http://anthropology.net/2007/10/11/on-the-evolution-of-language/ Beyond bones & stones Sun, 27 May 2012 23:21:41 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://anthropology.net/2007/10/11/on-the-evolution-of-language/#comment-4882 Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:24:14 +0000 http://anthropology.net/2007/10/11/on-the-evolution-of-language/#comment-4882 [...] Anthropology has a nice article on this: Nature’s “Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language,” studies how grammatical rules change over time, a term the authors call regularization. The authors specifically studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Here’s a summary of what they concluded from the abstract, “We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs. Of these irregular verbs, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. We study how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast. Our study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule.” [...]

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