MetaFilter posts tagged with evolution and language

Death of the dirty word

weapons-grade pandemonium — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:43:14 -0800

Why would an evolutionary biologist study words? It turns out there is an astonishing parallel between the evolution of words in a lexicon and the evolution of genes in an organism. The word two, for example, has been around much longer than most, and will likely be with us for millennia, whereas the comparatively rare and recent word dirty has undergone many mutations, and will probably be extinct in a few hundred years. Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK, tells us why on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's program As It Happens. Pull slider to 16:00 to start the seven minute interview.

Long Term Thinking

Homemade Interossiter — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:39:07 -0800

How far do you plan ahead? Are we careering towards another Dark Age? The Long Now Foundation (subject of many previous posts on Metafilter), has finally solved the technical problems in producing a modern day Rosetta Stone. Orders are now shipping. Not only does the question address long term backup and materials science, but also the evolution of language.

The Origins and Evolution of Intelligence

MetaMonkey — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 22:33:17 -0800

The origins and evolution of human intelligence: parasitic insects? viruses? mushrooms? neural darwinism? foraging? machiavellian competition? emergence? or something else?

Meet the newspeak, same as the oldspeak

Mr. Six — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:40:27 -0800

When taking lessons in English from the BBC, be sure to follow up with remedial "playground-speak"

This is fiction

0bvious — Wed, 10 May 2006 18:27:00 -0800

Writing has been around for a long time, but that doesn't mean we've mastered it yet. Want to make fiction? Perhaps it makes itself, perhaps it makes you... Self reference breeding infinite hyperrealities. Which world will you choose?

It all starts by looking a baby right in the eyes

languagehat — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 14:49:07 -0800

Language started with emotional signaling. That's the thesis of a new book, The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker.

Lived emotional experience is key to language learning, the authors suggest. "Mathematicians and physicists may manipulate abstruse symbols representing space, time, and quantity, but they first understood those entities as tiny children wanting a far-away toy, or waiting for juice, or counting cookies. The grown-up genius, like the adventurous child, forms ideas through playful explorations in the imagination, only later translated into the rigor of mathematics."

The book is very ambitious, and I don't think we'll ever know where language came from, but this sounds like a more fruitful line of thinking than Chomsky's deus ex machina "language gene" mutation.