Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id TAA17723 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 30 Apr 2002 19:42:35 +0100 Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 11:37:38 -0700 From: Bill Spight <bspight@pacbell.net> Subject: Re: teleology and language To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Message-id: <3CCEE472.F1965380@pacbell.net> Organization: Saybrook Graduate School X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Yahoo;YIP052400} (Win95; U) Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Accept-Language: en,ja References: <20020430123349.30682.qmail@web10103.mail.yahoo.com> <002301c1f05f$5a7a2c00$856c4518@no.shawcable.net> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Dear Douglas,
> > Our current languages are the result of thousands of years of
> > evolution and are actually quite versatile and diverse
>
> Unless the discipline of linguistics has changed very much since I went to
> school, that statement must be rejected as entirely contrary to what we know
> about human language. The early linguists, prior to the mid-20th century,
> expected to find that illiterate indigenous people in Africa, New Guinea,
> and the high arctic spoke inferior languages without the expressive
> capabilities of modern languages used by literate people. But that proved
> not the be the case. No languages primitive enough to be considered
> inferior to English or Russian have ever been found.
>
There is a common notion of evolution that is confused with development.
In that sense, languages have not, for millenia in any event, evolved
from more primitive to more complex.
However, the biological and memetic meanings of evolution do not involve
development. So the fact that languages have not, on the whole become
more complex, as far as we know, does not mean that they have not
evolved.
> There are various interpretations of this empirical fact, and some people
> remain convinced that language does evolve, but I don't agree. Brains
> evolve. Language doesn't.
There are three components to evolution: replication, variation, and
selection. Are languages replicated? Yes. Do they vary over time? Yes.
Are they, or their components, selected? Yes. Languages evolve.
Best,
Bill
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 30 2002 - 19:54:14 BST