I'd be interested in y'all's comments on this hypothesis. ~ Faldage
Language evolved in a leapConflicting needs may have driven rapid development of communication. 22 January 2003
PHILIP BALL
Speakers want few words; listeners want many. Language
probably leapt, not crept, from squeaks to Shakespeare, two
physicists have
calculated. Human communication, they propose, underwent a '
phase transition', like solid ice melting to liquid water.
First out I'd like to thank these two nice physicists for taking time away from doing real science and attempting to straighten out this sorry word mess that we language speaking people of the world find ourselves in.The richness of human languages is a fine-tuned compromise between the needs of speakers and of listeners. Just a slight imbalance of these demands prevents the exchange of complex information.
Said the same thing to a guy on the bus yesterday. He said "Bullshit!" What a jerk! So languages between those of present-day humans and the limited signalling of some animals cannot really exist. There must, at some point, have been a switch from rudimentary to sophisticated language.
Exactly. My dog gets confused when I say "fetch". This contrasts with some linguists' view that language evolution was a gradual affair in which new words accumulated steadily.
If I say the word l.i.n.g.u.i.s.t. I must spit. A language that conveyed all information unambiguously, would have a separate word for every thing. Such a language would be formidably complicated for the speaker: the green of grass, for example, would be represented by a totally different word to the green of sea, an emerald or an oak leaf. But it would be ideal for the listener, who wouldn't have to work out any meanings from a word's context.
Ideal for the speaker is a language of few words, where simple, short utterances serve many purposes. The extreme case is a language with a single sound that conveys everything that needs saying. Some might suggest that teenagers prefer this kind of minimal-effort tongue that forces others to figure out what their grunts actually mean.
Yes,yes,yes, the politician who speaks but a few words and we want more, the teenager who grunts. Uh, moving right along... We have devised a mathematical model in which the cost of using a language depends on the balance between these conflicting preferences. We calculate the properties of the lexicon that requires minimal effort for different degrees of compromise, from exhaustive vocabularies to one-word languages.
We find that the change from one extreme to the other does not happen smoothly. There is a jump in the amount of communication, from very little to near-perfect, at a certain value of the relative weightings of speaker and hearer preferences.
Yeah, I get it...like a jump...yeah, like a...like a quantum Jump! Human languages seem to sit right on this sudden change. When it happens, the frequency of word usages develops a distinctive mathematical form, called a power law. The power law disappears on either side of the communication jump.
It has been known since the 1940s that human languages do indeed show just this kind of statistical distribution of word usage - the social scientist George Kingsley Zipf spotted the power-law behaviour. But it has never been satisfactorily explained before, although Zipf himself speculated that it might represent some kind of "principle of least effort".
Look fellows I don't want to hurt your feelings or anything but obviously your forte is not mumbo jumbo. That's the domain of linguists. Would you mind going to the back room and cooking up some nice neat math. We'll supply the wild theories, you supply the mathematical voo doo to give them class. Thanks guys, for your support.