Linguistics

From RationalWiki

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and shows that languages are complex interactive systems. Linguistics shows that languages evolve over time, they mutate, change, and develop to meet new situations. The rate of change is faster when the people speaking the language experience social change. Two examples are the way new words entered the English language from others during the age of imperialism, and the way new coinages are entering common parlance to deal with modern information technologies.

Noam Chomsky famously suggested that the structure of language is hard-wired in human beings. One piece of evidence for this is that children of parents who speak a pidgin version of a second language^[1] spontaneously create a full-blown new language known as a creole. This has also been observed in the children of deaf people in communities where there was no known sign language, and their parents had to invent their own simple version.

[edit] Evolution of Language

The evolution of language in many ways parallels that of the evolution of species. For example, geographic isolation results in changes over time that lead to two quite different languages from what started as a common language. One has only to contemplate the differences between British English and American English to see how quickly geographic separation can lead to the evolution of two dialects from what was once the same language.

Studies of language on islands in the Pacific Ocean have clearly demonstrated how languages change over time in geographic isolation. A group speaking the same language travelled from the Asian mainland and settled the first island they came to. Years later, as population pressure increased, a group set off from that island to a farther one. This sequence of events was repeated over time. Studies show that the language of those who settled the first island bears the greatest resemblance to that spoken by the original migrants from the mainland. The farther an island is from the mainland, the greater the difference in the language that is spoken there. Small changes in language that occured on the first island were carried to the second, where new changes developed over time and were carried to the second island, and so on. At some point, after the passage of time and distance, the populations living farthest apart no longer understand each other. This is remarkably similar to the process of biological evolution that occurs with species migrating from island to island and eventually becoming incapable of interbreeding.

[edit] Linguistics in mythology

The story of the construction of the Tower of Babel and God's breaking of the builder's common language into many languages as a punishment was a primitive attempt to explain why there were so many languages on the Earth at the time (as there are still now).