Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…We have a little bit of old English to modern English because there was a writing system and we can see how old English looked. The word order changed for instance, in old English to middle English to modern English. And so we could see things like that. But most languages don’t even have a writing system. Of the 7,000, only a small subset of those have a writing system. And even if they have a writing system, it’s not a very modern writing system and so they don’t have it … For Mandarin, for Chinese, we have a lot of evidence for a long time, and for English, and not for much else. German a little bit but not for a whole lot of … Long-term language evolution, we don’t have a lot. We have snapshots, is what we’ve got of current languages. You get an inkling of that from the rapid communication on certain platforms. On Reddit, there’s different communities and they’ll come up with different slang, usually from my perspective, driven by a little bit of humor or maybe mockery or whatever, just talking shit in different kinds of ways. And you could see the evolution of language there because I think a lot of things on the internet, you don’t want to be the boring mainstream. You want to deviate from the proper way of talking. And so you get a lot of deviation, rapid deviation. Then when communities collide, you get … Just like you said, humans adapt to it. And you could see it through the lines of humor. It’s very difficult to study but you can imagine a hundred years from now, well, if there’s a new language born for example, we’ll get really high resolution data. English is changing, English changes all the time. All languages change all the time. It was a famous result about the Queen’s English. If you look at the Queen’s vowels, the Queen’s English is supposed to be … Originally the proper way to talk was defined by whoever the queen talked or the king, whoever was in charge. And so if you look at how her vowels changed from when she first became queen in 1952 or ’53 when she was coronated, that’s Queen Elizabeth who died recently of course, until 50 years later, her vowels changed, her vowels shifted a lot. And so even in the sounds of British English, the way she was talking was changing. The vowels were changing slightly. That’s just in the sounds there was change. We’re all interested in what’s driving any of these changes. The word order of English changed a lot over a thousand years. It used to look like German. It used to be a verb final language with case marking. And it shifted to a vermedial language, a lot of contact, a lot of contact with French. And it became a vermedial language with no case marking. And so it became this verb initially thing.…

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