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 > ped
igüeño 'beggar' (instead of expected *pedueño).