed Oct 23, 2019 9:55 pm

Clarity just sounds more sophisticated than clearness, probably because it is Latin derived.

I find the concept of linguistic cycles, which I think Iversen touched on, fascinating. That is the idea of how grammar of languages change in a predictable way over the centuries, gradually becoming completely different, like from a synthetic grammar to an analytic one.
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby Querneus » Thu Oct 24, 2019 5:55 am

iguanamon wrote:Even though I'm not a linguist, some of our members are, or have studied linguistics as amateurs. I'm interested in seeing your opinions on the argument the article raises about language evolution having a large degree of randomness involved more so than has been previously acknowledged.

I think the article and Plotkin's ideas as portrayed in the article are fine, but I take some issue with this key point:
Linguists are still behind. It’s easy to see how languages can change through drift, as people randomly pick up the words and constructions they overhear. But when Darwin wrote about evolving tongues, he said, “The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.” That’s a view based purely on natural selection, and it persists. “For the most part, linguists today have a strict Darwinian outlook,” Plotkin says. “When they see a change, they think there must be a directional force behind it. But I propose that language change, maybe lots of it, is driven by random chance—by drift.”

Personally, I actually think like Plotkin in that I believe some language change happens through pure chance and fashion, what he refers to as drift. I have a friend who likes to say that when such phenomena happens, speakers have basically gone into a "frenzy" as a particular change gets rapidly adopted by many speakers. However, I would say that this is not a useful mode of thought, and that in the study of linguistic history it's better to start from a position of trying to find suggestive reasons for changes in the language. Assuming the changes happen by random chance ultimately amounts to hand-waving what could be found to actually have explanations. I think that, for one, known instances of socially-motivated language change are fascinating and have been worth exploring, like the change of French -oi- from [wɛ] to [wa] overnight after the French revolution, or the analogy between "flattering" and "begging" in the development of Spanish.*

I think he provides examples of his subject matter that are a little inappropriate when he talks about verbs like "to split" and "to knit". This is analogy, so it is some kind of regularization in itself. He provides these two words as examples that underwent the opposite of regularization, as if the -ed pattern were the only regular one in English, but languages can develop more than one regular pattern. Nevertheless, his point still stands that many changes in the world's languages do not go on the direction of shorter and easier, especially changes where pronunciation becomes more difficult through "fortition". An example of fortition would be the change of Classical Latin [li], afterwards Late Latin [ʎ] (like the soft-sounding "lh" of Portuguese), to the harsh [ʒ] "zh" sound of Old Spanish, still a quite harsh [X] nowadays in many dialects of northern Spain and Peru. Latin alium 'garlic' > Spanish ajo 'garlic', palea 'chaff' > paja 'straw, hay'.


* Witness the odd and curious development of Latin eleemosyna > Spanish limosna 'alms' along with Old Occitan lauzenja > Spanish lisonja 'flattery' (instead of expected *losenja), or Andalusian Arabic خلاق xalaag 'thief dove' > Old Spanish halagar 'to flatter' > halagüeño 'flatterer' along with pedir 'to ask for sth', + Latin -ōneum > pedigüeño 'beggar' (instead of expected *pedueño).
Last edited by Querneus on Tue Nov 12, 2019 5:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby Cainntear » Thu Oct 24, 2019 3:04 pm

Well, if we're going to try to analogise language evolution to genetic evolution, it certainly isn't helpful to refer to Darwinism.
We don't analyse modern physics solely by reference to Newton, after all!

Clarity vs clearness can't really be described as "drift", given how quickly it changed. The best biological analogue would have to be sexual selection -- you don't pass on your genes unless you can get a mate, and our teachers and editors are the lifeforms with "sexual preference" for clarity.

Regardless, chasing a biological analogy seems like a fool's errand to me. The finer points of language change are dealt with by sociology, psychology and neurology, and while you can treat these things as "the environment" it doesn't help at all -- at the end of the day, you've still got to look into how social interactions work and how the brain processes language to understand how the evolution works, so why bother with the analogy?
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby Random Review » Thu Oct 24, 2019 6:10 pm

The stuff on the past tense forms is interesting, though he hasn't said anything I haven't seen from linguists before.

Regarding do support, there are a number of theories and its origin is still very much not settled. There's the view Iversen mentions above, there's the Celtic origin view and there is the view of it as a change brought about by internal processes.

FWIW the view I personally find most persuasive is the Celtic origin, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to defend it well. If anyone's interested, I recommend reading John McWhorter on the topic. It's certainly not true, as the article implies, that it appears suddenly from nowhere in Elizabethan times (although it was more ubiquitous then than before or indeed now). That might be from the journalist rather than Plotkin, though.

The most intriguing one is the language internal view. It's not totally mutually exclusive with either of the above two theories either.

All 3 are plausible, as family inheritance, contact phenomena and language internal change are all known to occur.

Random drift, on the other hand, could never be a sufficient explanation for something like that (though it could play a role), for the same reason that genetic drift can't explain complex biological adaptations. For a biological model to be valid, there really would have to be found some kind of analogous process to natural selection.

As a layperson who reads a lot of linguists, I can definitely say he is attacking a straw man to some extent; but that doesn't make his work uninteresting.
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby Cainntear » Fri Oct 25, 2019 9:39 am

Random Review wrote:Random drift, on the other hand, could never be a sufficient explanation for something like that (though it could play a role), for the same reason that genetic drift can't explain complex biological adaptations. For a biological model to be valid, there really would have to be found some kind of analogous process to natural selection.

Well, change with no obvious direct environmental pressure is usually pegged as sexual preference in biology, and in language there are the very similar ideas of "accommodation" and "convergence", where we try to talk more like each other in order both to be more easily understood and to create a feeling of community.

The problem with any suggestion that drift is random is that most patterns of change occur in multiple languages with a degree of statistical predictability. In some instances, we kind of understand why, and in others we don't; but it seems to be widely accepted that there's probably a reason for it, just we haven't discovered the mechanism yet. Unknown is a different thing from random.
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby Random Review » Fri Oct 25, 2019 3:23 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Random Review wrote:Random drift, on the other hand, could never be a sufficient explanation for something like that (though it could play a role), for the same reason that genetic drift can't explain complex biological adaptations. For a biological model to be valid, there really would have to be found some kind of analogous process to natural selection.

Well, change with no obvious direct environmental pressure is usually pegged as sexual preference in biology, and in language there are the very similar ideas of "accommodation" and "convergence", where we try to talk more like each other in order both to be more easily understood and to create a feeling of community.

The problem with any suggestion that drift is random is that most patterns of change occur in multiple languages with a degree of statistical predictability. In some instances, we kind of understand why, and in others we don't; but it seems to be widely accepted that there's probably a reason for it, just we haven't discovered the mechanism yet. Unknown is a different thing from random.


I don't think that bit in bold is true, mate.

The rest of your post, I broadly agree (and I would mention constraints as well), but I think even after we understand these mechanisms better, there is likely to be some kind of role for some sort of random drift in language change just as there is in biology or other complex systems.
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Re: Random Evolution of Language

Postby Ezra » Sun Nov 03, 2019 1:55 pm

tungemål wrote:I find the concept of linguistic cycles, which I think Iversen touched on, fascinating. That is the idea of how grammar of languages change in a predictable way over the centuries, gradually becoming completely different, like from a synthetic grammar to an analytic one.
That's why I like Classical languages. You learn one grammar for a given language and you are set for two thousand years :).
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