Lngwidge iz a straynge thingee. You can probably read that sentence without much trouble. Sentence also not this time hard. You can screw around quite a bit with both spelling and word order and still be understood. This shouldn't be surprising: Language is flexible enough to evolve into new slang, dialects, and entirely new tongues.
In the 1960s, many early computer scientists hoped that human language was a type of code that could be written down in a neat, compact way, so there was a race to crack that code. If you could decipher it, then a computer ought to be able to speak with people! That approach turned out to be extremely difficult, though. Automatic language translation, for instance, never really took off.
In the last five years or so, computers have gotten so powerful that it has become possible to shift methods. A program can look for correlations in large amounts of text. Even if it isn't possible to capture all the language variations that might appear in the real world (like the oddities I used at the start of this column), a sufficiently huge number of correlations eventually yields results.
For instance, suppose you have a lot of text in two languages, like Chinese and English. If you start searching for sequences of letters or characters that appear in each text under similar circumstances, you can start to build a dictionary of correlations. That can produce significant results, even if the correlations don't always fit perfectly into a rigid organizing principle, like a grammar.
Such brute-force approaches to language translation have been demonstrated by companies like Meaningful Machines, where I was an adviser for a while, and more recently by Google and others. They can be incredibly inefficient, often taking 10,000 times as much computation as older methods, but we have big enough computers these days, so why not put them to work? Set loose on the Internet, such a project could begin to erase language barriers. Even though language translation is unlikely to become perfect, it might get good enough—perhaps within this decade—to make countries and cultures more transparent to one another.
These experiments in linguistic variety could also inspire a better understanding of how language came about in the first place. One of Charles Darwin's beautiful evolutionary speculations was that music might have preceded language. He was interested in the way many species use song for sexual display and wondered if human vocalizations might have started out that way too. Perhaps vocalizations became varied and complex only later, when song was applied to topics other than mating and such basics of survival.
Language might not have entirely escaped its origins. Since you can be understood even when you are not well-spoken, why bother being well-spoken at all? Why is there a magazine editor being paid to improve this text? Perhaps speaking well is still, in part, a form of sexual display. By being well-spoken I show not only that I am a clued-in member of the tribe but also that I am intelligent and likely to be a successful partner and helpful mate.
Only a handful of species, including humans and certain birds, can make a huge and ever-changing variety of sounds. Most animals, including our great-ape relatives, tend to make the same patterns of sound repeatedly. It is reasonable to suppose that an increase in variety of human sounds had to precede, or at least coincide with, the evolution of language. Which leads to another question: What makes the variety of sounds coming from a species increase?
As it happens, there is a well-documented case of song variety growing under controlled circumstances. Kazuo Okanoya of the Riken Institute in Tokyo compared songs between two populations of birds: the wild white-rump munia and its domesticated variant, the Bengalese finch. Over several centuries, bird fanciers bred Bengalese finches, selecting them for appearance only. Something odd happened during that time: Domesticated finches started singing an extreme and evolving variety of songs, quite unlike the wild munia, which has only a limited number of calls. The wild birds do not expand their vocal range even if they are raised in captivity, so the change was at least in part genetic.
