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.