Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

The Homeric epics are among the greatest masterpieces of literature, but when they were produced is not known with certainty. Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works. Our analysis compared a common set of vocabulary items among the three pairs of languages, recording for each item whether the words in the two languages were cognate – derived from a shared ancestral word – or not. We then used a likelihood-based Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure to estimate the most probable times in years separating these languages given the percentage of words they shared, combined with knowledge of the rates at which different words change. Our date for the epics is in close agreement with historians' and classicists' beliefs derived from historical and archaeological sources. The Homeric epics are among the greatest masterpieces of literature. The Iliad's story of the Trojan Wars tells us that the epics were almost certainly produced sometime after the 12th century BCE – if indeed the wars were ever fought – but the question is how much later? Herodotus thought considerably later: Writing in the Histories Book II.53 around 450 BCE, he stated that Homer ‘lived, as I believe, not more than 400 years ago’. The most commonly accepted date among modern classicists, drawing on historical, literary and archaeological analyses, is around the mid-8th century BCE 1, 2, although some authors propose a more recent 7th century BCE date 3. Here, we investigate whether formal statistical modelling of languages can help to inform this historical question. In particular, we investigate whether evolutionary-linguistic statistical methods can be usefully applied to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to provide a date for these great works.

The fact that all languages known are digital poses the question of their origin. The answer developed here treats language as the interface of information theory and molecular development by showing previously unrecognized isomorphisms between the analog and digital features of language and life at the molecular level. Human language is a special case of signal transduction and hence is subject to the coding aspects of Shannon's theorems and the analog aspects of pattern recognition, each represented by genotype and phenotype. Digital language acquisition is late in evolution and postnatal development and requires a neural reorganization by a mechanism of somatic network programming in response to the environment. Such a mechanism would solve the Chomsky conundrum of how children can learn any language without knowing rules of grammar too numerous to be encoded genotypically. BioEssays