Language, Not Only Emergent, But Sudden and Subject to Power laws
A couple of mathematicians have done some analysis of Language and come up with a reason there are either extremely primitive languages, (Orangutan, Gibbon, 16 Year Old male) or complete, coherent and highly complex ones.
The secret is that language is mathematically an emergent phenomenon that exists in a crucial, and very limited zone where the benefits to the listener and speaker are optimized. Outside that range there is no language at all, when it happens, it happens very suddenly and without transitional phases.
According to
this article in NatureFerrer i Cancho and Solé have devised a mathematical model in which the cost of using a language depends on the balance between these conflicting preferences. They calculate the properties of the lexicon that requires minimal effort for different degrees of compromise, from exhaustive vocabularies to one-word languages.
They find that the change from one extreme to the other does not happen smoothly. There is a jump in the amount of communication, from very little to near-perfect, at a certain value of the relative weightings of speaker and hearer preferences.
This raises an interesting problem because, having been under fire for some time with his theory that there is a hardwired predisposition in humans to develop language, Chomsky's ideas may be getting some support from this.
How else could we have made the jump unless some twitch in the DNA had turned on language?
The original document is Ferrer i Cancho, R. & Solé, R. V. Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, published online, doi:10.1073/ pnas.0335980100 (2003)
