Xenology/quotes/notes/2/29/2024

The Canada Goose Chin Strap

Aloha

Xenology

“Is the formation of new languages similar to the process of speciation?”

Yes, it’s a common comparison among people who understand both processes. But it’s also a common example of a similarity that’s not at all an identity.

Part of the similarity is based on the idea of dialects and subspecies. The important differences are:

Dialects of a language are different versions that can still be (mostly) understood by the speakers; when dialects diverge to the point that their speakers (mostly) can’t understand each other, then they’re called separate languages.

Subspecies of a species are different populations that can (mostly) interbreed and produce healthy offspring that can also reproduce with either parent population; when populations diverge to the point that they can no longer interbreed, or produce offspring that (mostly) die before producing offspring, they’re considered separate species.

The big difference between these two definitions is:

Once two species have formed, it’s usually impossible for them to recombine or exchange genetic information. But when dialects diverge into languages, they can always continue to borrow new terminology (and even grammar), no matter how different they become.

English has words that are borrowed from many languages that linguists can’t relate to English at all. But you don’t find hybrids among species in different families, genera, etc.

Actually, both of these concepts have some conceptual problems. Biologists have been documenting cases of gene transfer between widely-separated species, as well a mergers of species. One of the most spectacular started as suggestions over a century ago that mitochondria and chloroplasts originated as bacteria that “colonized” prokaryotic cells. It took another half century, but in the 1950s and 1960s, it was verified, and it’s now part of biologists’ understanding of the origin of nucleated cells and “higher” multicellular plants and animals.

This does cause a bit of a definitional problem in biology, especially with the more recent discovery of single-celled “species” that can and do regularly exchange DNA with many other (and very different) species. Google “viral transduction” for one of the simpler mechanisms that has been documented.

But “borrowing” doesn’t cause many definitional problems in linguistics, since languages don’t have physical barriers that block the spread of words, morphemes, etc. Borrowing does cause a lot of problems in trying to determine the history and relatedness of languages.

But despite all these problems, the language/dialect and species/subspecies (sometimes called “race”) concepts are useful in linguistics and species. You just have to learn not to take them too seriously, because the real world is a lot messier than these concepts might lead you to believe.

Quora, web

Two types of xenoglossy are distinguished. Recitative xenoglossy is the use of an unacquired language incomprehensibly, while responsive xenoglossy refers to the ability to intelligibly employ the unlearned language as if already acquired.[9]

wiki, xenology

It also became apparent that the imaginary involves a linguistic dimension: whereas the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the "signified" and "signification" belong to the imaginary. Thus language has both symbolic and imaginary aspects: "words themselves can undergo symbolic lesions and accomplish imaginary acts of which the patient is the subject.…In this way, speech may become an imaginary, or even real object."[9]: 87–8

wiki, imaginary psychoanalysis

"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish."Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that something so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

FANDOM,web
HItchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Notes: well, yeah, linguistics is like biology, and I noted its messiness too...big dif, is species of fauna and flora are living creatures...ohhh, wait...brb...lol...the Hitchhiker is the Babel Fish!...go figure...I was wondering when I would get to the linguistic creme de la creme, the Babel Fish...aaand, I've managed to do another "challenge", a daily riff for a month, as it were, just babbling on...leap year gave me an extra day, this post like a postscript, "thanks for all the fish"!🐬

Aloha,

:)

DavidDavid