DYNAMICS OF VOCABULARY EVOLUTION

In this paper we study the evolution of vocabulary fromthe dynamic system point of view. Based on some basic assumptionsof the relationship between the brain dynamics and the pronunciationof vocabulary, we model the beginning of vocabulary evolutionas an interacting, classifying and clustering process of brain’s dynamicrepresentations of speakable and unspeakable meanings. As illustrativeexamples, we use chaotic attractors to model brain’s dynamicrepresentations of meanings. Chaotic attractors of brain dynamicsare used to code meaningful information such as words and sentenceswhile limit cycles or chaotic attractors with relatively simple structuresare used to encode basic building blocks of meanings in spokenlanguages. Based on our model, we also present a reasonable modelfor the emergence of phonemes in primitive languages. Our modelshows that the evolution route leading to the emergence of phonemesshould include the following three phases: speak meaningful, speakmeaningless and phoneme formation. We also conclude that the numberof words should be bigger than a critical value in order to providestrong enough interactions among different brain dynamic representationsof words and furthermore enable the emergence of phonemes.