Scientists study the dynamics of language

Wall Street Journal : A team of physicists used Google’s collection of more than 5 million scanned books published from 1800 to 2008 to analyze the dynamic properties of words in English, Spanish, and Hebrew. “It’s an inherently competitive, evolutionary environment,” said Joel Tenenbaum, one of the authors of a paper the team recently published in Nature. The researchers claim to have identified universal laws governing the ever-changing permutations of language. Although the number of English words continues to grow, they found that the birth rate of words is decreasing, while the death rate is increasing. Any new words that manage to survive tend to be much more popular than new words in the past, possibly because they describe something genuinely new (like “iPod,” “internet,” and “Twitter”), and words that die out are often synonyms or variant spellings eradicated by vigilant copyeditors and automatic spell-checkers. Such work is advancing the new field of “Culturomics,” which Christopher Shea, writing for the Wall Street Journal, describes as “the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities.”