Chapter 28 living language

"Stigmergy" is a new word.Grasse (PP) recently coined this term to explain the nest-building behavior of termites and presumably the complex activities of other social animals.The word is coined from several Greek roots that mean "to inspire work."Grassi intends to show that it is the product of the work itself that provides the stimulus and direction for further work.He came to this conclusion after long-term observation of termite nest-building behavior.Except for man-made cities, termite nests are probably the largest structures in nature.If termites were photographed standing on the edge of their nests, and we judged a single termite against that, it would be equivalent to a New Yorker and show better organization than the resident of Los Angeles.The anthills of the African termite (Macrotermes bellicosus), some twelve feet high and a hundred feet in diameter, contain millions of termites.Around the hole, smaller and younger anthills gather, like the outskirts of a city.

The interior of the nest is like a three-dimensional maze.Among them are spiral corridors and passages, vaulted roofs, well ventilated, and air-conditioned.Some large caverns serve as fungal plantations, from which the termites derive their nourishment and perhaps use them for heating.There is a circular vaulted palace in which the queen lives, and this room is called the harem.The basic unit of the whole design is the arch coupon. To explain the ability of these small, blind, and relatively mindless animals to build structures of such size and complexity, Grassi needed his own neologism to describe it.Does each termite have a blueprint, or is the entire design, down to the detail of each vault, encoded in its DNA?Or, with so many little brains interconnected, the whole group has a collective intellectual power comparable to that of a large contractor?

Grassi put a batch of termites into a tray filled with dirt and wood chips and watched them work.The composition of sawdust is lignin, which is a microscopic wood.At first, they don't act like contractors at all.No one stood there calling the shots or charging.They just ran around in circles, picking up soil particles and sawdust in their mouths and putting them down in a random manner.Then two or three grains of soil and sawdust happened to be stacked together, and this changed the behavior of all the termites at once.They began to show great interest, focusing frantically on the original column, adding new chips and soil particles to it.After reaching a certain height, construction ceased, and they did not come alive again until other columns were built nearby.At this time, the structure changed from a column to an arch, which was evenly bent, and then closed, and an arch was built.So, a few termites started to build another arch.

Presumably the same is true of the work of constructing languages.It is conceivable that the Proto-Indo-Europeans got together by chance and babbled.Once surrounded by bees, one of them suddenly shouted: "Bhei——!" At this time, the rest of the people adopted bhei and repeated it over and over again, so this part of the language was completed.However, this is a limited and too mechanistic view.This view treats phonemes as sawdust, implying that the deep structure of grammar is made of some sort of glue like sawdust.I disagree with this view. More likely, language is just alive, like a living thing.This is what we tell each other when we talk about living languages.I think that what we call "living" is not purely a similar metaphor.We mean that language is really alive.Words are the cells of language; they animate the vast body of language.

Language grows, evolves, and leaves fossils behind.Single words are like different species of animals, with mutations occurring from time to time.Different words fuse and then mate, hybrids and compounds that are wild varieties are their offspring.Some compound words resemble one parent, while the other is recessive.A word's usage this year is its phenotype, but it also has a deeper, unchanging meaning that is often hidden, and that is its heredity. If we knew more about both, the language of genetics could be used to describe the inheritance of language in a way like this. About 5,000 years ago or earlier, the independent languages ​​of the Indo-European language family may have originally been one language.The people who spoke the language were separated by migration and this had an effect on the language.This phenomenon can be compared with the speciation observed by Darwin in the Galapagos Islands, where the languages ​​became distinct species, retaining enough resemblance to the ancestors that similarities of the same genus could still be seen .Languages ​​change all the time, as a result of occasional contact between speakers of different languages ​​and people outside their language islands, and possibly as a result of random mutations.

