Linguistic darwinsim in the 19th treated languages as living organisms. How has this view evolved in the history of linguistics? .

Essay: Do languages struggle for survival?

PART 1: 19th C

The proportion of languages to living organisms and the concept of natural evolution argon already install before the publication of Darwins Evolution in 1857. Humboldt, who wasnt a historical linguist, already saw language as a living organism. He emphasized that each language lives in the speakers mind as a vital play and that is only when fixed in a steady state when a grammarian writes down its structures and forms at a particular time. Furthermore, he thought that languages are continually seeking perfection and apply the term evolution alongside with development.

Later on, Schleicher turned Humboldts see perfectionist evolution into Darwinian survival evolution, which is a historical process taking place in real time. In his of a sudden treatise on Darwinian theory and linguistics (1863) he say that what he had already written on the history and prehistory of languages tallied with Darwins own evolutionary theory. He considered language as single of the natural organisms of the world, to be treated by the methods of natural science and one which has its periods of growth, maturity and decline independently of its speakers will or consciousness.

More examples of the treatment of languages of languages as organic bodies are to be found in Bopp and Pott among many other linguists of the time.

In the nineteenth century the directiveness of change, whether languages become simpler or more complex over time, was an all important(p) issue in linguistics. In biology, the replacement of old species by new is not a random process, but a movement from lower to higher- mutations which succeed in spreading are those which give their possessor an advantage in the struggle for survival, art object disadvantageous traits are eliminated. The most widely held view was that inflecting languages were get around and higher than...

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