Re: Language

On 8 Mar, 22:37, Occidental <Occiden...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Not exactly; the OP was talking (by implication) about the slow
transformation of a word for a common thing into a different word for
the same thing. It would not be surprising if an occasional member of
a language group introduced an idiosyncratic pronunciation, but it is
surprising that such a new pronunciation would be generally adopted.
Such a new pronunciation would be analogous to a mildly deleterious
mutation, and we would expect it to suffer a similar fate, unless the
other members got a charge out of novel pronunciations. A new meaning
ascribed to a familiar word, in the example you give, resembles what
(IIRC) Gould called an "exaptation", and would survive because it is
useful. What use is a new word for "food"?

On Mar 13, 9:37 pm, Vend <ven...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sometime the "mutations" arent' phonetical, but semantic.

For instance, the verb "to eat" its "mangiare" in Italian and "manger"
in French. Those terms come from the Latin "manducare" which means "to
chew", while the Latin verb for "to eat" was "edere".
Probably someone started using "to chew" as a metaphor for "to eat"
and for some reason the use catched in a population of speakers, while
many other speakers kept using the old terms (which, according to
Wikitionary, are from Indo-European origin).

["caught", not "catched"]
But why would a population that had a universally accepted word for
"eat" start using a new word?

I don't know why certain metaphors catch and why they do in certain
groups and not others. Maybe they refer to something that is preculiar
to the culture of a group, or maybe they are used by influential
members, or maybe it's just a random effect.

Maybe, but IMO this doesn't explain the high mutability of language as
reported by linguists (see post in this thread by Bea Mused)

snip, somewhat

At individual level there is pressure towards the average, but the
average itself moves more or less unconstrained.
(I think that's a similar situation to the courtship behaviors of
various animals. Individuals are subject to selective pressure towards
the population average courtship behavior, but the average behavior
changes over time, and if two populations split for a sufficient
amount of time, they might effectively speciate due to their average
courtship behaviors having become too different).

Is there an example of this - where the two populations are not
subspecies adapted to different environments (in which case it would
be adaptive for each group to develop its own unique courtship
procedures to prevent the generation of an intermediate type not well
adapted to either environment)?
Again, you appear to be reifying the average; all average change
starts and ends and can only be explained by individual change. I
would be inclined to think that, absent any good reason for courtship
behavior to change, it would remain constant.

Here is Robin Dunbar's evolutionary explanation:

QUOTE
Early Voices: The Leap to Language NICHOLAS WADE, NYT

But sociality, from Dr. Dunbar's perspective, helps explain another
feature of language: its extreme corruptibility. To convey
information, a stable system might seem most efficient, and surely not
beyond nature's ability to devise. But dialects change from one
village to another, and languages shift each generation. The reason,
Dr. Dunbar suggests, is that language also operates as a badge to
differentiate the in group from outsiders; thus the Gileadites could
pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite asked to say ''shibboleth''
because, so the writer of Judges reports, ''He said sibboleth: for he
could not frame to pronounce it right.''
END QUOTE

We observe, for example, that sub-groups within large advanced
societies (gangs, ethnic groups, teenagers) often spontaneously
develop an idiosyncratic in-group language to set themselves apart
from everyone else.

More broadly, humans positively *like* novel pronunciations and
pointless neologisms and reversals of meaning and the use of a
familiar word to mean something for which a word already exists. This
behavior is, according to Dunbar, a legacy of our tribal past.

Makes sense, but how we can distinguish this from the effects of a
purely random walk of the average language?

Absent some way to model the sort of random language change you are
talking about, it boils down to individual judgment. ISTM that such a
model must include a disposition on the part of the members of the
modeled population to accept and adopt the changes to pronunciation
and grammar introduced randomly by single individuals. Without that,
it wouldn't work.

I tend to be wary of adaptive stories, but in this case we can see
Dunbar's hypothesized ancestral behavior recapitulated in contemporary
groups, which makes it more credible.

.

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