Complexity Digest 2008.22 - 01

29-May-2008

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Language: The Language Barrier, Nature Bookmark and Share

Excerpts: Some researchers think that the evolution of languages can be understood by treating them like genomes ¡X but many linguists don't want to hear about it. (...)

Just as species can shade off into a maddening continuum of subspecies, populations and hybrids, languages dissolve into an untidy collection of dialects and intermediate forms. And the rampant borrowing of words between languages resembles, graphically at least, the promiscuous horizontal gene transfer that microbes engage in.

There are limits to the analogy. It is unclear, for example, what the 'selection pressures' are for language, if any.