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Language death has nothing to do with fitness, and these languages are not being "selected against" by the presence (or absence) of some linguistic characterist

by rvense 5y ago

Language death has nothing to do with fitness, and these languages are not being "selected against" by the presence (or absence) of some linguistic characteristic. Languages die out because the groups that speak them assimilate into other groups, taking on their language and culture.

renewiltord 5y ago
That's memetic selection, right? Like, the assimilation is going one way.
- rvense 5y ago
  But it's selection based on non-linguistic criteria, like who's better at violence and economics. So it affects language, but it is not based in language, and thus GP's insinuation that this linguistic feature is a "bad idea from a natural selection point of view" and this is somehow related to those languages' so-called obscurity does not make sense.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    That makes sense. There is low evidence that having this characteristic affects the assimilation. Okay, colour me convinced.
    - rvense 5y ago
      For it to make sense, language replacement (which is an observable phenomenon) would have to happen by communities learning a bunch of different languages and picking the one that they liked best. That's just not how it goes. You learn a new language to speak with new people that you're interested in, regardless of how weird and hard to learn their language is.
grozzle 5y ago
Indeed. English is as dominant in the world as it is today probably because England and the USA have (or had) plenty of shallow coal, iron, and (relevant after the "special relationship") oil deposits, not because of any particular linguistic efficiency.
- bmmayer1 5y ago
  Iraq has even more oil deposits. Why doesn't the world speak Arabic?
  - grozzle 5y ago
    Too late to the party with just that resource. Engines that most efficiently use oil came about only after the era of history when engines that need coal were dominant. Fun bit of alt-history pondering - China was the most powerful single nation on Earth at the time of the dawn of the industrial revolution - it's quite plausible that they missed out on that lead just because of a couple of shallow whitewater sections of the Yangtze river that made bringing their coal by barge to the coastal cities impractical.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      No, they missed out on it because of bureaucratic stupidity. There was a Chinese industrial revolution in, IIRC, the 1100s and/or 1200s. They were producing something on the order of 100,000 tons of iron a year, with the whole industrial revolution "using the outputs to improve the efficiency" cycle starting to happen. And then the bureaucrats shut it down, because "the wrong kind of people" were getting rich from it. They could have owned the world. They could have been the ones with the technological and manufacturing dominance. And instead they threw it away to keep their society stratified in the way they thought it should be. The Chinese "century of humiliation" was caused by that decision back in the 1200s.
pessimizer 5y ago
Especially seeing as hugely dominant languages like Mandarin and English are so difficult to write, and one would assume that ease of literacy would contribute to fitness.

by rvense 5y ago

renewiltord 5y ago

That's memetic selection, right? Like, the assimilation is going one way.

rvense 5y ago
But it's selection based on non-linguistic criteria, like who's better at violence and economics. So it affects language, but it is not based in language, and thus GP's insinuation that this linguistic feature is a "bad idea from a natural selection point of view" and this is somehow related to those languages' so-called obscurity does not make sense.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  That makes sense. There is low evidence that having this characteristic affects the assimilation. Okay, colour me convinced.
  - rvense 5y ago
    For it to make sense, language replacement (which is an observable phenomenon) would have to happen by communities learning a bunch of different languages and picking the one that they liked best. That's just not how it goes. You learn a new language to speak with new people that you're interested in, regardless of how weird and hard to learn their language is.

grozzle 5y ago

Indeed. English is as dominant in the world as it is today probably because England and the USA have (or had) plenty of shallow coal, iron, and (relevant after the "special relationship") oil deposits, not because of any particular linguistic efficiency.

bmmayer1 5y ago
Iraq has even more oil deposits. Why doesn't the world speak Arabic?
- grozzle 5y ago
  Too late to the party with just that resource. Engines that most efficiently use oil came about only after the era of history when engines that need coal were dominant. Fun bit of alt-history pondering - China was the most powerful single nation on Earth at the time of the dawn of the industrial revolution - it's quite plausible that they missed out on that lead just because of a couple of shallow whitewater sections of the Yangtze river that made bringing their coal by barge to the coastal cities impractical.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    No, they missed out on it because of bureaucratic stupidity. There was a Chinese industrial revolution in, IIRC, the 1100s and/or 1200s. They were producing something on the order of 100,000 tons of iron a year, with the whole industrial revolution "using the outputs to improve the efficiency" cycle starting to happen. And then the bureaucrats shut it down, because "the wrong kind of people" were getting rich from it. They could have owned the world. They could have been the ones with the technological and manufacturing dominance. And instead they threw it away to keep their society stratified in the way they thought it should be. The Chinese "century of humiliation" was caused by that decision back in the 1200s.

pessimizer 5y ago

Especially seeing as hugely dominant languages like Mandarin and English are so difficult to write, and one would assume that ease of literacy would contribute to fitness.