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Symbiosism is a philosophy about the mind and man's place in nature. It is a Darwinian theory, which considers language an organism residing in the human brain and claims that language is a memetic life form. Symbiosism is defined by the Leiden School.
Memes are meanings, i.e. iso-functional neuroanatomical constructs corresponding to signs in the sense of Ferdinand de Saussure. Meanings thrive, replicate incessantly and constitute the essence of language. An essential characteristic of memes is that linguistic meanings have the nature of nonconstructible sets in the mathematical sense and do not abide by constraints governing Aristotelian logic, such as the principle of the excluded middle. The Leiden conception of the meme contrasts with the Oxford definition as a unit of imitation, a behavioral notion that in Leiden is captured by the term meme. The fecundity of memes as replicators and their fidelity of replication are limited, more so in pre-linguistic contexts.
Language is a mutualist symbiont and enters into a mutually beneficial relationship with its hominid host. Humans propagate language, whilst language furnishes the conceptual universe that guides and shapes the thinking of the hominid host. Language enhances the Darwinian fitness of the human species. Yet individual grammatical and lexical meanings and configurations of memes mediated by language may be either beneficial or deleterious to the biological host. The symbiosis is rendered more complex than just simple mutualism, both by the physiological discrepancy between language as an overall condition and the nature of individual ideas conveyed through language, as well as by the ecological difference between vertically and horizontally transmitted memes. The symbiotic theory of language propounded by George van Driem grew out of the Leiden school of language evolution, fathered by Frederik Kortlandt.
Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked with evolutionary anthropology, cognitive linguistics and biolinguistics. Studying languages as the products of nature, it is interested in the biological origin and development of language. Evolutionary linguistics is contrasted with humanistic approaches, especially structural linguistics.
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.
The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective or otherwise non-pulmonic stops, *pʼ *tʼ *kʼ, instead of the plain voiced ones, *b *d *ɡ as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions.
Construction grammar is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.
Robert Stephen Paul Beekes was a Dutch linguist who was emeritus professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University and an author of many monographs on the Proto-Indo-European language.
George "Sjors" van Driem is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he was the chair of Historical Linguistics and directed the Linguistics Institute. He became professor emeritus in 2022.
Frederik Herman Henri (Frits) Kortlandt is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as controversial Indo-Uralic.
The Leiden school is a school of thought in linguistics that models languages as memes or benign neurological parasites, and tries to use rigorous mathematical tools borrowed by analogy from biological evolution to model the origin and spread of language in general and specific languages in particular.
William Diver was an American linguist. He was the founder of the Columbia School of Linguistics, which is named after Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in comparative Indo-European linguistics.
The Khengkha language, or Kheng, is an East Bodish language spoken by ~40,000 native speakers worldwide, in the Zhemgang, Trongsa, and Mongar districts of south–central Bhutan.
Bodish, named for the Tibetan ethnonym Bod, is a proposed grouping consisting of the Tibetic languages and associated Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Tibet, North India, Nepal, Bhutan, and North Pakistan. It has not been demonstrated that all these languages form a clade, characterized by shared innovations, within Sino-Tibetan.
Willem Leo Marie (Leo) Wetzels is a full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Directeur de recherche at Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (LPP), CNRS/Sorbonne-Nouvelle in Paris. He is Editor-in-Chief of Probus International, the Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics.
The Kurtöp language is an East Bodish language spoken in Kurtoe Gewog, Lhuntse District, Bhutan. In 1993, there were about 10,000 speakers of Kurtöp.
Jeroen van de Weijer is a Dutch linguist who teaches phonology, morphology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and other courses at Shenzhen University, where he is Distinguished Professor of English linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages. Before, he was Full Professor of English Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University, in the School of English Studies.
The Baram–Thangmi languages, Baram and Thangmi are Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Nepal. They are classified as part of the Newaric branch by van Driem (2003) and Turin (2004), who view Newar as being most closely related to Baram–Thangmi.
The Dzala language, also called Dzalakha, Dzalamat, or Yangtsebikha, is an East Bodish language spoken in eastern Bhutan, in the Lhuntse and Trashiyangtse Districts.
The Chocha Ngacha language or Chochangachakha or Tsamang is a Southern Tibetic language spoken by about 20,000 people in the Kurichu Valley of Lhuntse and Mongar Districts in eastern Bhutan.
Discourse Grammar (DG) is a grammatical framework that grew out of the analysis of spoken and written linguistic discourse on the one hand, and of work on parenthetical expressions, including Simon C. Dik's study of extra-clausal constituents, on the other. Initiated by Gunther Kaltenböck, Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva, the framework is based on the distinction between two organizing principles of grammar where one concerns the structure of sentences and the other the linguistic organization beyond the sentence.
Theory of language is a topic in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; "Why do languages have the properties they do?"; or "What is the origin of language?". In addition to these fundamental questions, the theory of language also seeks to understand how language is acquired and used by individuals and communities. This involves investigating the cognitive and neural processes involved in language processing and production, as well as the social and cultural factors that shape linguistic behavior.