Dedicated to the subjects and methodological tools that most vividly depict the law's interaction with societal and technological change.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
More use, less change
It has been nearly a year since I last wrote in my Vox Populi series, in a post called Heritage speakers, but human language, my first and favorite intellectual paramour, has always waited for me.
The power of this article is instantly apparent to any careful student of diachronic linguistics and evolutionary biology. Indeed, it unifies the two fields. George Kingsley Zipf, meet Charles Darwin. The same process of random mutation, natural selection, sexual selection, and genetic drift that defines biological evolution also explains Zipf's law.
In practical terms, this phenomenon explains how any perceptive speaker of an Indo-European language can make astonishing headway in a previously unfamiliar Indo-European language simply by focusing on these classes of words:
Perhaps the authors have omitted another useful way to learn languages.
The arch-polylinguist Sir Richard Burton accelerated his language accumulation by learning idiomatic insults first. ;)
Others however ascribe his linguistic prowess to having learnt Romani, the gypsy language, with its cross roots across the Indo European language belt.
Perhaps the authors have omitted another useful way to learn languages.
ReplyDeleteThe arch-polylinguist Sir Richard Burton accelerated his language accumulation by learning idiomatic insults first. ;)
Others however ascribe his linguistic prowess to having learnt Romani, the gypsy language, with its cross roots across the Indo European language belt.