Riddled with irregularity

Why are languages so different—and disorderly?

by Philip Ball / August 22, 2012 / Leave a comment

Published in September 2012 issue of Prospect Magazine

Languages are extremely diverse, but they are not arbitrary. Behind the bewildering, contradictory ways in which different tongues conceptualise the world, we can sometimes discern order. Linguists have traditionally assumed that this reflects the hardwired linguistic aptitude of the human brain. Yet recent scientific studies propose that language “universals” aren’t simply prescribed by genes but that they arise from the interaction between the biology of human perception and the bustle, exchange and negotiation of human culture.

Language has a logical job to do—to convey information—and yet it is riddled with irrationality: irregular verbs, random genders, silent vowels, ambiguous homophones. You’d think languages would evolve towards an optimal state of concision, but instead they accumulate quirks that hinder learning, not only for foreigners but also for native speakers.

These peculiarities have been explained by linguists by reference to the history of the people who speak it. That’s often fascinating, but it does not yield general principles about how languages have developed—or how they will change in future. As they evolve, what guides their form?

Linguists have long suspected that language is like a game, in which individuals in a group vie to impose their way of speaking. We adopt words and phrases that we hear, and help them propagate. Through face-to-face encounters, language evolves to reconcile our conflicting needs as speakers or listeners: when speaking, we want to say our bit with minimal effort—we want language to be structurally simple. As listeners, we want the meaning to be clear—we want language to be informative. In other words, speakers try to shift the effort onto listeners, and vice versa.

All this makes language what scientists call a complex system. This means that it involves many agents interacting with each other via fairly well-defined rules. From these interactions there typically emerges an organised, global mode of behaviour, but this cannot be deduced from the local rules alone.

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Comments

Dan Hutch
August 25, 2012 at 10:35
Have their been comparative studies of how the rainbow's sequence is seen and named?
Jayarava
August 27, 2012 at 18:50
Why would languages converge when situations are constantly changing? Why do you generalise the value of concision? Why do you think that language has a "logical job to do"? Why do you complain about irregularity? The opening of this article is plagued by unspoken, and unexamined assumptions that do more to hinder understanding than irregular verbs and spelling. Language is rich, complex and fluid. Get over it.
averill stevenson
August 27, 2012 at 19:40
Words are invented, when one NEEDS the word to communicate. Red is the color of blood, crucial to life and death, and all living things. No matter where human life exists, the jungle, the desert, the frozen tundra - the red of blood is common to humans - no matter the culture. I would think the need to invent this descriptor would be very, very high, compared to other colors.
David Lay
August 28, 2012 at 15:45
I agree with Averill and I'll take it a step further. In early development of colour language, blue may be tied up in the concept of sky, and green in the concept of vegetation. But red is an event, either blood or food, and hence gets a distinct label.
Carole Brooks Platt, PhD
August 29, 2012 at 16:44
I'd say the early words "red," "white" and "black" derived from the colors available in the environment to make art, the earliest symbolic communication. Beginning in pre-linguistiic, prehistory, these were the colors used to create cave art. To name something brings it into palpable existence. Perhaps this is why red, white and black were the predominantly named color categories when language did arise.
tyrone slothrop
August 29, 2012 at 18:43
This piece is a mess. Let me concur with an early comment, the claim that languages have a logical job to do is utterly vacuous. Such a claim, though, seems to conflate language with its semantico-referential function (“labels” as they are naively called in this piece). But as anyone who has read their Jakobson knows (or Pierce), languages are mutlifunctional and reference is one function among many. Ambiguity seems to be an essential feature of languages. Note also the conflation of writing with "language." What, after all, is a "silent vowel" outside the context of writing? Still further, note that the English classificatory system is tacitly assumed to be the system that most naturally aligns with some putative reality. This seems to have ignored a fair amount of work on linguistic relativity. Meanwhile, it should be noted, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have been doing detailed ethnographic research on the ways that children are socialized into being language users. They haven’t needed computer models. They’ve based their research on empirical research. That languages are cultural practices also isn’t news to either sociolinguists or linguistic anthropologists. Dell Hymes made most of these points 40 years ago; nice to see that “linguists” are catching up.
Jil Hanifan
August 29, 2012 at 21:52
Come on, folks, you're all missing the real point. Why is red the first color to earn a STABLE name? So the question isn't what it relates to, or symbolizes, but why is it first? And if we have trouble distinguishing different reds, then maybe they all look alike? Unlike blues, which apparently we see harder to agree on - like English and Russian -
ebbolles
August 30, 2012 at 02:15
Linguists are not in the general agreement that this post implies. For example in the sentence, "Linguists have traditionally assumed that this reflects the hardwired linguistic aptitude of the human brain," the author could have said 'Noam Chomsky and his followers have assumed...' This piece therefore is one more essay reporting doubts about Chomsky's work, but because of the conflation between Chomskyites and linguists, the reader will never suspect.
Frann Harris
September 4, 2012 at 16:54
This piece reminds me why I didn't become a linguist! Perhaps it takes a non-linguist to figure out why red is the colour of choice around the world.
Alyson
September 12, 2012 at 12:12
Words always seem to me to be the anchors within the music of meaning. The tone and the phraseology holds more than the sum of the parts. Also rainbows are the same all over the world so naming colours in different languages, based on the spectrum, is plainly logical. Secondary to that come the cultural associations, hierarchies and associations that fine-tune definition.
Janet O'Mara Kent
October 13, 2012 at 14:27
Back in the day, I did a paper for my anthropic-linguistics class. My thesis was that women, who were used to distinguishing shades of red in cosmetics, would be able to label and retain many more shades then men. It proved valid so far as it went- men could distinguish the different shades of red, but because they didn't have a particular label for them, found it difficult to recognize the same shade later on. Women, on the other hand, were proficient at distinguishing crimson from magenta, from fire engine red. etc. and being able to pick out those shades again. I think that this does support the theory that we coin words that are important to us and shape our world.
Philip Ball
October 14, 2012 at 21:00
I'm afraid I stumbled over these comments only after my subsequent blog piece on the physics Nobels was posted, so I'm too late to be of much consequence. But for the record, a few responses to tyrone slothrop (why are aggressive comments always pseudonymous, I wonder?). "Ambiguity seems to be an essential feature of languages" - yes, and the question is whether that ambiguity is there by intention or because of the fluidity of our choice of referents. "The English classificatory system is tacitly assumed to be the system that most naturally aligns with some putative reality" - no, the opposite actually, this piece, written in English, points out that some categories that English speakers might assume to be "natural" (such as "blue") are handled very differently in other languages. This comment betrays the author's preconceptions. "Sociolinguists etc. have been studying language socialization in children" - and your point is? That "red" emerges first because, um, that's the only colour term some tribes teach to their children? You're thinking here about different questions entirely, though I'm not sure what they are. "That languages are cultural practices isn't news..." - no, I don't think I'd have written a piece in which that was the news.
Avishai
October 10, 2013 at 20:16
Why red? In Hebrew aDom(red) is directly related to Daam(blood) aDama(earth) aDam(man, Adam). In Arabic aKHmar(red) related to Hebrew KHomer(clay), Aramaic KHamra(wine). These relationships become even more apparent when seen as Semitic 3 consonant root (with no vowels) where some of these words appear identical. Daam ?? by the way is Blood in all Afro-Asian languages.