Darwin and linguistics

Interesting linguistic discovery, that I want to share here, even if it has nothing to do with art (at least, not obviously).

In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, linguists observed an artificial language evolve from random to ordered, naturally adapting in ways that assured its reproduction.

"From Darwin onwards, there's been a mechanism for nature producing a design without there being a designer," said study co-author Simon Kirby, an evolutionary linguist at the University of Edinburgh. "We're used to that in biology. People have claimed that the same might happen in culture, and here we've shown a mechanism for language."

Structure, said Kirby, was the key to a language being remembered.
"Over many generations, the grammar goes from ad-hoc and inexpressive into a language that's cleanly structured and expressive," he said. "But what's evolving here isn't the agents" -- the speakers -- "but the language itself. It has its own evolutionary imperative. It wants to be passed on, and finds ways of doing that. We're its hosts."

(Read full article here).

A very interesting comment was then made to Kirby:

"Could the study participants simply have interpreted the gibberish according to their own already-established linguistic patterns?"

To read Kirby's reaction to that, go here