Scientific Babelism
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The proponents of "Wrathful Dispersion Theory" have been vulnerable to the criticism that their viewpoint is religious rather than scientific in nature. But now, we see a strong scientific alternative to the increasingly-discredited theory of so-called "historical linguistics", as Dennis Baron explains ("The great language change hoax", 4/1/2013):
Deniers of global warming, the big bang, and evolution have a new target: language change. Arguing that language change is just a theory, not a fact, they’re launching efforts to remove it from the school curriculum. To support their efforts, they’re citing a new report, “The Great Language Change Hoax,” presented last month at the annual conference of the Society for Pure English in Toronto.
The authors of the study, Jon Lamarck and Tori Lysenko, are cognitive biophysicists at Hudson University who feel that explaining language is best done by scientists who know nothing about language. Linguists, the researchers usually associated with language study, are too close to their subject matter, thus too subjective. “We don’t even like language,” Lamarck told attendees at the SPE conference. “That’s why we can be objective about it.”
Lamarck and Lysenko do admit that language, like climate, can vary. “No one’s going to doubt that Chicago is slightly warmer by the lake and cooler in the suburbs, just as no one doubts that I say tomayto and you say tomahto,” said Lysenko.
Variation, according to Lamarck and Lysenko, isn’t change. "You may say tomahto, but actually, you're wrong, it's tomayto. Hence, no change," he said. More important, the researchers conclude that although language may vary, it doesn’t actually change over time. That’s the myth—the great language change hoax—that these scientists are so eager to expose. "Just as there’s no proof that dinosaurs lived before humans, there's no reason to believe that language existed before there was writing, so it couldn't have evolved,” Lysenko said, a statement sure to make him popular with the young earth crowd. "And it’s important to remember that people don’t cause language change,” Lamarck added, echoing the anti-climate-change rhetoric.
Some relevant LL posts:
"Linguists boycott Kansas intelligent design hearings", 5/5/2005
"Chomsky testifies in Kansas", 5/6/2005
"Wrathful Dispersion Theory", 12/2/2005
"The science and theology of global language change", 12/30/2007
"Mailbag: The comparative theology of linguistic diversity", 12/31/2007
"The origin of speeches: Wrathful dispersion for real?", 12/31/2007
James said,
April 1, 2013 @ 8:19 pm
Hm, I think Roger Shuy's 2007 classic is also relevant.
Todd said,
April 1, 2013 @ 8:34 pm
I think James has hit the nail on the head.
Max Overby said,
April 1, 2013 @ 8:39 pm
There's a fatal flaw in this theory. Everyone in Chicago knows it's cooler near the Lake. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_name_%22Windy_City%22
Diane said,
April 1, 2013 @ 8:43 pm
Given that the authors cited are named Lamarck and Lysenko (two names prominently associated with mistaken or bad science), and that today is April Fool's, well…
Diane said,
April 1, 2013 @ 8:46 pm
Oh another thing, Lamarck and Lysenko were both prominently wrong not just about science but about *evolution*, and while this doesn't talk about biological evolution it invokes many of the same concepts. Yeah, we're talking April Fool's joke here.
Diane said,
April 1, 2013 @ 8:47 pm
Should have followed James's link before I posted. I guess I wasn't the first to get the joke.
Chris C. said,
April 1, 2013 @ 9:03 pm
*checks calendar*
Oh, you!
tudza said,
April 1, 2013 @ 9:18 pm
So the other articles linked from dates nowhere near the first of April are to be taken as jokes as well?
J.W. Brewer said,
April 1, 2013 @ 9:18 pm
"The original nineteenth-century constitution of the Societe linguistique de Paris is famous for explicitly prohibiting the discussion of matters concerning the origin of language at the society's meetings. This was no mere quirk of the founders: they introduced this limitation for precisely the reason that there could apparently _be_ no real science that bore on the topic. Since the late 1990s, interest among linguists and others has reawakened and conferences are now regularly devoted to the subject. To my mind, this revival is not based on additional data, but rather on the mistaken impression that if we can _pose_ an important question, we ought in principle to be able to find an answer." Stephen R. Anderson, former LSA president, and Chair of the Linguistics Department at a reasonably well-known research university (who I'm pretty sure is not a skeptic of standard modern counts of biological evolution).
Wrathful dispersionism (if we are willing to bracket questions of time depth . . .) can only be falsified by a credible account of the origin of language AND a convincing reconstruction of proto-World – a project which seems at present to require more bold speculation that Meritt Ruhlen and a room full of Nostraticists put together.
Henning Makholm said,
April 1, 2013 @ 9:21 pm
There's an appealing internal consistency to the view. The language itself doesn't change — historical sources just show that people have become steadily better at speaking it since somewhen in medieval times.
At least until about the time I graduated from high school, after the ability of people to write correctly has been declining. Oh, they still get it mostly right, compared to the atrocious state of even "educated" people's spelling and grammar in, say, the 1500s — but it's a cause for major concern that for the first time in history people are getting progressively worse at speaking properly rather than better as time goes by.
Pete R. said,
April 1, 2013 @ 9:33 pm
The worst part is that I completely believed that people could claim this for a minute.
Ray Girvan said,
April 1, 2013 @ 10:39 pm
@Henning Makholm: historical sources just show that people have become steadily better at speaking it since somewhen in medieval times
Hardly! This is just rationalizing the continual decline; they've continually got worse and worse at Old English since 1066, to the point where we're having to stumble by with some unrecognisably bastardized mongrel language, muddied with foreign borrowings, with its vowels shifted beyond recognition, and all its inflections and other grammatical subtleties gone.
Rubrick said,
April 1, 2013 @ 10:41 pm
The joke's on you: it's only April 1 in the Gregorian calendar, which is provably incorrect.
David Morris said,
April 2, 2013 @ 1:41 am
It's already well into 2 April here, so I've had extra practice at spotting the April Fool's Day stories.
maidhc said,
April 2, 2013 @ 4:50 am
That first link, "Linguists boycott Kansas intelligent design hearings", shows how linguists conspire to cover up the truth. If languages weren't created by intelligent design, where did Esperanto come from?
richardelguru said,
April 2, 2013 @ 6:09 am
I just hope that this joke doesn't backfire siince you've given the denier community another cause.
ohwilleke said,
April 2, 2013 @ 10:11 am
Language formation in action:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/humming.png
D.O. said,
April 2, 2013 @ 10:30 am
God has created English language so that KJV, Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations, Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution could be written guiding the humanity on the ways of piety, wealth, freedom, and democracy.
KeithB said,
April 2, 2013 @ 10:32 am
This strays pretty close to Poe's law. I have never heard from a YEC just *how many* languages were created during the Tower of Babel incident. After all, we know that new languages can arise in about 1000 years (Portugese, Spanish, French, Italian…) so we know that *all* the languages were not instantly created.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 2, 2013 @ 11:27 am
From a purely scientific standpoint, I should think wrathful dispersionism ought to be appealing because it provides an elegant workaround to the seemingly insoluble monogenesis v. polygenesis problem. I expect that most people find monogenesis more intuitively appealing, but again we hit the problem (if we are wary of crackpottish-sounding proposals) of being unable to reconstruct proto-World or winnow the number of separate reconstructed ancestral languages below, I don't know, a few dozen even if you're a lumper rather than splitter. A sudden discontinuity, in which the results of monogenesis are transformed into something functionally equivalent to what would appear to be the results of polygenesis (because the pre-discontinuity Ursprache cannot be reverse-engineered from the post-Babel data), harmonizes the intuition with the data.