Vowels in an Elevator

Thank God I've finally got to the point where I can finish this work. I've held it out, psychologically, as the only book on my bucket list, a culmination of working teaching language for thirty years and raising ten children, watching some or most of them learn language themselves. It is my work's answer to my training and what I feel was wrong with it. It is my theoretical explanation of language.

As I look at the manuscript that I'd started (I'd written about fifty pages), I feel like it's crap. I have to start over again. No problem, though, what's fifty pages once you get going? And I can already tell, I'll probably start several more times before I get the one I need. But it's written in my head; that's the most important part.

The title can be explained very simply; in fact if you are a follower of this blog you have already read it. This blog is a collection of sources related to the idea that language is a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one that can be described as similar to an elevator where a number of people shift around to make themselves more comfortable, and end up in a perfect pattern whereby there is maximum distance between each of them. The fact that vowels do this in a language - preserve maximum distance between them - makes a lot of sense, yet is hard to explain. That is my goal. A self organizing system, in brief, is one in which the players all make an organization by doing what their own little job is; they may be unaware of the grand organization, and they certainly aren't being told to organize in a pattern. Looked at from above, one might conclude that the whole organization is perfect, like a mandala. But it is simply a product of individual small actors doing their part.

So right now I'm practicing so I can make a better blurb, when the time comes. It will be self-published. I'll show some pictures soon.

sources

 

1. G. K. Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology, Addison-Wesley, Boston, Mass, USA, 1949

   
   

   P. Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, Copernicus Publications, Göttingen, Germany, 1996. View at: Publisher Site | MathSciNet

   
   

   G. Pruessner, Self-Organized Criticality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2012. View at: Publisher Site

   
   

   Vasilii A. Gromov, Anastasia M. Migrina, "A Language as a Self-Organized Critical System", Complexity, vol. 2017, Article ID 9212538, 7 pages, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9212538

Jensen, Henrik. J. (2012, Sept. Foreword to Self-Organized Critcality.  Cambridge Univ. Press. 

When Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) was first introduced in 1987 by Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld, it was suggested to be the explanation of the fractal structures surrounding us everywhere in space and time. The very poetic intuitive appeal of the combination of terms self-organisation and criticality, meant that the field gained immediate attention. The excitement was not lowered much by the fact that the claimed 1/f and fractal behaviour were soon realised in reality not to be present in the sandpile model used by the authors to introduce their research agenda. Nor did the lack of power laws in experiments on real piles of sand deter investigators from interpreting pieces of power laws observed in various theoretical models and physical systems as evidence of SOC being essentially everywhere. This led rapidly to a strong polarisation between two camps. On the one side there was the group of researchers who did not worry about the lack of a reasonably precise exclusive definition of the SOC concept and therefore tended to use SOC as synonymous with snippets of power laws, rendering the term fairly meaningless. The other camp maintained that SOC was not to be taken seriously. They arrived at this conclusion through a mixture of factors including the observation that SOC was ill defined, not demonstrated convincingly in models, and absent from experiments on sandpiles. The debate sometimes reflected a reaction in response to bruises received during fierce exchanges at meetings as much as a reaction to scientific evidence.

General report

There is not much new to report, actually. I am about to write my book, Vowels in an Elevator, which I will explain in a minute. I will give a brief overview of the book. I have written about a third of it and just have to fill out the details, or rather, the meat of it. It is not simple. It will take a lot of concentration on my part and time to myself is not something I've had in recent years. Even now, I am finishing a book about Puritan New England and have had trouble getting hours to click together to work on it.

So here is the gist of the book: Chomsky has been wrong. From the beginning we linguists have been looking for the science that is the foundation of language, and Chomsky claimed to have found "universals," and his universalist doctrine has prevailed in the field of linguistics for as long as I have been studying it. But what he has come up with after all these years is that human language has recursion, while animal language does not. Well, this may be true, but it doesn't give us the scientific underpinning we need to make generalizations about all languages. My book will begin by showing how Chomsky's theories have not panned out nor allowed us to have a satisfactory explanation of what languages have in common.

The science of self-organizing systems, however, does give us that explanation, so the book will ultimately go into the relationship between symbols and language, and the science behind understanding the behavior of human perception of symbols. The problem with language is that it is so bound up in perception that one must be able to scientifically explain perception in order to scientifically explain language. But it can be done.

