Re: [tied] Glottochronology (Was: "Celtic Found to Have Ancient Roo

Miguel,

Your reference to phonemes gives me the impression that you might be thinking along these lines: Words consist of sequences of phonemes. It is the phonemes that play the role of bits of DNA. As there are no differences between using this phoneme instead of that phoneme in forming a word, the phonemic substitutions are all selectively neutral. If this is what you are suggesting, my response would be the following. First, it is doubtful whether all phonemic substitutions are really selectively neutral in their concrete historical setting. Why should they be selectively neutral? Second, even if you were right about the selective neutrality of phonemic replacements, it by no means follow that words would display similar behaviour.  

After all, we are discussing this matter in English, not in Finnish or in Basque language. If a Greater Finland had conquered and colonized half of the globe, we would be discussing here in Finnish, not in English. That is more than enough to put an end to selective neutrality of word substitutions here: there is a lot of selection going on in favour of English words in the minds/brains of millions of people. And there is ample evidence for the view that, given a suitable community of "imitators", certain words and phrases "infect" human brains more efficiently than others. After all, Mark Twain confessed in his "A Literary Nightmare" how a refrain of a piece of instruction, namely "Punch in the presence of the passanjare" nearly took over his fertile mind...It is doubtful whether any English phrase whatsoever could have accomplished this: some phrases are more mantralike than others, and the same may be true of some words, too. 

But I do understand your point on this level of language, too. There is likely to be nothing "intrinsically" advantageous in, say, English words vis-a-vis Finnish or Basque words as all these languages are "learnable" by ordinary human beings. And the infective efficiency of linguistic items is surely relative to the historically evolving/developing brains/minds of the potential imitators. 

I also sympathize your unwillingness to enter the meme-land. Despite its attractiveness, the meme theory does contain theoretical problems, not least in its ambiguous position vis-a-vis the "informational" and "material" aspects of genes and memes, respectively.

But my point remains: junk genes makes for good clocks because junk genes do not code any phenotypic properties, hence they are selectively neutral. But words in use are not protected from selection, far from that. And whatever memes might be, they do not seem to have a single "archival kind of medium" in the way genes have in bits of DNA (but see my later remark). Still, if we take seriously the idea of memes, we must (arguably unlike Dawkins) distinguish the "informationally specified" meme from its varied material manifestations. Which leads to my original question: what sort of "ideas" could play the role of non-coding parts of DNA in the meme world? Phonems, whether selectively neutral or not, cannot be �junk� because they do code meaningful words and words certainly are selected for or against. So, what is left? If language faculty is some sort of biological organ in our brains, one could think that some neural connections of that very organ might be inert, hence �junk neuron configurations�. Still, I see very little light in the end of the tunnel here. But as somebody must have greater powers of discrimination, let he or she enlighten us here. 

On Thu, 03 Jul 2003 13:32:58 -0700 (PDT), Juha Savolainen
<juhavs@...> wrote:

>What does count is the selective neutrality of the evolution. And unless
>you spell out how the "error termr" lay rest the (chronologywise) disturbing
>selective forces in (a) genetic evolution and (b) memetic evolution, I am still
>asking what might play the role of "junk genes" in memetic evolution.

I don't want to get into memes in general, but in the specific case of
language I'd say there is nothing but junk. 

Whether one, say, pronounces "whether" with /w/ or /hw/ makes not a bit of
difference either for their survival as a biological entity, nor for the
chances of survival of the speech variety (i.e. meme) itself.  The success
of Latin, Chinese or English, or the eventual lack of success of Sumerian,
Etruscan or Huron have nothing whatsoever to do with any property of those
languages themselves.

So if everything is junk, why doesn't the molecular clock work for
language?   Well, I suppose it would work if all the languages of the world
had only four possible phonemes to choose from (/c/, /g/, /a/, /t/).  This
is not the case.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...


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