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Language is a living system, that feeds on the social network of mankind and gives much in return: it is a powerful tool for man's adaptation and defence. Man and his language system live in close symbiosis. Language, like the neuronal system that carries it, is an evolving system and relates in a meaningful way to the user's environment. If used properly, it represents all relevant aspects of that environment. The use of language enables man to defeat barriers of time and distance, to probe, to simulate. It is a particularly useful tool for the human self to interact with its environment in internal and external dialogue. Moreover, language acts as a huge collective memory for mankind: it gives access to practically unlimited resources, such as conferences, libraries, the Internet.
As living and evolving systems, languages employ a strategy of generation, mutation, and selection to increase their efficiency, or "fitness". As a new generation of native speakers is assembled, messengers, in the form of spoken words and phrases, transfer the information from the memory of the language-community (the blue-print) to the building place of the neophyte language-users. Stored in memory are logic rules for word form and sentence structure (phonology and syntax) and meaningful content. The messengers (oral and written messages) carry this information to the new generation of language users.
The potential to develop language resides in the child's genes: but not in the form of folded molecules that will deploy when water is added. You can feed and cuddle a child and fulfill its immediate bodily and emotional needs: but that will not be enough to evoke the use of language. Also required is the caregivers auditory exchange with the child - cooing noises to the use of one specific language. In principle one pair of humans is enough for language to develop, e.g. a mother with her child. The mother will transmit her own language to her child. If it is English, English will develop in the child. If the child grows up with a mother from Rumania and a father from Holland, who communicate with each other and with the child in Esperanto, Esperanto will be the first language acquired by the child. Several such cases are on record, thus supplying Esperanto with equal status as "natural" languages. If twins grow up in close contact with each other, they may develop a language of their own, using bits and pieces caught up from the world outside, but deviating substantially from the language in their environment. In that case, selection proceeds in a different way, the twins reinforcing each other's mutated expressions and dodging the full control of the (language) environment.
This is another indication that language, although an interactive product of the human brain, is itself a living system. Language has features in common with the genetic system (8.3) and features similar to the lymphoid and the neuronal systems (discussed in Chapter 5) that assist man in sustaining life and coping with his environment. Like these evolving systems, speech/language is an instrument for man to create a map of his world and learn to adapt and defend himself. The book-title "The gentle art of verbal self-defence" (S.Haden Elgin 1980) demonstrates that language has a place among the systems for adaptation and defence (SADS).
Like the other SADS, language has a large capacity of memory-storage. Relevant auditory and visual features that are represented in the memory (primary representation) have a secondary symbolic representation in the form of the sounds and signs of speech and language. S.K.Langer has elaborated this point in Philosophy in a New Key, 1960.
Summarising from a phylogenetic point of view, language has these points in common with a living system
it evolves over time,
there are families of languages,
there are species, each with variations, competing with each other and with a great fecundity of reproduction (for every language that has disappeared, a new one has come into existence)
natural languages have a hard core of unchangeable generative rules, and surface structures that are pliable
a language adapts readily to a new user group.
When we turn to the ontogenetic (developmental) view of speech and language: non-verbal and verbal skills are acquired and improved by learning, and will continue to adapt to changing environments during a lifetime. In this it also resembles the immune and the neuronal systems.
The network properties in speech-communication present another very strong congruence: all language users are simultaneously receptors and producers of standard messages and are therefore strongly coupled to one another as long as they use the same or a similar language. Just like immune globulines and neurons, language users are part of an adaptive system in which meaningful phrases are exchanged in response to an inviting and stimulating environment. The varieties of languages within one "species" are many. Here are some examples:
baby-talk, motherese,
gang-idiom, professional jargon,
lovers talk, poetry,
advertising language.
Sometimes a variety is nurtured to the extreme, as a token of group-identity, such as gang-idiom or professional jargon. Linguists who try to define the point in time when an idiom has split off and has become a separate language, may find inspiration in the biological definition for speciation. '..a unit comprised of groups of similar populations capable of reproducing themselves, which differs sharply from all comparable groups in several traits.' National languages, when studied in a historical perspective, seem to have response times of at least 20 to 50 years, depending on the force of challenges posed by the environment, such as migration or social change. Domination by a foreign nation has often been a powerful stimulus for change.
There is a fairly rapid turnover of fashion words, and two idioms can be out of phase in developing their vocabularies. What has been outdated in one idiom may be the most original thing in another. Adaptive changes of a language take place over short or long time spans, depending on the properties and the size of the user group. At the level of an individual transmitter/receiver, adaptive response times will be in the order of weeks. At the level of large groups (government employees, the world of art-critics, university professors) the waves of expressions that are in fashion probably vary from months to several years (not unlike a slowed down version of the chemical waves in 3.1, that were the birth-place of cognition).
Languages may experience the need to adapt themselves to exigences of the cultural and social environment, such as new developments in technology, a new experience of emotional or religious feelings, new tools of rational thinking, a surge of ethnic consciousness in a population (black language in the U.S.A.). Within a homogeneous group of language-users the oscillations of prevailing terms are largely synchronous, between groups the coupling is weaker than between members of one group, and the oscillations show phase differences. These and other properties of the behaviour of languages are predicted by the concentrically shaped model as described more fully in 9.10. In Map 9.4.1 we recognize the hard core of language structure, the rules that are resistant to change, and the pliable surface structures that adapt more easily to changes in the environment.
Map 9.4.1 Neural system (NAD), left, interacting with language system (VAD), approaching from the right
In the Map we see two spheres interacting. The left sphere, representing the nervous system of a human individual encounters a language system as part of his environment. In the zone of interaction the language user assumes an idiotypic variety of the language that is adapted to e.g. a two-year old. The language-environment thus undergoes change: under the influence of the child a mother will employ a different sort of language than she would with an adult, she will use her motherese. Linguistic research is finding out which structures in language belong to the hard core that gives rise, via intermediate structures, to the more pliable and interchangeable structure of oral and written language.
Logicians who are mathematising linguistics may find hints in this Map for how to proceed from the hard core of language universals to the surface structures of a particular language. It is more than likely that the Darwinian strategy of a two-way hierarchy (varying + selecting) will be one of the choices to be tried out.
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