But words have other properties that make them look and feel like living, moving creatures with minds of their own.To get a feel for this, it's best to find a dictionary that traces all the roots back to a putative fossil language—Proto-Indo-European—look them up, and watch them behave. There are words that originated in Indo-European languages ​​and later poured into religions in many parts of the world.For example, the word blaghmen means priest.It entered Latin and Middle English in the form of flamen, the pagan name for a priest; in Sanskrit as brahma, and later as brahman (Brahman). Weid, meaning to see, later had the connotation of wisdom and alertness.Entering the Germanic language family, it became witan, entered Old English as wis, and later became wisdom (wisdom).It became videre (to see) in Latin again, and thus the English vision (vision).It was suffixed to become woid-o, thus becoming Sanskrit veda (knowledge).

The word Beudh has taken the same tortuous journey.It meant to know, and in Old English it became beodan, meaning omen.In Sanskrit, bodhati means "he is awake" and "enlightened", so there are Bodhisattva (Bodhisattva) and Buddha (Tathagata Buddha). The sattva part of Bodhisattva comes from the Indo-European es, meaning "existence" or "is", and later entered Sanskrit, becoming sat and sant, and also became esse in Latin and einai in Greek; einai became Some words have the suffix -ont, which means to exist, such as "symbiont" (symbiosis). bhag in Indo-European, meaning to share; entered Greek into phagein (to eat), entered Old Persian as bakhsh (tip) - later gave birth to baksheesh (tip); to Sanskrit, because bhage means good luck , it became Bhagavadgita (Song of the Blessed) (where gita comes from gei, which means song).

The songs sung by the Hari-Krishna people are very close to English, although it doesn't sound like it. Krishna (Black Sky) is the eighth incarnation of Vishnu, whose name comes from the Sanskrit word krsnah, which means black.The word comes from the Indo-European kers, meaning black (kers also gave rise to cnernozem, meaning black topsoil, via the Russian word chernyi). This enumeration is obviously endless, and it can consume a person's life.Fortunately, over the past hundred years, several generations of comparative linguists have devoted their lives to it.William Jones (William Jones, 1746-1794, English) discovered the similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin in 1786, and since then, their research has entered the realm of science. In 1817, Franz Bopp (1791-1867, Germany) published a book, since then it has been recognized that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and all the languages ​​of the Germanic family are so closely related , then there must have been a common ancestor language earlier.Since then, the science has developed roughly parallel to biology, only with less fanfare.

It is an area in which the unresponsive layman can continually find mysterious pleasure.There's a straight-forward question, like, where did the most famous, stinkiest, four-letter swearword in Anglo-Saxon come about?If you find the answer, it raises embarrassing new questions.Now we discuss words.It comes from peig.It's a nasty, vicious Indo-European word meaning evil and hostile, and it's an integral part of swearing.Later it became poikos, and later into Germanic gafaihaz and Old English gefah, enemy.In Germanic it went from poik-yos to faigjaz, and in Old English it was faege, doomed to die, from which came fey (Scottish, doomed to die).In Old English it became fehida, hence feud (feud); in Old Dutch it was fokken.Somehow, out of those words, it became one of the greatest curse words in the English language, meaning "you'll die before your time!" Now, that unspoken malice is buried deep in that word. Innermost, while its exterior reveals itself to be nothing more than a dirty word.

Leech (leech, leech) is a charming word.It is an ancient word referring to a doctor, and at the same time it refers to the aquatic animal leech (Sanguisugus), which was used by ancient doctors to suck human blood to cure diseases.The two meanings are far and wide, but a phenomenon similar to biomimicry has occurred here: as a doctor, leech is a person who uses the worm to treat diseases; the worm has become a symbol of a doctor.The word leech as doctor comes from the Indo-European word leg, meaning to collect, from which many words meaning to speak are derived. Leg later became the Germanic lekjaz, which means a person who can read spells, a sorcerer.In Old English it was laece, meaning doctor (in Danish the word for doctor is still laege, in Swedish it is lakare).Since leg has the meaning of collecting, picking and speaking, the Latin legere was born, and words such as lecture (teaching) and legible (clear and easy to read) came into being.In Greek it became legein, to gather and to speak; from this came the words legal (legislative) and legislator (legislator). Leg further becomes logos in Greek, meaning reason.

