Contents › Section 5: Sociolinguistics, historical development and politics › answer 7 of 45
Has anyone attempted to simulate the creation/development of a language?
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Nobody, has modeled the whole of language development (to many moving parts, although a kind of a SIMS game with language would probably not be out of the realm of possibility). But there have been models of certain parts.
Some people working on the newly opened area of language evolution/origins have conducted experiments that they used to model the changes in meaning. Simon Kirby is well known for his experiments. There's a whole centre for Language Evolution and Computing at the University of Edinburgh: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/lec. He describes some of his models in this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3-R3Ii35nY and more details can be found here: https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/3283.
Of course, modeling of language change goes all the way to the postulation of sound change laws in the Indo European languages. But computational modeling is much more recent and not nearly as common. Most models are concerned with child language development or adult learning.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).