It’s interesting how casual ponderings can take unexpected turns. Take for example, my ramblings about a Darwinian mechanism in language two posts down. Today’s Google Alerts sent me to article:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=8B115001-E7F2-99DF-346F909C5D6D751C&chanID=sa007
that was so appropriately titled: “Use it or Lose it: Why Languages Change over Time.” This article deals with the transformation and disposal of some irregular verbs and general vocabulary over time. For example, over the years, the past tense of “help” changed from “holp” to the present day “helped.” It’s interesting to note that they categorized these changing verbs as “infrequently used irregular verb,” noting that these were the quickest to change: “a verb used 100 times less frequently evolved 10 times as fast.” Why was it that the past tense of “help” was so irregular hundreds of years ago? Could it be that there was another word to substitute “to have aided someone sometime before the present”? The article goes on to remark that most of these irregular verbs have been replaced by their root verb + “ed” mainly due to the simplicity and ease to commit to memory of the word. Then I wondered: is this a reflection of western culture, that the past tense of an action does not nearly mean as much as the present, and therefore is not worth the merit of a completely different word? Could it represent our predilection for expedition at the expense of culturally linguistic implications? The western lifestyle certainly does lend itself to this way of thinking: life here is so much more fast-paced, and an extreme emphasis seems to be placed on “living in the moment.” Therefore, the cultural aspects of these verb transformation seems to dictate the outcome of a change. That is, the adoption of –ed to represent past tense is very much a reflection of the contemporary culture.
After doing a bit of research, I came across another site that made an interesting remark considering the correlation between language and culture: it was noted that some of Darwin’s contemporaries “were not evolutionists and adhered to quasi-mystical ideas to explain language development.” Interestingly enough, they believed that language were animate and breathing things, or that an “internal spirit drove language change.” Could this internal spirit be synonymous with the cultural underlings of the society? Interesting how such concepts relating language and society were developed so long ago!
source
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-verbs11oct11,0,6512249.story?coll=la-home-center
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1 comment:
I have a feeling I've already commented you about this, but I absolutely love these ideas! To see language as a species in a sense.....continuously evolving and accomodating only the traits that are "selected" by nature. In a sense we are helping to shape this evolution by "selecting" the words in the language that we continue to use and perpetuate. Only the most fit words can survive.....the ones that die out are those that cannot be reproduced and passed on. And with the changing world, language must adapt to its external environment to survive or else potentially face extinction. Awesome post.
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