As I have mentioned here before, there is quite a bit of evidence that natural language is evolved not by adults, but by children under the age of eight. In a way, this is not so surprising, since any temporary change in grammar or usage that is not learnable by little children simply does not become a persistent part of the language.
We are not talking here about specialized technical “languages” and vocabularies, as these are not part of natural language. Rather, we are discussing the elements that all natural languages have in common, such as tense, case, deictics (words like “this” and “that”), and consistent ordering of subject, predicate and object.
I was talking with a colleague today, and we were musing whether a kid’s game could be deliberately designed so as to provoke an evolution of natural language. Imagine something as popular as Minecraft, but designed with a specific agenda to evolve language itself.
If such a thing could be done, it could be put to interesting uses. For example, as kids with those modified linguistic abilities grow up, they might be able to communicate with each other in ways that would seem to us like magic.
Of course it’s quite likely that something this is already happening without any deliberate design, and that we simply haven’t yet developed the right kind of tools to see it.
Have you seen (Eric H’s friend Chris’s) games over at Hungry Frog?
There is a lot to go through, but I think his idea was to apply gaming techniques to learning language. He’s been doing it for over 15 years I think…
http://jellyfishfun.com/flash-games-online-education-program/latin-flash-online-education-program/
and
http://www.hungryfrog.com
granted salt-a-slug Latin yummies is pretty far out there….
he made a zillion of them:
http://jellyfishfun.com/site-map.html
Thanks Sally. These look like interesting tools to help learn a language.
What I was trying to get at was the idea of tools that help to evolve language.
This made me think of Captain Blood from the C64 era (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(video_game). You could communicate with aliens in the game using a simple symbol language. It was a full on conversation where you were never really sure what exactly it all meant. The concept completely blew my mind back in the day. Not sure how deep it was given the computational power of c64 but i’ve been wanting to do something like that ever since. A game where you have to infer the meaning and structure of the language based solely on your experience and interactions with game characters.