An evolution is merely a change over time. So to say "Language evolves" is only suggesting that it changes over time, which is demonstrable. Don't think too far into it.

Srap Tasmaner mentioned that languages evolve, but I find I'm still not getting how that could be taken literally. — frank

The biological evolution that had anything to do with "language evolving" happened a long time ago -- likely some time in the late stone age, once we had evolved into the modern human species -- 100,000 years ago, give or take a few.

But language as a cultural phenomenon does evolve, is evolving all the time. For a longer range view, take a look/listen to the first few seconds of this: Beowulf read in Old English (c. 4-500 a.d.), also known as Anglo Saxon. Look for the phrase " "That was a good king." I bet you'll be able to detect it:



Now listen to a few seconds of this: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales read in Middle English, c. 1450:



first four lines in Middle English

1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour
4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

I don't think you need the modern English to figure out what it means, but here it is:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;

So, you've seen English 1300 years ago, 600 years ago, and 15 minutes ago.

Here's an example of current evolution in progress: The word "block" (like, city block) is generally pronounced with a "schwa" sound -- soft 'a'. A specialist in dialect noticed that in Detroit the pronunciation was beginning to shift about 20 years ago: the 'schwa' sound was transitioning to a short 'e' sound, as in fleck or deck. So instead of "let's take a walk around the block" you'd year "let's take a walk around the bleck." Neither of us is handy with the system of phonetic symbols, so you'll just have to imagine what this sounds like.

I don't know why block--->bleck is happening; it just does. Back in Chaucer's time, some vowels were pronounced the way continental Europe pronounced them, like the "i" in machine, and other words shifted away from the continental sound to the a British system, like the "i" in spine, grind, or rinse. Final 'e" was pronounced (sounded like 'uh") in Chaucer's time; 300 years later final 'e's were mostly silent.

So yes, languages literally evolve. Some languages (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit) were frozen because they became specialist languages used by learnéd people with fixed rules. Some versions of Italian (so I've heard) are very close to Latin. Hebrew was once a frozen language, mostly limited to liturgical use. Now it is a working language again (like in Israel) and it will get limbered up and change.

Languages evolve, even bird songs evolve according to a study of more than 30 years of Savannah sparrows recordings, the birds are singing distinctly different songs today than their ancestors did 30 years ago - changes passed along generation to generation, according to a 2013 study by University of Guelph researchers.

Bird's that don't learn their songs from their parents don't find mates.

about 8:30 p.m. on January 3, in 209. There was a really bad cold front that moved down over the Balkan peninsula and was stuck there for a week. Stiff as a board. Joking, obviously. I hope it's obvious, anyway.

Well, Koine and Attic Greek that were committed to "paper" and then banked in libraries got separated from daily use and were frozen, because it ceased being an everyday language. Of course, another branch of the river of Greek language stayed liquid--the branch that is spoken today.

Shakespeare's language was "frozen" in a similar way -- committed to print, then repeated verbatim into the present, while the rest of the language went on changing. BTW, There have been some very successful performances of WS's plays spoken in Elizabethan language with (reconstructed) pronunciation.

One of the interesting topics I studied as an undegrad was Max Müller's 'linguistic archeology'. Müller (1823-1900) was one of the first European scholars of Sanskrit and of the idea of 'Indo-European languages', about which there was much speculation about the relationship between Greco-Roman cultures and those of more ancient peoples. In particular the Vedic culture of India was thought to have been the ancestor of European Classical cultures, and Muller sought to compare the genetically-related European and Asian languages in order to reconstruct the earliest form of the root-language. The Vedic language, Sanskrit, was thought to be the oldest of the IE languages. Müller therefore devoted himself to the study of this language, becoming one of the major Sanskrit scholars of his day. Müller believed that the earliest documents of Vedic culture should be studied in order to provide the key to the development of pagan European religions, and of the development of the religious culture of India and the West.

There are many word roots which are common to both Sanskrit and Latin i.e. 'pada', path, pedestrian; sarpena, serpent; vac-, voice; there are many thousands of these examples, By analysing the development of these word forms through studies of ancient manuscripts (he undertook one of the first translations of the Rg Veda), Müller traced the spread of the ancient Indo-European languages from their origin in the European Steppe through to India, Persia, Greece and then the other European cultures.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Max_M%C3%BCller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_M%C3%BCller

Thank you for that helpful clarification.

There are multiple phenomena you can look at: changes in pronunciation, in meaning, in whatever the word is for degree of "elevatedness", etc. All of these follow a similar pattern. Changes in the frequency with which a community is using an allophone, for example, slots into the math where biology would have changes in the frequency of an allele. And that's why languages form family trees much like species. A hypothetical language like proto-indo-european is a most recent common ancestor just like biologists talk about.

But how do you decide that it's literally the same vs. evolution is a good metaphor?

There's a structural isomorphism between the two processes, biological and linguistic evolution, so it's more than an analogy.

Look at how Latin (or camp Latin) speciates into the romance languages. You're looking at an accumulation of changes in frequency of pronunciations, meanings, spellings, etc.

Where biology relies on biological reproduction, languages have something else, this is true. But usages and pronunciations and the rest do get reproduced or not within a community. Some words catch on. Some meanings, etc. Some don't. And over time the language changes. Languages have descendants, go extinct, all the rest.

If it's the same process, then we would have to say that natural selection isn't too significant in language evolution (due to low population size). It's mostly random changes in pronunciation and word use. It's pretty easy to picture randomness in sexual reproduction, but in language use?