The above-mentioned evolutionary history sounds clear and plausible, and doctors will be happy to read it.Yet another leech, that kind of bug, remains.Its origin is unclear.Its evolution in language, however, began at the same time as leech as a physician, appearing in Old English as laece and lyce, two words that are instantly recognizable for worms and have medical importance at the same time.It also has the meaning of parasitism, that is, living on the flesh and blood of others.Later, probably influenced by Middle English AMA, the word leech gradually became exclusive to the worm, while the doctor was called doctor, which came from Jek, which meant to accept, and later meant to teach. The word Man (person) has not changed.In Indo-European it is man, meaning the same.But the other two words for people have a strange origin.One is dhghem, meaning earth; it became guman in Germanic, gumen in Old English, homo and humanus in Latin.From these words we have human (human) and humus (humus).Another word for person carries the same warning, but sends the message back.The word was wiros, which means man in Indo-European, weraldh in Germanic, weorold in Old English, and then amazingly formed the word world. It seems that this science is not easy.You would think that if a word for soil gave birth to an important word for people, and an ancient word for people would later become a word for the world, then it might be found that other words for soil would develop in parallel .No: There is a word in Indo-European that ers later became earth, and as far as I know, it is only mentioned that it evolved into a word for an animal, which is aardvark (arardvark). I am glad that my brain has a semi-permeable memory after I delved into this science.If you had to speak English while mentally subtitled the roots of all the words all the way back to Indo-European, you'd fall off your bicycle.Speaking is an automatic thing.You may search for words as you speak, but there are agents in your brain that can find them for you over which you have no direct control.If you insist on thinking about Indo-European languages, you will always be speechless or babbling (babbling, from baba, meaning unclear speech; in Russian, balalayka; Latin balbus, meaning stupid; ancient French baboue, which later produced baboon (baboon); Greek barbaros, meaning foreign or impolite; Sanskrit babu, meaning dad).And so on. I had more trouble exploring the term stigmergy.I was looking for other words to express stimulation and motivation to work, and I came across toeggon (supervise, encourage).The egg here comes from ak, which means sharp. In Germanic language, the suffix akjo is added, which means blade; in Old Norse, it is akjan, which has the meaning of egg, that is, stimulation and goad; the same root comes to Old English, Two words appeared: aehher and ear, which meant the ear of corn (corn, here is another extra branch, it came from greno, which meant grain, and later became korn in Old High German, granum in Latin, cyrnel in Old English, so give birth to the kernel—the grain).However, the egg and ear from ak are not real egg (egg, egg) and ear (ear).The real egg (egg) comes from awi, which means bird, and becomes avis (bird) and ovum (egg) in Latin (of course, I don’t know whether there is a bird or an egg first), and becomes oion in Greek, and spek (see ) merged into awispek, meaning "bird watcher", which later became auspex in Latin, meaning augurs who observe birds and predict bad luck. The real ear (ear) was ous at first, and later became auzan in Germanic, eare in Old English, and auri in Latin; it was combined with sleg (loose) in the course of evolution to become lagous, meaning "ear drooping", this The word later became lagos, which is Greek for "rabbit." Once you're on this road, you can't stop, not even turn around. Ous becomes aus and becomes auscultation, and auscultation is how doctors (leeches, from leg) live (from leip), unless they are legal (leg, from leg) leeches, but by the way, These leeches are not the same thing as lawyers (lawyers, from legh). Alright, these are enough (enough, from nek, meaning to obtain, later Germanic ganoga and Old English genog, and Greek onkos, meaning burden, so there is oncology—oncology), You can have the basic (general, from gene) concept (idea, from weid, which later became Greek widesya became idea).But it’s also easy to lose your train of thought (thread, from ter, means friction, twist—twist, maybe termite—termites are also born here). —Hi, are you listening?