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Nature 449, 665-667 (11 October 2007) | doi:10.1038/449665a; Published online 10 October 2007
There is a Correction (1 November 2007) associated with this document.
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Professor of Nanotechnology
- University of Southampton
- Southampton United Kingdom
Assistant Professor
- University of Michigan
- Michigan, MI 48109 United States
Linguistics: An invisible hand
W. Tecumseh Fitch1
Abstract
Quantitative relationships between how frequently a word is used and how rapidly it changes over time raise intriguing questions about the way individual behaviours determine large-scale linguistic and cultural change.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, linguistics was considered a thoroughly historical science, focusing on how languages such as English or Sanskrit changed through time. By uncovering rules governing phonological change, historical linguists reconstructed dead protolanguages such as Indo-European — an ancestral dialect spoken some 10,000 years ago that diverged into a wide variety of modern languages, including Hindi, Russian, Spanish, English and Gaelic.
- W. Tecumseh Fitch is in the School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Fife KY16 9JP, UK.
Email: wtsf@st-andrews.ac.uk
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