The first word
Interesting review in the New York times today of a new book that attempts to unravel the mystery of how language came to be: THE FIRST WORD — The Search for the Origins of Language, by Christine Kenneally.
This it what turned me on the most (italics mine):
One of Ms. Kenneally’s most intriguing scientists, Simon Kirby, a linguist at the University of Edinburgh who works with computer models, has proposed the idea that language might be a self-evolving phenomenon. Somewhat like a computer virus, it changes and adapts to survive.
…Mr. Kirby, the computer modeler, devised an experiment in which subjects were shown objects on a screen along with words describing the objects in what was represented as an invented alien language. The subjects were asked to learn the language. In testing one student after the other, however, Mr. Kirby added new objects to the ones already shown, whereupon the subjects unthinkingly generated new words and combinations. These changes were added to the core list and passed along to successive subjects who, trying to master the language created, in part, by each of their predecessors, made their own additions and changes.
“Except for the initial random language given to the first subject, there was no alien language, only the contributions of each individual, which were culturally transmitted from generation to generation,” Ms. Kenneally writes. “Each subject in the experiment believed that he was simply giving back what he had learned, but instead the language was evolving.”
In similar fashion, researchers have been looking at Internet sites that generate their own protolanguages and linguistic structures.
I’ll have to alert these researchers to my site — they’ll have a field-day here. Actually, there’s probably too much English and not enough Alienish to properly nourish them. But we’ll see.
Perhaps they’ve already played around with another site I developed, Wordlab, nearly a decade ago.
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