Origin & Evolution of Languages

[Nicholas Widdows]

>Nicholas Widdows wrote:

>> it probably has no great amount of natural
>> selection. (And of course it's not progressive.)

Nik Tailor replied.
> Natural selection doesn't make species better.  It makes species *better
> suited for their environment*.

Yes. Hence my bracketed "of course": the preceding clauses were cases where
biology does have a feature, and language doesn't. But I meant, of course
_neither_ evolves progressively.

> Just as subterranean animals lose their eyes, a language in a
> culture becoming more egalitarian will lose a formal/informal
> distinction.  In English, this also resulted in an inadvertent loss of
> singular/plural distinction in 2nd person.  In some dialects of Spanish,
> _usted_ is being lost, same phenomenon, later time-period, similar
> cause.

Almost certainly, an animal first retreats to caves, then loses sight;
though it's theoretically possible that an animal could become blind and in
consequence be forced to retreat to where this is no handicap. But in
language the causation is much less clear. In English I think the use of
<ye, you> for singular began as elevated address, spread to the bourgeoisie
around 1600, and to the common people by about 1700. The Quakers maintained
<thou> precisely for egalitarianism. My lord Foppington who minced under his
jewels and pomaded wig said <you> even to his servants. It might be true
that now, when we have no choice, we do have a more egalitarian system.

> Granted, not all changes can be connected with that, and
> probably more examples of random change exist in linguistic evolution
> than in biological evolution.

Yes. I have no idea how one would quantify natural selection or assess
causation. There must be some effect; there might be a big effect. I was
just stressing the difference from biology.

Nicholas Widdows
[If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kick-boxing.]