I came across another reference to language evolution in NZZ online:
www.nature.com
www.nzz.ch
Linguists devise "rules" or predictive (post-dictive?) equations on language evolution when numerous examples are evaluated.
Example: "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language" by Lieberman, Michel, Jackson, Tang and Nowak.
I am not a paying subscriber to Nature, and thus could only read the abstract.
What I would like to know is: how close do these ad hoc equations fit?
(If x number of examples are added to or subtracted from the words actually in the study, is the equation still a good fit?)
[Can the data be massaged to fit the desired equation?]
This post ©reated by Ribonuff on October 21, 2007.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
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2 comments:
I love linguistics! Their equations for verb regularization seem valid enough to extrapolate to a larger sample, at any rate. It's interesting that there even are such equations. Seems I have much to learn still.
I don't know if I accept these equations whole-heartedly, but one has to do the best one can.
It may be analogous to the field of economics - those equations are sometimes no more than broad arm-waves.
Thank you for writing; it was kind of you.
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