Comments on: Evolution of the Lexicon

By: Notagod

Notagod — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:46:52 +0000

Also, words can just appear out of nowhere. Such as christians wouldn’t want to refer to a deceased person as deceased or dead, they would want a word that isn’t scary to them. Of course, christians will want to find a new word, as time passes, when passed becomes scary to them. Natural processes are unlikely to produce that arbitrary strangeness when all the facts are known.

As much as some would like a dat (dog-cat), it is very unlikely to occur naturally. However, it is possible that a cButtarsMor[m]onic could be produced somewhere within the lowerchristian species.

Wouldn’t the language trees be all tied in rather unnatural knots? Could be interesting though.

By: Iain

Iain — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 08:06:11 +0000

A million things to say here, not least that all those scientists will be dead by now from stomach cancer caused by all that charred meat! And the Peabody is still there.

Have not checked the paper (yet) but do they deal with the situation where irregular verbs seem to be the common ones and not to be conserved between languages?

By: wazza

wazza — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:11:35 +0000

Linguistic phylogeny has the same problems as memetics, and indeed can be regarded as a form of memetics (given that a word is an idea). Both are harder to follow than genetics because of the borrowing and hybridisation between widely varying forms. It’s as if all biology had as much propensity to horizontal gene transfer as bacteria do.

Still, I think it’s an idea worth pursuing. It’ll just be harder than developing genetic phylogeny.

By: the real me

the real me — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:50:22 +0000

Awww, Greg, stop being such a kun….but the schwanz was always the pecker when I heard it from that old bird, my grandfather.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 16:58:38 +0000

Paper Hand: I had thought about using some of the other examples of this (taboo) that come to mind but thought better of it. In any event, yes, this is why Pagel et all use more data than I did!

The bigger picture: There is a list of things that “complicate” language phylogenies, but there is also a list of things that “complicate” genetic phylogenies. Having walked away from this methodology decades ago, it would be reasonable for linguists to have a second look leaving behind their assumptions.

But they won’t. Which is fine. Other people will do this for them, because it is kinda fun.

By: Paper Hand

Paper Hand — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 16:22:14 +0000

Now let’s try for some more anatomy, with the English word “penis.”

Ah, but in this case, “penis” is a relatively recent borrowing from Latin. I don’t know what the Anglo-Saxons called it, but they didn’t call it “penis” (which, incidentally, meant “tail” in Latin – it originated as a colloquial term! – and is indirectly related to “pen” and “pencil” as well as “penicillin”)

In this case, there is the common phenomenon of taboo replacement – a word becomes taboo so it’s replaced by another word, perhaps a borrowing or a word that originally meant something different, which itself eventually becomes taboo and needs to be replaced.

These are the kind of phenomena that complicate historical linguistics. There’s a lot of “horizontal gene transfer” to use a biology-derived metaphor.