This paper examines how historical cognitive linguistics can benefit methodologically through the application of the notion of language as a complex adaptive system. The idea that languages are complex adaptive systems (CAS) was introduced initially in computational evolutionary linguistics, a discipline that was and remains inspired by biological, systems theoretical approaches to the evolution of life. Here the way that the CAS approach serves to replace older historical linguistic notions of languages as organisms and languages as species is explained as well as how the CAS approach can be generalized to encompass linguistic domains. Specifically, an overview of the CAS approach and its implementation in linguistics is provided with an emphasis on stigmergic, embodied, usage-based and socio-culturally situated language studies in particular.Scientific revolutions are, in fact, metaphoric revolutions, and theoretical models should be seen as metaphoric redescriptions of the domain of phenomena. (Arbid and Hesse 1986: 156) Languages meander like great rivers leaving oxbow traces over forgotten beds, to be seen only from the air or by scholars. Language is like some infinitely inter-fertile family of species spreading or mysteriously declining over time, shamelessly and endlessly hybridizing, changing its own rules as it goes. Words are used as signs, as stand-ins, arbitrary and temporary, even as language reflects (and informs) the shifting values of the peoples whose minds it inhabits and glides through. We have faith in 'meaning' like we might believe in wolverines -putting trust in the occasional reports of others, or on the authority of once seeing a pelt. But it is sometimes worth tracking this trickster back.

In 1780 the renowned French historian of metrology Alexis Paucton (1780:166, 191-195) argued that the physical length of the "feet" of the vara de Burgos (which are identical to those of the Basque bar standards of Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia) should be adopted as the universal linear standard, rather than the length of the new decimal meter bar standard which at that time had been proposed by a group of French astronomers, including Méchain and Delambre. Although Paucton was unaware of the Basque Septuagesimal System (BSS), his intuition was correct since, as the present study demonstrates, the geometric feet coded into the vara de Burgos produce a remarkably accurate geodetic model (Frank 1997b).Furthermore, given the evidence, the septuagesimal system of coordinates along with its unique celestial and terrestrial cartographic traditions and other related cognitive artifacts, e.g., an ingenious device called the Thread and Pearl Analog Calculator (TPAC) as well as the geometry embedded in the construction of the Basque stone octagons (Frank & Patrick 1993), suggests that the different modes of numerical and geometric thought intrinsic to the BSS should be considered indigenous to Western Europe while the cognitive origins of the system and its ecocentric cosmovision can be traced back to the Iron Age or even before (Frank 1996a; Zaldua 1996). Kurzreferat: Ein Essay über europäische Ethnomathematik:Soziale und kulturelle Grundlagen des vara de Burgos -Maßes und seine Beziehung zum baskischen Septuagesimalsystem. 1780 sprach sich der berühmte Metrologie-Historiker Alexis Paucton dafür aus, die physikalische Länge "feet" des vara de BurgosMaßes als universelles Längenmaß zu nehmen anstelle des neuen dezimalen Längenmaßes, das zu dieser Zeit von einer Gruppe französicher Astronomen, unter ihnen Méchain und Delambre, vorgeschlagen wurde. Obwohl Paucton das baskische Septuagesimalsystem (BSS) nicht kannte, war seine Intuition richtig, denn -wie diese Arbeit zeigt -geometrische Fuß kodiert nach vara de Burgos ergeben ein bemerkenswert genaues geodätisches Modell.Des weiteren wird durch das septuagesimale Koordinatensystem zusammen mit den einzigartigen Traditionen der Himmelsund Erdkartographie und anderen kognitiven Artefakten (wie z.B. ein raffiniertes, Thread and Pearl Analog Calculator genanntes Werkzeug) wie auch durch die Geometrie, die in der Konstruktion der baskischen steinernen Achtecke steckt, nahegelegt, den Ursprung der verschiedenen, dem BSS innewohnenden Arten des numerischen und geometrischen Denkens Westeuropa zuzurechnen, während die kognitiven Ursprünge des Systems und seiner ökozentrischen Kosmovision bis zur Eisenzeit und davor zurückverfolgt werden können.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract