In French, Je t'aime -- Je is I, te is you and aime is love... (the apostrophe is used when ever two consecutive words end and start with a vowel respectively).
That's the Subject / Object / Verb grammatical structure (SOV) used by many world languages. In English of course we would use the grammatical I Love You which is Subject / Verb / Object (SVO).
But studies show that even English speakers use the French grammar form of SOV when asked to communicate a phrase without using speech, either by gestures or by drawings.
To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with pictures). We found that the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech did not influence their nonverbal behavior. Surprisingly, speakers of all four languages used the same order and on both nonverbal tasks. This order, actor-patient-act, is analogous to the subject-object-verb pattern found in many languages of the world and, importantly, in newly developing gestural languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing language anew.
Odd, is it not?
But that leads to another oddity.
A study that demonstrates that language has an evolutionary property of its own and that we are the carriers of its gene expression. As well, the study also show that language evolution can also take place sans biological agents like ourselves.
Researchers Synthesize Evolution of Language[snip]
In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, linguists observed an artificial language evolve from random to ordered, naturally adapting in ways that assured its reproduction
The findings duplicated a phenomena they'd already simulated on a computer, and hint at the earliest evolutionary origins of language -- that cultural version of the opposable thumb, and the basis of humanity's civilizational complexity.
Even more tantalizingly, by showing that cultural evolution can be examined in a controlled setting, the study lays a framework for studying evolution outside its standard biological habitat.
"From Darwin onwards, there's been a mechanism for nature producing a design without there being a designer," said study co-author Simon Kirby, an evolutionary linguist at the University of Edinburgh. "We're used to that in biology. People have claimed that the same might happen in culture, and here we've shown a mechanism for language."
Kirby and his team showed people a collection of pictures paired with gibberish words, and later tested which pairs they could recall. Whether or not the recollections were accurate, they were recorded and used as the basis of the next group's language training. As the process was repeated, patterns emerged: a certain word might be used, for example, to describe anything that moved horizontally, and another to indicate objects that bounced.
The language that emerged from the first set of iterations, said Kirby, was limited and simplistic. But for the next set, they discarded duplicate words. Confronted with this selection pressure -- analogous, perhaps, to that exerted by nature on hunters with few words for their prey -- the language became precise and highly structured.
Structure, said Kirby, was the key to a language being remembered.
"Over many generations, the grammar goes from ad-hoc and inexpressive into a language that's cleanly structured and expressive," he said. "But what's evolving here isn't the agents" -- the speakers -- "but the language itself. It has its own evolutionary imperative. It wants to be passed on, and finds ways of doing that. We're its hosts."
Kirby believes the experiment touches on the same process that provided
humans with the first languages. However, he said that linguistic
evolution has largely stalled in modern times: though languages
continue to change -- witness Chinglish -- and our communications
skills vary, the underlying rules remain stable, having already found a
successful form.
Some researchers have proposed studying religion in terms of cultural evolution, said Kirby, but he's not interested.
"That's an incredibly difficult thing to study. But with language, we have tons of data. It's the best case study we have for understanding evolution," he said.
He continued, "But people who are interested in culture more generally might take this work and study the emergence of design in a lab. I'd like to see how far that can be pushed. What kinds of adaptations would a culturally evolving practice come up with? How much of what happens around us, that appears rational and intelligently designed, is the product of a blind process?"
I You Love 2...
:)
Bah with the new webbie I have lost access to the songs:( wanted River before bed.... )If you ever feel like recording case of you I might just be over the moon...
spankies,
Rob
hey rob, howz it?
haven't transferred a lot of the old stuff yet.
Not bad buds, working for molson/labatt these days and doin my best to keep my chin up.
I am very mad at you for not ever introducing me to Nick Drake :) ... althouhg my Dylan collection has massively grown. I remember at one point you saying to me "Id buy you every Dylan album if you would learn every song" 46 albums (and no Im not lying) and counting...
anyways I totally miss your tunes. I can still play "Nelly" and do a pretty reasonable "Case of you"... plus "American Tune"
I hope all is going well for you and I miss you a million.
rob
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