12.379, Disc: New: Parallelism Between Lang & Genome

[The LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-379. Tue Feb 13 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.379, Disc: New: Parallelism Between Lang & Genome

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1)
Date:  Mon, 12 Feb 2001 17:19:45 EST
From:  Zylogy at aol.com
Subject:  parallelism between language and genome

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 12 Feb 2001 17:19:45 EST
From:  Zylogy at aol.com
Subject:  parallelism between language and genome




Many years ago, during the early '60's when the outlines of the genetic code
were being adduced by Crick and others, Roman Jakobson speculated about
parallelism between genetic and linguistic structures. There has been
essentially silence on the issue since.

Current efforts in genomics suggest perhaps a reexamination of possible
parallelism:
overlapping genes in certain viruses versus polysynthetic structure, gene
apposition versus agglutination/serialization, split genes versus syntactic
combination. Are there genetic structures which parallel ideophones in
form/meaning linkage? Studies have shown that the structure of the genetic
code is far from arbitrary. Could the larger gene inventory, as a parallel to
the lexicon, have been built from nonarbitrary intermediate-sized chunks
(producing protein structural domains and motifs), and is this a parallel to
the ideophone to lexeme pathway hypothesized for the lexicon?

Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com

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