Example: in the US, it was once common in many areas for blacks and whites to speak in essentially the same way. In the 1960s that changed because of a desire to create a unique black identity. The goal was for blacks to escape out from under the umbrella of white identity where blacks could only ever aspire to be more perfectly flawed. One aspect of it was conscious change in black speech that has survived to this day. I'd have to turn my head sort of sideways to see that as random.

If it's the same process, then we would have to say that natural selection isn't too significant in language evolution (due to low population size). — frank

Except that it's obviously mainly natural selection. And you can see other stuff like drift when a population is geographically isolated, etc.

There are going to be some differences between biological evolution and linguistic evolution. Because the method of reproduction is so different, there isn't quite the same genotype/phenotype issue there is in biology, for instance. There's some stuff there I guess but that's linguistics I'm none too confident about.

To your specific point: I think you're matching things up wrong. A language is a species, not an individual organism. The counterpoint to an individual organism would be an idiolect, and maybe even a snapshot of an idiolect. In either case, you're not talking about small populations at all.

Some guy says to his friend, "That girl you were out with last night was 14-karat." Maybe he just saw a jewelry ad. His friend might like this expression and use it now & then. It could catch on in their circle and spread. Or maybe not. What's reproducing here is an idiolect that includes this usage of "14-karat". If nobody likes it, it could immediately go extinct. The idiolect is a member of the species English.

Is this making sense? It was my understanding that this isn't remotely controversial within linguistics, but I haven't done any googling since this thread started.

To your specific point: I think you're matching things up wrong. A language is a species, not an individual organism. The counterpoint to an individual organism would be an idiolect, and maybe even a snapshot of an idiolect. In either case, you're not talking about small populations at all. — Srap Tasmaner

It does matter which one you're identifying as an individual. The human population is presently not large enough to mainly be influenced by natural selection. We're a genetic drift species. That rules out idiolect as an individual, if as you say, natural selection is the main driving force of change.

It would have to be something else that to me, doesn't clearly stand out as an individual. There's going to be a wonk factor to it if we insist that it's exactly the same process.

It does seem more natural to say that my idiolect today is a descendant of, to start with, my idiolect, say, twenty years ago. At what point did I learn the word "idiolect", for instance?

What's clear though is that we're talking about differential reproduction, exactly as we do in biological evolution by natural selection, and that these changes in idiolects "sum" to changes in their species over time, and perhaps also to speciation. (The last being a can of worms I don't care to open right now.)

:up:

We're there? Sweet.

Btw, I live in the bible belt and a friend of mine who's a linguistics PhD has had encounters with people who accept linguistic but not biological evolution! He was in the position of arguing, "But you accept this with language, why ... ?"

It's a strange world.

How Shakespeare's English sounded.

I think we need to draw a distinction between evolution and change in language.

Evolution connotes some kind of progression towards a goal - adapting to the pressures of the language environment. To me it seems language has evolved. Math, for example, is a language adapted to the world of quantity. We could say it's an instance of language evolution. Musical notation is another case of language evolution.

I suppose it all depends on the evolution of our minds. As our minds enter different levels or worlds of experience, our language would evolve in tandem to describe them.

As for simple change in language, this is demonstrable as BitterCrank has shown with his videos.

Note that our brain, it seems, is finite and that surely sets a limit on symbolic communication. The universe is so vast and it's my guess that all of in it is impossible to capture with symbolic language (the existing form). Perhaps we need a radically different kind of language, one that transcends symbols. One that is fully capable of understanding the very universe itself.

Evolution connotes some kind of progression towards a goal — TheMadFool

Ick.

- adapting to the pressures of the language environment. — TheMadFool

I deliberately said nothing about adaptation.

Adaptation comes into biological evolution because there is an expectation that individuals better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and (therefore) more likely to reproduce. That's not an exclusive deal, because sexual selection is a thing. But the point is always reproduction and surviving by being "fit" is just a means to an end. Natural selection predicts adaptation, for this very reason, but doesn't actually care. All that matters is that some individuals out-compete other individuals of their species in having their genes represented in the next generation. Reproduce more and you win. If adaptation helps, then that explains adaptation.

It's not clear to me that there is a similar story to tell about linguistic evolution. Reproduction in language, like talk -- because it is just talk -- is cheap. Almost preposterously cheap.

Of course there are selection pressures -- @frank gave a reasonable example of what that looks like, and that stuff is interesting. In nature, the penalty for a mutation that doesn't pan out is pretty harsh -- you die and you take all your genes with you, making it a little less likely that even the non-mutants will win in the next generation. In language, if a new usage (or whatever) doesn't catch on, oh well. It dies on the vine and the vine can keep churning out new grapes.

It's not clear to me that there is a similar story to tell about linguistic evolution. Reproduction in language, like talk -- because it is just talk -- is cheap. Almost preposterously cheap. — Srap Tasmaner

Evolution of language needn't have a 1-to-1 correspondence with biological evolution. The key concepts that are relevant would be new environments and language adapting to them.

In very general terms we're stuck in space-time which is, claustrophobic as it is for us, the limit of our understanding. Our language, presently, can't go beyond space-time.

If perchance there are things beyond space-time our language would experience this new environment and adapt to describe it. In other words language would evolve. Don't you think?

Linguistic evolution appears to be at least partially Lamarckian, and that's interesting. I doubt that it is entirely so, but who knows.

In what sense do languages evolve? — frank

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_(linguistics)