language and biology

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

At 12:29 PM 2/7/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote:
>Historical linguistics, by definition, deals with language change.
>And language change does not result from biological change: it results
>from social factors.

In a message dated 2/21/00 9:12:55 PM, Stanley Friesen replied:
<<The point is that social change is another form of biological process, it
is just not *genetic* change.>>

But is this question relevant to the issue of whether recent biological
models may help in linguistic analysis?

Does really doesn't matter if you classify languages as biological phenomena
or not?

It would seem that if you are after 'genetic' relatedness, biology provides
pretty good models for such concepts associated with the transfer of
attributes by 'descent' as wll as by other mechanisms.  The analogy may not
be perfect, but the prototypical idea of attributes passing from parental to
filial generations must come from biology.  In fact, I suspect the whole idea
of relatedness among languages is by analogy from the biological notion of
inheritance.  (Although I'm conscious that Grimm predates Mendel.)  And
clearly the notion of strata in languages must have been a concept borrowed
from geology.

Systems may have similar organizations not because their constituents are
relateable.  The similarity in organization may come from the fact that the
tasks are similar though the pieces are different.  The history of human
technology is often, e.g., analogized with natural selection, and the two
processes often parallel one another.  It should not be that hard to see how
biology and linguistics
might follow the same paths and processes in terms of 'genetics', though
their subject matters are materially different.

Regards,
Steve Long