This site has within it most of the links I need to finish the work. I have not done much searching in recent years but I know from what limited contact I have with the linguistics world that there is very little meaningful work being done on language as a self-organizing system. What work has been done is back in my notes somewhere and will have to be pulled out, aired out, investigated, etc. Work on behavior of self-organizing systems is mostly scattered in other fields. But a well-written work will connect language with other scientific systems in such a way that there will be no doubt that linguistics can be a science of language production.

I am sorry to let this site die away a little as I've been preoccupied with other things. I have ten children, the last three adopted (three others step), but the last ones have somewhat filled my plate, and made my retirement a little busier than I had planned. At the same time I have twenty-seven other books on the market, and every time I try to do something esl/linguistics oriented I get a slight back-to-work headache whereas in the process of marketing my books (haiku/short stories/novel/historical biography) I get rushes of egomaniacal self-satisfaction. So I've put a stall on Vowels in an Elevator for way too long.

Finally, let me explain the title. If you were to have a seat at the top of an elevator which had a glass ceiling, and watched as a number of people got in the elevator, you would notice a perfect kind of pattern-making where every person makes as much space as possible between himself/herself and every other person, thus making the entire elevator take on the image of a perfect mandala or a perfect pattern. You would conjure up a rule of mandala-creation that said that there is a rule that people must create a perfect mandala pattern. The same thing happens with vowels in our mouths. Is there a rule that says vowels have to make as much space between them as possible? Well, you would think so, because they do. And they do because that is easier for people's perceptions. People do it naturally, because they are acting in their own best interest.

Case closed. Stay in touch.

Another update - more than a year later

What has given some urgency to this situation is that, coming around the corner from sixty seven to sixty eight, I am beginning to realize that my time is running out. I have a solid idea of what I want to write. I even have it largely finished, although it needs quite a bit of work. I just have to get it out there.

The book, Vowels in an Elevator, is about finding the science in language and language change, in a situation where Chomsky has largely been defeated but nobody has risen to take his place.

By defeated I mean that though his theories still reign in the world of teaching linguistics, his sixty-year search for language universals has been reduced to the idea that human language has "recursion" while many or most animal languages don't have it. As I do with most of his ideas, I question such things immediately and wonder several things. First, who says animals can't do recursion? Who can prove it? If we don't know what dolphins are saying, how can we know they don't have recursion?

Second, if recursion is a language's being able to refer to itself, a layering of symbolism as it were, then what we are saying is that humans at least as we know them now have enough braind power, or gave themselves enough brain power, to keep track of such things (such as, My friends Peter and Paul married Joan and Mary, respectively), thus having a characteristic of reference and keeping track that supposedly animals can't do. But there is nothing special grammatically about this. It negates all his previous ideas about how grammar was some kind of magical characteristic that we were genetically programmed to be able to figure out, and this genetic magical characteristic (the Language Acquisition Device) was programmed with all these restrictions or laws that somehow just appeared in our genetic programming. All that turns out to be hogwash, which is what I suspected from the minute i heard it. It sounded good, and Chomsky sold it worldwide, and people are still spouting it, but it's hogwash.

So what's the truth? Stay tuned and I'll put it forward, as soon as I can.

2020 Update

There is no news on the language-as-a-self-organizing-system front. I have not finished my book, and have not even worked on it. Nobody I know is doing work on language-as-a-self-organizing-system.

Ah, but here's the rub. Language is a self-organizing system. I know it. I will write a book about it. That book will explain everything.

Feel free to comment if you agree, or know someone who can help me with this. During the lockdown, I've been writing 1) lots of family history; 2) short stories; 3) haiku; 4) a novel about the Actualists. I still hope to do my memoirs and this.

This, Language as a Self-Organizing System, is most important, because it represents a lifetime of observing and noticing the structure of language as people grapple with it and try to learn it. I wasn't wasting my time; I have a lot to contribute; I want to do it before I'm senile and it's too late.

If you are interested in anything I have just said, most of my work on the subject is linked off of this blog. It's no secret. It just has to be compiled into a reasonable theory book. And it will get done, sooner rather than later, because this lockdown deal isn't going anywhere. I'm finally retired, and could do it if I put my mind to it.