Computer Simulation of Language Competition by Physicists

Schulze, Christian; Stauffer, Dietrich

doi:10.1002/9783527610006.ch11

Cited by 12 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Relevant questions pertain to the life time, concentration, distribution, .. complexity of these and their relations between each others. Thus human language is a new emerging field for the application of methods from the physical sciences in order to achieve a deeper understanding of linguistic complexity [1,2,3,4,5]. Language distributions, competitions, life durations, ... have become an active field of research in statistical physics indeed since [4,5,6,7], where usual techniques based on non-equilibrium considerations [8], and agent based models are already much applied One should distinguish two main frameworks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Equilibrium and dynamic methods when comparing an English text and its Esperanto translation

Ausloos¹

2008

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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A comparison of two english texts from Lewis Carroll, one (Alice in wonderland), also translated into esperanto, the other (Through a looking glass) are discussed in order to observe whether natural and artificial languages significantly differ from each other. One dimensional time series like signals are constructed using only word frequencies (FTS) or word lengths (LTS). The data is studied through (i) a Zipf method for sorting out correlations in the FTS and (ii) a Grassberger-Procaccia (GP) technique based method for finding correlations in LTS. Features are compared : different power laws are observed with characteristic exponents for the ranking properties, and the phase space attractor dimensionality. The Zipf exponent can take values much less than unity (ca. 0.50 or 0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. This non-universality is conjectured to be a measure of the author style. Moreover the attractor dimension r is a simple function of the so called phase space dimension n, i.e., r = n λ , with λ = 0.79. Such an exponent should also conjecture to be a measure of the author creativity. However, even though there are quantitative differences between the original english text and its esperanto translation, the qualitative differences are very minutes, indicating in this case a translation relatively well respecting, along our analysis lines, the content of the author writing.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Equilibrium and dynamic methods when comparing an English text and its Esperanto translation

Ausloos¹

2008

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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“…In this spirit, microscopic models have been recently proposed to account for collective social phenomena, like the formation of consensus on a specific topic [5,6,7], the creation of common cultural traits and their dissemination [8], the origin and evolution of language [9,10], etc. While models are studied quantitatively in great detail, the comparison with real-world social phenomena is often merely qualitative and on this account it is not possible to make a real discrimination between competing models.…”

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confidence: 99%

Scaling and Universality in Proportional Elections

2007

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A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale social phenomena, such as scaling and universality. We show that, in proportional elections, the distribution of the number of votes received by candidates is a universal scaling function, identical in different countries and years. This finding reveals the existence in the voting process of a general microscopic dynamics that does not depend on the historical, political and/or economical context where voters operate. A simple dynamical model for the behaviour of voters, similar to a branching process, reproduces the universal distribution.

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“…When one starts with several different random languages the resulting amount of diversity is similarly dependent upon the rate of change, with more than half of the population eventually speaking just one language for slow rates of change. The amount of time it takes before this dominance of one language sets in increases (logarithmically, roughly) with the population size (Schulze and Stauffer 2006). The effects of language shift and diffusion can be blocked by physical barriers, making it possible for languages to remain permanently distinct (Schulze and Stauffer 2007).…”

Section: Some Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Emerging Field of Language Dynamics

Wichmann

2008

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Large linguistic databases, especially databases having a global coverage, such as the World Atlas of Language Structures, the Automated Similarity Judgment Program, and Ethnologue, are making it possible to systematically investigate many aspects of how languages change and compete for viability. Agent‐based computer simulations supplement such empirical data by analyzing the necessary and sufficient parameters for the current global distributions of languages or linguistic features. By combining empirical datasets with simulations and applying quantitative methods, it is now possible to address fundamental questions, such as ‘what are the relative rates of change in different parts of languages?’, ‘why are there a few large language families, many intermediate ones, and even more small ones?’, ‘do small languages change faster or slower than large ones?’, or ‘how does the borrowing of words relate to the borrowing of structural features?’

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Computer Simulation of Language Competition by Physicists

Abstract: Computer simulation of languages is an old subject, but since the paper of Abrams and Strogatz (2003) several physics groups independently took up this field. We shortly review their work and bring more details on our own simulations.

Cited by 12 publications

References 21 publications

Equilibrium and dynamic methods when comparing an English text and its Esperanto translation

Equilibrium and dynamic methods when comparing an English text and its Esperanto translation

Scaling and Universality in Proportional Elections

The Emerging Field of Language Dynamics

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