Comments on: “We not ship to Russia”

By: Tsu Dho Nimh

Tsu Dho Nimh — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:14:34 +0000

When I wrote global English, I always made sure to expand contractions to the parent form because they can be easily misunderstood.

But it not require me speak like Og the Caveman!

“We don’t ship to Russia” becomes ‘We do not ship to Russia.”

By: Vahid

Vahid — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:02:04 +0000

Dear Ingrid,

I declare myself to be a non-believer of the idea that the theory of evolution can describe everything about language! But, as you know, usually those who strongly believe in the evolution of language believe that the phenomenon should be examined from the viewpoint of memory. If we take into account what for example Pinker (1999) claims to be the case in the development of language, some points may become more tangible.

Pinker believes that we come to this world as infants, we naturally begin to experience the world, to know entities around us and as a result semantic categories will be formed in our mind. To be able to live, we need to know our world. According to Pinker (1999), our ancestors, like us, needed to know their world to lead a better life; but the amount of knowledge around them was too much too be recorded in their memories, and as a result natural selection, one of the most important processes of evolution, selected some knowledge vital for their lives. Therefore natural selection has turned anything human beings have encountered a lot or has been vital for their survival and reproduction into instincts. In other words, human beings during their evolution needed to have certain semantic knowledge to know their environment and this knowledge had to be the same wherever they lived. In fact natural selection turned this knowledge into a kind of instinct inscribed in our semantic memory.

Then our episodic memory evolved to enable human beings to record detailed information. It is exactly this kind of knowledge which is not general or universal but depends on the environment/context.

To summarize, as claimed by Pinker, we have a part of our knowledge as instinct in our mind, and we gain another part through our daily experiences.

Health & Peace,
Vahid

Pinker, S. (1999). How the Mind Works. W.W. Norton Publishers.

By: Britta Schneider

Britta Schneider — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:05:52 +0000

Ah, I so much like these discussions on “evolution” as they are really omnipresent in so many arguments and then, evolution is so often seen as something that has no agent. What then came to my mind was something I read this morning, where Blommaert and Huang say we need to

“reintroduce history as a real category of analysis. The simplicity is, however, deceptive of course, for what is
required is a toolkit of concepts that are intrinsically historical; that is: concepts whose very nature and direction point towards connections between the past and the present in terms of social activities – concepts, in short, that define and explain synchronic social events in terms of their histories of becoming as social events.”
Blommaert & Huang. 2009. “Historical bodies and historical space.” Journal of Applied Linguistics

Saying that we no ship to Russia is, I think, better grasped as social event than in terms of evolution, so I am also a non-believer. It is fascinating how “morphological complexity” symbolically can function in discourses on linguistic evolution (that are then used to legitimize social inequality). Thank you for this really interesting post!

By: Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:16:30 +0000

Exactly my point that we need to speak about “contexts of use” rather than “English” (or any other language) as one entity. I like your term “linguistic fitness landscape”!

By: Interrobang

Interrobang — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:11:33 +0000

I think it's useful to speak of language evolution, but you have to understand what evolution is before it really makes sense. Evolution is a consequense, not a process, which is dependent upon the landscape in which it operates. Hence "We not" may thrive in the fitness landscape known as eBay because it's clear and easily understood by non-native speakers, many of whose native languages may do negation in exactly that way; but "We not" will not thrive in a fitness landscape where it is stigmatised, because it will be crowded (or corrected) out by "We do not" or "We don't." I mean, if algorithms and antenna designs can literally evolve, why not languages?